COLBY KING @ WASHPOST: The “Original Dreamers” Were Disenfranchised African Americans! — “That fight must continue on behalf of today’s dreamers, the disenfranchised, the demeaned and left out, and all freedom-loving people in this nation.“

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-black-men-of-the-civil-war-were-americas-original-dreamers/2019/02/15/8c00088e-30a8-11e9-813a-0ab2f17e305b_story.html

Colby King writes in WashPost:

Today, a wall looms large in my thoughts. It isn’t the structure President Trump has in mind for our southern border. I’m thinking of the Wall of Honor at the African American Civil War Memorial, located at Vermont Avenue and U Street NW.

Listed on the wall are the names of 209,145 U.S. Colored Troops who fought during the Civil War. One of those names is that of Isaiah King, my great-grandfather.

I think of those courageous black men as America’s original “dreamers.”

Today’s dreamers are in their teens and 20s, having arrived in this country as children. King’s generation of dreamers were former slaves or descendants of slaves brought to these shores against their will.

However, the black men who fought in the Civil War had the same status as today’s dreamers: noncitizens without a discernable path to citizenship.

Like dreamers of today, those black soldiers and sailors also had families and attended churches; some were enrolled in schools. They could dream of a future, anchored in the rights and privileges that come with democracy. But they had no legal claim to an existence within America’s borders.

My great-grandfather was born in the slave-holding city of Washington in 1848, but his mother was a freed woman. She moved the family to New Bedford, Mass., when he was 4. Around the time of his 17th birthday, Isaiah King enlistedin the 5th Massachusetts Cavalry (Colored), thinking, “I would have it easier riding than walking,” he told the New Bedford Evening Standard in an interview on the eve of Memorial Day services in 1932.

Black men such as my great-grandfather signed on to fight for a Union in which the right to citizenship was reserved for white people. The Supreme Court ruled in Dred Scott v. Sandford, in 1857, that black people were not citizens of the United States. Putting it bluntly, the high court said black people were “so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”

And even then, they started their service to the United States one step behind.

In his book “The Fifth Massachusetts Colored Cavalry in the Civil War,” Steven M. LaBarre cited the first disparity: It was enshrined in the Second Confiscation and Militia Act of July 17, 1862, which authorized recruitment of black men into the Union army. The law stated that a “person of African descent [of any rank] . . . shall receive ten dollars per month . . . three dollars of which monthly pay may be in clothing.” White privates at the time received $13 per month plus a $3.50 clothing allowance. It wasn’t until July 15, 1864, that Congress granted equal pay to black soldiers.

Yet, serve they did.

As evidence of the regard in which they were held, LaBarre quoted Massachusetts Gov. John Albion Andrew’s commendation of the 5th Massachusetts Cavalry when it was launched: “In this hour of hope for our common country and for themselves; at a time when they hold the destiny of their race in their own grasp; and when its certain emancipation from prejudice, as well as slavery, is in the hands of those now invited to unite in the final blow which will annihilate the rebel power, let no brave and strong man hesitate. One cannot exaggerate the call sounding in the ears of all men, in whose veins flows the blood of Africa, and whose color has been the badge of slavery. It offers the opportunity of years, crowded into an hour.”

Volunteering was a start. They still had something to prove.

According to National Archives, by the end of the Civil War, roughly 179,000 black men were serving as soldiers — 10 percent of the Union army — and 19,000 served in the Union navy. Nearly 40,000 black soldiers died over the course of the war — 30,000 of infection or disease. By war’s end, 16 black soldiers had been awarded the Medal of Honor .

King came back to the capital in May 1864 as a private with the 5th Massachusetts Cavalry to defend the city against attack by Confederate troops. His unit participated in the Siege of Petersburg. They guarded Confederate prisoners at Point Lookout, Md. And his unit was among the first Union regiments to enter Richmond, capital of the dying Confederacy, on April 3, 1865.

The Civil War ended, but not his service. Three months later, the 5th Massachusetts Cavalry was sent to Texas to defend against threats from Mexico. (Sound familiar?) He was mustered out of service on Oct. 31, 1865, at Clarksville, Tex. — still not a citizen of the United States.

It wasn’t until 1868 that the threat of removal from the United States was lifted by the 14th Amendment, which granted citizenship to all persons born or naturalized in this country, including former slaves.

The men with names on the African American Civil War Memorial’s Wall of Honor fought and died to end two centuries of slavery, without being able to count democracy as their own.

For their descendants, the fight for full rights, for full participation in every part of our democracy, goes on.

That fight must continue on behalf of today’s dreamers, the disenfranchised, the demeaned and left out, and all freedom-loving people in this nation.

Read more from Colbert King’s archive.

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Thanks, Colby, for putting the current plight of “Dreamers” (and I might add refugees and other migrants who are serving, contributing, and building our society despite their disenfranchisement and the government-sponsored dehumanization being inflicted upon them) in the historical context of the fight for civil rights and human dignity in America.

That’s why the “21st Century Jim Crows” like Trump, Sessions, Stephen Miller, Sen. Tom Cotton, Rep. Steve King, and others (largely associated with the GOP) are so pernicious. Like the “Jim Crows of the past,” these guys use degrading racial stereotypes, intentionally false narratives, and bogus “rule of law” arguments to generate hate and bias, sow division, and use the law to suppress and violate rights rather than advancing them.

While sycophant DHS Sec. Kirstjen Nielsen does not appear to be an “ideological racist,” her mindless and disingenuous parroting of the Trump White Nationalist “party lies” and “enforcement” (read “de-humanization”) agenda certainly makes her a “functional racist.”

It’s quite outrageous and dangerous that individuals with these types of views have been elevated to powerful public offices in the modern era, after the death of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. When will we ever learn, when will we ever learn?

PWS

02-16-19

“’DUH’ ARTICLE OF DA DAY” – Former FBI Acting Director McCabe Says “then–Attorney General Sessions [was] a Trump-like idiot and racist” – Gee, Seems Like That Was What Liz, Corey, & The Black Caucus Told Us – But McConnell Silenced The Truth & He & His GOP Cronies Subjected America To Perhaps The Worst & Least Qualified Attorney General In U.S. History!

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/02/andrew-mccabe-book-jeff-sessions-irishmen.html

Molly Olmstead reports for Slate:

Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe’s new book, which details his frustrations with President’s Trump administration, has made it clear that his “disdain for Trump is rivaled only by his contempt for [Jeff] Sessions,” according to an assessment from Washington Post reporter Greg Miller.

According to Miller’s review of the book, McCabe saw then–Attorney General Sessions as a Trump-like idiot and racist who had “trouble focusing, particularly when topics of conversation strayed from a small number of issues,” failed to read intelligence reports, and jumbled classified material with publicly reported news.

The strangest detail from the book, though, had to do with Sessions’ thoughts on the FBI’s hiring practices. According to the Post:

The FBI was better off when “you all only hired Irishmen,” Sessions said in one diatribe about the bureau’s workforce. “They were drunks but they could be trusted. Not like all those new people with nose rings and tattoos — who knows what they’re doing?”

According to a Wall Street Journal review of the book, McCabe wrote in his book that Sessions was only interested in immigration issues. He obsessed over the connection between crime and immigration, and he believed that Islam was an inherently violent religion, according to the Post. When presented with a counterterrorism case, he would first ask where the suspect was born or where the suspect’s parents were from. “He blamed immigrants for nearly every societal problem and uttered racist sentiments with shocking callousness,” Miller concluded from McCabe’s book.

McCabe’s assessment is surprising in only that it comes so bluntly from a man who once was acting head of the FBI but now seems intent on speaking out against the men who made his professional and personal life so difficult for 10 months (before he was fired just hours before his planned retirement, blocking him from receiving his full pension benefits). Sessions has a long, long history of making racist and anti-immigrant comments, while also implementing racist and anti-immigrant policies. A non-exhaustive list includes: allegedly warning a black lawyer to “be careful how you talk to white folks”; calling the NAACP “un-American”; reportedly joking that he used to think the KKK was “OK” until he discovered some smoked marijuana; praising an 1924 immigration act promoted by Nazi-style eugenics; denigrating a judge in Hawaii as “sitting on an island in the Pacific”; fondly remembered George Wallace, America’s most famous segregationist politician, as “one of the most formidable third-party candidates in this century; and lauding “the Anglo-American heritage of law enforcement.”

As for actions, in Alabama, Sessions punished black activists, defended voter suppression tactics, and kept black judges off the federal bench. He opposed sentencing reform over the crack-cocaine disparity. He has opposed hate crime protections and defended the official display of the Confederate flag. He has regularly attended events hosted by anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim groups, which he maintains a close relationship with. He touted falsehoods about DACA and immigrants in general. And of course, he pushed, relentlessly, for deportations and prosecutions of undocumented immigrants and even refugees fleeing domestic and gang violence.

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Sessions is a living example of how someone can spend a lifetime “on the dole” as a so-called “public servant” without providing any meaningful positive service or contributions to the public good.

Compare this “life not so well lived” with the “real world” contributions of the many decent, hard-working, honest, and dedicated civil servants who were screwed over by Trump’s shutdown. Or, compare Sessions’s squandered, anti-social life with the significant “real life” contributions of many of the immigrants, both documented and undocumented, who came before me in Immigration Court over 13 years.

I’m not sure even the worst of the aggravated felons that I ordered deported did as much lasting damage to our nation and its future as did Sessions! He was a child abuser on a grand scale, and someone who used knowingly false narratives to send deserving refugees, particularly abused women, back to torture or even death in the countries from which they had fled. He was the architect of both family separation and the unbridled expansion of the “New American Gulag.”

He promoted hate, intellectual dishonesty, ignorance, bias, and intolerance of all kinds, and was an avowed enemy of kindness and human compassion. He even had the absolute audacity to cite the Christian Bible, the compassionate, merciful, inclusive, and forgiving teachings of one of the world’s greatest “outcasts,” in support of his own perverted, bias-driven, and totally un-Christian world view.

Oh yeah, and he had no management qualifications going into the job and proved, beyond a reasonable doubt, that he couldn’t manage his way out of a paper bag. Seldom in modern times has there been a more demoralized, mission-less, and dysfunctional mess than today’s Department of Justice. Even Watergate didn’t do as much institutional damage.

Sessions’s only real contribution to justice, due process, and the public good was the day he walked out of the U.S. Department of Justice for the last time. But, it will take years, if not generations, to repair the damage he has inflicted on the rule of law, our Constitution, honest government, and humane values.

Truly, Liz was right! This was one supremely unqualified dude!

PWS

02-16-19

“SIMPLY BRILLIANT” — Retired U.S. Immigration Judge Carol King Tells Us All We Need To Know About The Deplorable State Of EOIR & Practice In The Largely “Due Process Free” Zone Of Today’s Immigration Courts In Her Keynote Address To The AILA Northwest Regional Immigration Law Conference!

KEYNOTE SPEECH

I.
KEYNOTE: AILA NORTHWEST REGIONAL IMMIGRATION LAW CONFERENCE February 14, 2019
Seattle, Washington
PRACTICING IN PERILOUS TIMES
INTRODUCTION: Practicing in Perilous Times a.What does it mean to be PRACTICING IN
PERILOUS TIMES? Is this time really so
different? b.ALWAYS:
i. You have ALWAYS worked with the most vulnerable clients
ii.You have ALWAYS taken in stories of trauma, persecution and grief in the normal course of your work
iii.You have ALWAYS had an uphill battle obtaining the relief to which your clients are entitled, because you operate in a system that is broken and often oblivious to their suffering.
c.YOU PERSISTED:
i. But you PERSISTED on behalf of your
clients because you had the skills and the courage to fight those battles on a relatively consistent, if not level, playing field.
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ii.You PERSISTED because you had for inspiration the resilience and courage and dreams of your immigrant clients
iii.You PERSISTED because, maybe not as often as you’d like, but at least occasionally, you had the satisfaction of helping someone achieve a second chance in life – a chance to start over in the country they chose as home, to work and contribute in their chosen manner, to be with their families, to enjoy a life free of persecution or torture or crushing poverty.
d.NOW
i. NOW the playing field tilts more
drastically every day and the battles are so bloody and so mean-spirited and the results so frequently demoralizing and unfair and lacking in due process, that it has become really difficult to carry on, to keep on persisting.
ii.NOW you’re not only experiencing stories of past trauma, but you are witnessing, in real time, the traumatization of your clients as this administration literally terrorizes them with its rhetoric and actions.
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iii.NOW you see decades of hard-won development of protections for your clients swept away in a single day and with a single pen stroke.
iv.In my more than 30 years both practicing as an immigration attorney and sitting as an immigration judge, I don’t believe there has been a more difficult or perilous time to practice in this area.
1.What you are all doing at this time in history is really, really difficult
2.It takes an inordinate amount of dedication, courage and vision.
3.I am in awe of each and every one of you.
II. IMMIGRATION COURT UPDATE a.I’ve been asked to give today an
IMMIGRATION COURT UPDATE.
i. That’s a bit of a difficult task, since
you are the experts on what you’re seeing every day in court, and since I have been off the bench and somewhat “out of the inside loop” for two years, and much has occurred since then. Despite that, I’m going to venture an opinion, and that is that the Immigration Court system itself is also
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in serious peril, as is its ability to provide due process of law to those who appear before it.
ii.I want to focus on a few issues that I think are extremely important to protecting due process in our court system.
b.ADMINISTRATIVE ISSUES resulting in a Crushing caseload: The Immigration Court has been functioning under a crushing caseload and with entirely inadequate resources for as long as I worked there.
i. That caseload is now growing exponentially for a variety of reasons (the last statistic I heard was that, on average, individual Immigration Judges have a pending caseload of over 2500 cases). What are some of the reasons for this exponential growth?:
1.Priorities: This administration has absolutely refused to set any kind of meaningful priorities for prosecution of cases. The policy is to prosecute every issue in every possible case to the max. There is no recognition that limitations on resources require prosecutorial discretion.
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2.Erosion of case management tools:
a.The current management of EOIR has eroded the case management tools that in the past allowed judges to juggle a massive caseload and prioritize the cases that were ripe for adjudication. First, administrative closure was taken away by AG Sessions, with a suggestion that such situations could be dealt with by continuances. Then, once that was in place, EOIR openly discouraged continuances, requiring judges to issue a long- form written decision justifying each granted continuance. No such decision is required to deny a continuance. In addition to eliminating essential tools for managing a massive caseload, incentivizing a particular outcome in decision-making undermines the independence of the court and due process
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and has no place in a court
system!
3.Aftermath of Gov’t Shut Down:
a. My contacts are with the SF
Immigration Court, not Seattle, but I think some generalizations can be made: First, there was ZERO GUIDANCE from EOIR management on how to deal with the specifics of the shut-down. Thus, each court administrator decided how to deal with, for instance, filings during the shut down, and the resetting of cases.
b.In San Francisco, all mail was opened and date stamped, then set for a 10 day call up to begin the day the government reopened. They received 10,000 filings during the 5 week shutdown. None of them could be entered into the system. They all came up for call up on Feb 7, 2019.
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Thus, the SF court, which is one of the most efficient and well-run courts, is overwhelmed still by the remnants of the shut down.
c. In addition, when the SF Court Administrator asked EOIR for a 3 day “recovery period” after the shutdown, the request was denied and they were told that all courtrooms had to be in full swing as of the morning of the first day the government reopened. ACCs did not have their files, court files had not been pulled for Master Calendar and Individual Calendar hearings. At that point 10,000 filings, including those filed before the two week filing deadline for cases scheduled that morning, were in a pile waiting to be entered into the court
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system and were
inaccessible to the judges. d.The only support offered
from EOIR was unlimited overtime for staff, so some staff has now been consistently working 20 hours a week overtime to try to catch up on the aftermath of the shutdown.
e.As an example of the delays engendered by the shutdown, in San Francisco 67 full Master Calendars had to be cancelled. As new cases pour in and add to the backlog, all these cases have to be reset to new Master Calendars, not to mention hundreds of individual cases which must now be reset.
4.Severe shortage in resources: As always, the Immigration Court is operating under a severe shortage of resources. As an example, in San Francisco, by this summer they will have a full complement of 27
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Judges and all courtrooms will be full, but the court is already down 30 Legal Assistants from what they should have and all Legal Assistants are carrying 2 judges’ caseloads, a nearly impossible task even in a short-term emergency situation. Because Legal Assistant hiring falls far behind even IJ hiring, by summer all the Legal Assistants will have to carry 3 judges’ caseloads.
c.LEGAL AND INDEPENDENCE ISSUES
i. I talked about incentivizing denying
continuances. But there are even more direct ways in which this administration has undermined the independence of the Immigration Court. When the Attorney General of the United States goes to a conference of Immigration Judges and specifically tells judges that entire categories of asylum cases should “generally” be denied (as AG Sessions did in the summer of 2018), this is a direct and blatant attack on the decisional independence of the Immigration Judges.
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ii.Matter of A-B- was only one in a series of decisions in which the current Department of Justice is inappropriately using the AG Certification Process in an attempt to roll back decades of painstaking development of the law, developments which had finally brought us into closer compliance with our international obligations to protect true refugees. This tactic has gone hand in hand with vicious attacks on immigrants in the press and disregard of their true motives for coming to the United States.
iii.Add to all of this the jurisdictional issues raised by the Supreme Court in Pereira v. Sessions and the Immigration Court system is in severe peril. It seems to me extremely clear that the legal conclusion in that case compels a finding that the vast majority of Notices to Appear filed with the court during the entire time I have been involved in immigration law are invalid and incapable of conferring jurisdiction on the Immigration Court. As I’m sure you know, a panel of the 9th Circuit
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recently held otherwise, but with very shaky reasoning. If eventually all these NTA’s are declared invalid, I have grave concerns for the impact that will have on the Immigration Court system, and even on tens of thousands of immigrants who have been granted relief by Immigration Courts over the last 40 years.
iv.The final perilous factor I want to talk about today is the pressure on judges to complete an overwhelming number of cases in a very short period of time, probably the most dangerous threat to due process of all.
1.Immigration Judges have, for the first time, been mandated to complete 700 cases per year. In the past we had “aspirational goals” to complete certain cases by a certain time, and that in and of itself, created a lot of pressure and fear among judges.
2.But now, not only have the case completion goals become mandatory, they have been tied to the Immigration Judge’s Performance Evaluations. If you
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look at the ABA’s guidelines for evaluation of judges, you will see that completing a particular number of cases is absolutely inappropriate as a factor to evaluate judges. Judges are evaluated by their peers and party/ stakeholders on criteria such as legal reasoning ability; knowledge of the law; knowledge of rules of procedure and evidence; keeping up on current developments; Integrity and Impartiality; communication skills; professionalism and temperament; administrative capacity (including managing a docket efficiently and effectively) – while this includes promptness in deciding cases, the commentary makes clear that these are aspirational goals, that some factors affecting promptness of decisions may be outside the judges’ control and that the purpose of such an evaluation is primarily for the individual improvement of each judge and
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should never be tied to
disciplinary action.
3.Now we have a situation in the Immigration Court in which the judges’ continued employment depends on their ability to keep up with an artificial and unrealistic case completion mandate, which requires the completion of approximately three full hearings a day, leaving complex asylum and cancellation hearings lucky to be scheduled for 90 minutes, where such hearings used to be scheduled for a full morning or afternoon, and might take even more than one such session.
4.This is something that requires vigilance by all of us. Knowing that the judges are under an incredible amount of pressure, and even sympathizing with that situation (please do!), does not relieve us of zealously representing our clients. What does that mean in this milieu? It means being super prepared. It means being super efficient in the presentation of your cases. It
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means trying to work out stipulations with ICE counsel as to issues, admissibility of evidence, the need for cross examination (anything you can think of to make the hearing go faster for the judge), it means briefing every or almost every case and making sure all arguments are addressed in writing in case time is not given for closing arguments or opening statements. And then, after you have done the most thorough, efficient, and complete job you can at presenting your case, if the time given is not sufficient and the judge is cutting off the presentation of the case, it means standing up on the record and using the words “denial of due process”.
III. CONCLUSION:
a.What does all this mean as we struggle to
deal with the peril in which we find ourselves?
i. As a community, we must continue to advocate for a more independent
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court, one which exists outside of any prosecutorial agency such as the DOJ.
1.For years we had mostly small incursions into decisional independence, most often when EOIR management made what they believed to be an “administrative” decision which inadvertently encroached on decisional independence
2.But, as judges, we saw the potential and feared that more intentional and direct incursions could be made under the current system. Therefore, at peril to our own jobs, we chose to advocate for an independent court under Article 1 of the United States Constitution. Since then, the Federal Bar Association, AILA and others have joined us in this call.
3.We are now seeing the types of direct and intentional attacks on the independence of the Immigration Judges that we mostly only feared before. Therefore, we must redouble our efforts to attain
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independent status for the
Immigration Court.
ii.As individuals, as I said in the
beginning, we are facing truly perilous times, and we can’t underestimate the impact that has on our health, our ability to stay in the work for the long term, and our competence as attorneys.
1.It bears saying that, in such perilous times, it is terribly easy to feel that there is no time to rest, no time to take a break, spend time with family, engage in self- care such as meditation or exercise or dancing or surfing or whatever floats your boat and helps you renew your stamina. It’s so easy to feel that our clients are suffering so badly that we ourselves have no right or ability to rest.
2.A young lawyer said to me recently, “We start out in this work feeling like warriors; but we wind up barely hanging on.” That got me thinking what it would mean to approach our work with the heart
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of a warrior. The characteristics of warriors are:
a.Persistence: not accepting what seems to be inevitable. We didn’t accept it when years of “settled law” seemed to preclude effective use of Particular Social Group in asylum cases, and we must not accept either when the AG “grabs” cases in order to undermine decades of patient and attentive legal development, as he did in Matter of A-B-. Likewise, we must not accept having our cases rushed beyond all semblance of due process.
b.Preparation: Warriors prepare themselves for battle – as we are doing now, and do regularly, by educating ourselves, learning from each other, strategizing and skills training. As warriors, we also prepare our cases as well as ourselves, and do so zealously and to the best of our ability.
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c.Dedication: As warriors, we must consistently ask ourselves – does this work bring me joy? If not, you will not be able to fully dedicate yourself to it for the long term. Because we believe in the work we are doing and the people we are representing, we WANT to give of ourselves 110%. But what does that mean? As part of her preparation for battle, a warrior prepares herself by taking care of body and soul.
I propose to you that in these perilous times, self-care becomes even more essential than it ordinarily is. It HAS to figure in to the 110% that you are giving! Our brains and bodies break down if we remain consistently in fight or flight mode and that effects not only our own happiness and health, but our ability to represent our clients competently and intelligently over a long period of time. Don’t put off this
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aspect of your role as a warrior for your clients. Please don’t wait, as I did, until you are too fundamentally exhausted to implement a self-care plan.
d.Do it now, do it for yourselves, do it for your family, do it for your current and future clients.
3.Thank you
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***********************

Thank you, Carol. Proud to be your colleague in “Our Gang!”

PWS

02-15-19

TAL @ SF CHRON WITH SOME GOOD NEWS ABOUT WHAT’S IN THE “BORDER SECURITY” BILL THAT TRUMP (APPARENTLY) WILL SIGN BEFORE DECLARING HIS TOTALLY BOGUS “NATIONAL EMERGENCY!”

https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/Funding-deal-blocks-ICE-from-arresting-adults-13617721.php

Funding deal blocks ICE from arresting adults taking in undocumented children

By Tal Kopan

WASHINGTON — A government funding deal on the verge of congressional passage would block federal officers from arresting undocumented immigrants solely because they come forward to take in migrant children.

The constraint on the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency comes after The Chronicle reported that the government had made scores of such arrests — including more than 100 people who were taken into custody from July through November despite having no criminal record. Immigrant and child welfare advocates had assailed the practice as endangering young people by keeping them in detention longer and by giving immigrants an incentive to conceal potential sponsors’ true identities.

The population of undocumented children in government custody skyrocketed to record levels as immigration officials investigated the potential sponsors.

The ban on arresting sponsors with no criminal record is included in a bill to fund roughly one-quarter of the government through September. The appropriations legislation is the product of weeks of intense negotiations to avert a repeat of the partial shutdown that began Dec. 22 and lasted 35 days.

The Senate passed the bill Thursday and the House was expected to follow suit before government funding runs out Friday. The White House said President Trump would sign it.

House Democrats pushed strongly for the provision during negotiations over the funding package, said a Democratic aide who was not authorized to speak publicly about the talks. Florida Democratic Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz offered the specific legislative language.

“Arresting potential sponsors only ensures that children who flee dangerous circumstances will languish longer in overly crowded detention facilities,” Wasserman Schultz said. “Democrats agree, this cruel, immoral Trump trap does nothing to make America safer.”

At issue is the process of finding homes for undocumented immigrant children who come to the U.S. by themselves or are separated from an adult at the border.

Those children end up detained in a national network of shelters until they can be released to an adult, usually a relative. The shelters are designed to be a temporary bridge for often-traumatized children to more stable homes, in which they can pursue their case to stay in the country legally.

To sponsor a child, adults have long had to go through background checks for any criminal history or other red flags that might endanger the child. Immigration status is not weighed as a risk factor.

But last year the Trump administration added additional layers of review, including working with Immigration and Customs Enforcement to run fingerprints of potential sponsors. That caused concern within the immigrant community that sponsors, many of whom are undocumented themselves, could be ensnared in the administration’s no-limits immigration enforcement. The revelation that ICE had in turn used that information to arrest potential sponsors, most of whom had no criminal record, confirmed that fear.

Under the administration’s policies, the number of children in custody reached nearly 15,000, breaking records even after the government halted the practice it implemented in spring 2018 of separating families at the border. In December, the Department of Health and Human Services stopped requiring that every additional adult in a sponsor’s home be fingerprinted, a practice that had greatly slowed the process, keeping children detained longer. Since then, the number of children in custody has dropped to 11,500.

The government funding bill bars the administration from detaining or moving to deport undocumented immigrants based solely on information provided by Health and Human Services, which runs the unaccompanied children program, unless it provides evidence of a past child abuse-related felony or potential human trafficking.

Tal Kopan is The San Francisco Chronicle’s Washington correspondent. Email: tal.kopan@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @talkopan

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Thanks, Tal, for putting the Chron “on top” of this grotesque mistreatment of children by the Trump Administration. Obviously, your courageous and timely reporting of abuses of human rights that DHS was trying to hide from public view has had a “real life” impact on legislation and people’s lives.

The intentional abuses of children and families that the Trump Administration is perpetrating in the name of our country is simply outrageous! Bad things happen to countries that make child abuse a national policy!

It also shows that the Democrats are right in challenging funding for abusive, wasteful, and unnecessary DHS detention. While they lacked the votes to succeed this time around, the battle certainly will continue, on both legislative and litigation fronts. As it does so, the full range of abuses, corruption, and unethical behavior by the Administration and DHS will be exposed and recorded for posterity.

As I’ve said before, it’s time for Article III Judges who have been lied to by Administration officials and whose orders to reunite families have been arrogantly ignored by the Trump Administration to put some of the Administration officials who have planned and carried out these gross human right abuses and thumbed their noses at court orders in jail for contempt.

Again, Tal, thanks for all you do for “truth, justice, and the American way!” And, thanks to conscientious legislators of both parties who helped put these restrictions on anti-social behavior in place. When the system works for the greater good, everyone benefits.

PWS

02-15-19

JUDICIAL BRAIN DRAIN: As Outlaw Administration Attacks Due Process & Attempts To Institutionalize Xenophobic Bias, Experienced, Conscientious U.S. Immigration Judges Head For The Exits – Abandonment Of Scholarship, Fairness, Commitment To Due Process Threatens Entire U.S. Justice System!

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/hamedaleaziz/immigration-policy-judge-resign-trump

Hamed Aleaziz reports for BuzzFeed News:

Being An Immigration Judge Was Their Dream. Under Trump, It Became Untenable.

“It has become so emotionally brutal and exhausting that many people I know are leaving or talking about finding an exit strategy,” said one immigration judge. “Morale has never, ever been lower.”

Hamed AleazizBuzzFeed News Reporter

Reporting From

San Francisco, California

Posted on February 13, 2019, at 6:15 p.m. ET

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Constanza Hevia for BuzzFeed News

Former immigration judge Rebecca Jamil in Fremont, California, on Dec. 28, 2018.

SAN FRANCISCO — Rebecca Jamil was sitting in a nondescript hotel ballroom in suburban Virginia when she realized that her dream job — being an immigration judge — was no longer tenable. It was June 11, 2018, and then–attorney general Jeff Sessions, her boss, was speaking to a room packed with immigration judges, running through his list of usual complaints over what was, in his estimation, a broken asylum system.

Toward the end of the speech, Sessions let slip some big news: He had decided whether domestic abuse and gang victims could be granted asylum in the US. Advocates, attorneys, and judges had been waiting months to see what Sessions, who in his role as attorney general had the power to review cases, would do. After all, it would determine the fate of thousands of asylum-seekers, many fleeing dangerous situations in Central America.

Sessions didn’t reveal to the room the details of his ruling but Jamil, based in San Francisco since she was appointed in 2016, learned later that day that the attorney general had decided to dramatically restrict asylum protections for domestic abuse victims.

“I’d seen the faces of these families,” the 43-year-old judge said. “They weren’t abstractions to me.”

Eric Risberg / AP

Hundreds of people overflow onto the sidewalk in a line snaking around the block outside a US immigration office with numerous courtrooms in San Francisco.

Jamil, a mother of two young daughters, had been shaken by the images and sounds that came as a result of the Trump administration’s policy to separate families at the border. As a judge who oversaw primarily cases of women and children fleeing abuse and dangers abroad, this was the last straw.

Soon after, she stepped down from the court.

“I can’t do this anymore,” she told friends. “I felt that I couldn’t be ‘Rebecca Jamil, representative of the attorney general’ while these things were going on.”

In many ways, her resignation underscores the tenuous position of immigration judges, who are overseen by the attorney general and susceptible to the shifting winds of each administration. To avoid potential conflicts, the union that represents the judges has long called for its court to be an independent body, separate from the Department of Justice.

The Trump administration has undertaken a monumental overhaul of the way immigration judges, which total around 400 across the country, work: placing quotas on the number of cases they should complete every year, ending their ability to indefinitely suspend certain cases, restricting when asylum can be granted, and pouring thousands of previously closed cases back into court dockets.

In the meantime, the case backlog has jumped to more than 800,000 under the administration and wait times have continued to skyrocket to hundreds of days.

The quotas in particular have made judges feel as if they were cogs in a deportation machine, as opposed to neutral arbiters given time to thoughtfully analyze the merits of each case.

“The job has become exceedingly more difficult as the court has veered even farther away from being administered as a court rather than a law enforcement bureaucracy,” said Ashley Tabaddor, an immigration judge who heads the National Association of Immigration Judges, a union representing around 350 judges.

And it’s not just Jamil who has departed because of the massive changes to the court undertaken by the Trump administration, according to observers within the Department of Justice and those on the outside. While some, like Jamil, have resigned, others have retired early in large part because of the policies instituted under Trump, they said.

For those remaining at the immigration court, the mood is bleak.

Justin Sullivan / Getty Images

Attorney General Jeff Sessions speaks during a news conference on Oct. 16, 2018.

“It has become so emotionally brutal and exhausting that many people I know are leaving or talking about finding an exit strategy,” said one immigration judge who declined to be named. “Morale has never, ever been lower.”

Another Justice Department official, who was not authorized to speak on the record, told BuzzFeed News, “It is exhausting when you feel undervalued by the people at the top of your organization, especially when they are motivated by partisanship and have not spent their careers doing the job that you do.”

Tabaddor, the head of the union, said that her group has noticed a higher rate of retirements and resignations than in the past because of the way judges have been treated under Trump.

Some have been bold in their timing. John Richardson, a former immigration judge in Phoenix, stepped down on Sep. 30, 2018 — the day before the administration instituted a quota for the number of cases to be completed by judges.

“The timing of my retirement was a direct result of the draconian policies of the Administration, the relegation of [judges] to the status of ‘action officers’ who deport as many people as possible as soon as possible with only token due process, and blaming [judges] for the immigration crisis caused by decades of neglect and under funding of the Immigration Courts,” he said in a statement to BuzzFeed News.

Another judge who resigned from the bench in September told staff members in a goodbye email, “I know things are getting difficult for you at [the Executive Office for Immigration Review], but I believe all you will ‘ride through the storm’ and ‘come out with a smile.’”

There have long been work challenges for immigration judges, including heavy caseloads and assignments, leading to comparatively high burnout rates. Justice Department officials told BuzzFeed News that concerns over retirements were nothing new.

“In 2015, 2013, and 2011, the National Association of IJs [immigration judges] raised the same concerns. In 2011, the NAIJ said that ‘stress on judges has reached unbearable levels … a large contributing factor to retirement at the earliest possible opportunity,’” said Steven Stafford, a Justice Department spokesperson. “What is actually new is that we are hiring more and more IJs and doing so faster than ever before. Today we have 68.9 percent more IJs than we did in 2010, and that number is only rising.”

According to the agency, from the beginning of fiscal year 2014 through Feb. 12, 2019, 94 immigration judges have retired, separated, or died. More than a third of those judges, 32, have left since Oct. 1, 2017. The agency does not track why judges leave their positions.

To those within the court and others who have recently retired, the situation has worsened to an unprecedented level. Richardson, the former judge in Phoenix, said he would have continued presiding over immigration cases if the status quo had remained.

“Yes, I was 75 years old with over 50 years of honorable federal service with the Department of Defense and the Department of Justice, but had no plans for retirement as long as I was treated with respect, appreciated, and provided adequate support,” he said. “I had 28 years as an IJ and very much enjoyed my job, even with the poor funding and lack of support by Congress and the White House during that 28 years.”

Jeff Chase, a former immigration judge who stepped down years ago and who speaks regularly with others who’ve left the bench, was blunt in his characterization.

“The fastest growth industry is former immigration judges,” Chase said. Those still on the bench have told him, “It’s horrible. Whatever you think it is, it is much, much worse.”

In the meantime, the Trump administration has hired more than 100 judges to not only fill the vacancies of those who’ve retired but to add numbers to the bench. It’s a rehauling of the courts that could “have a drastic impact,” according to Chase.

Many of the judges retiring in recent months are experienced jurists, hired by the Clinton administration in the mid to late ’90s, he said. These judges, Chase said, were more willing to push back on claims made in court by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement or to allow immigrants extended time to make their cases in what could otherwise be a rushed procedure.

In their place, Chase said, are judges hired by the new administration with case completion quotas, a two-year probation period, and a mandate to avoid showing sympathy for the people appearing before them.

“Even if it doesn’t show up on the sheet, just the level of humanity, that makes a huge difference — that’s what this administration is trying to remove from the immigration judge corps,” he said.

Constanza Hevia for BuzzFeed News

Rebecca Jamil holds her immigration judge certificate.

For her part, Jamil wanted to become an immigration judge from the earliest moments of her legal career. After working as a staff attorney at the 9th Circuit US Court of Appeals, she joined the government as a prosecutor with ICE in 2011, where she was able to use discretion to focus deportation efforts on those with serious criminal backgrounds. Under the Trump administration, ICE attorneys have been told that nearly all undocumented immigrants are priorities for deportation.

In 2014, Jamil took a chance to fulfill her dream: She applied to become an immigration judge. It was a 17-month process, full of drawn-out interviews in Washington, DC, but finally, in 2015 she received a phone call informing her that she got the job.

“I thought, and I must have told most people I know, that this is the last job that I would ever have. It’s all I wanted to do,” she said.

Jamil dedicated herself to the exhausting career. She oversaw a docket made up primarily of families and regularly heard cases in which women and children applied for asylum based on abuse that they had experienced by partners and family members abroad.

Day in and day out, Jamil heard intense testimony of physical and sexual violence against women and children.

“You’re sitting in a windowless room and people tell you the very worst parts of their life and you have to decide if it is enough to stay in the US,” she said. “That is very tiring day after day to be the person who makes that decision.”

Then, under the Trump administration, things started to change. In 2018, Sessions instituted a new policy, severely limiting when judges could suspend certain cases. Suddenly, her docket expanded and she wasn’t allowed to decide which cases deserved to remain in court and which didn’t.

Jamil and fellow immigration judges were in attendance at the Virginia conference where Sessions spoke for annual trainings on courtroom procedure. The year before, jurists heard substantive legal updates and trainings on bias in the courtroom.

This version of the training, however, felt different.

“The entire conference was profoundly disturbing. Do things as fast as possible. There was an overarching theme of disbelieving aliens and their claims and how to remove people faster,” Jamil said. “That is not what I saw my job as an immigration judge to be. I was not trained to do that.”

Soon after she returned home, Jamil put in her resignation. Her colleagues fretted, probing her about whether she had considered the type of judge that could fill her spot on the bench and the impact that could have.

She didn’t have an answer, but she knew that she couldn’t do it any longer.

“Family separations; Sessions making his own case law on asylum; when we could continue cases — I could no longer sit below the seal of the Department of Justice and represent the Department of Justice at that point,” Jamil said. “They just chipped away at our authority on a daily basis. It felt like we weren’t really judges. It was frustrating and demoralizing.”

A former colleague, Laura Ramirez, worked for years as an immigration judge in San Francisco. In December, she retired at the earliest date possible, five days after she turned 60.

The changes put in place by the Trump administration, especially the case quotas, and the politicization of her job, became too much to handle.

The loss of judges like Jamil and others could be immeasurable to both immigrants and Department of Homeland Security attorneys, Ramirez said.

“For the system of justice, there’s these highly qualified, fair, thoughtful people who are being squeezed out of the system for political reasons, basically,” she said. “If people like her are squeezed out, it’s a loss to people who appear before her. The system can’t be fair if good people like her are pushed out.”

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Forcing the “best, brightest, and fairest” out. Reinforcing “worst practices.” Enabling judges with well-established records of anti-asylum, nationality-based, and misogynistic bias. Attacking those private attorneys who steadfastly defended legal and Constitutional rights that were being systematically undermined by the Administration. Blaming others for his own incompetence and lack of scholarship. That’s what the “Sessions program” was all about.

The only good news: folks like Judge Jamil, Judge Ramirez, Judge Richardson, and Judge Chase are now part of the ever-growing “Our Gang” of retired Immigraton Judges helping others to fight the injustices and destruction of Due Process being pushed by the Trump Administration and a DOJ that has abandoned its mission in favor of a White Nationalist political agenda. Our voices are being heard in support of the efforts of the “New Due Process Army.”

And, while I doubt that anyone outside of Trump and Miller can match the viscous lies, racism, and knowingly false narratives of Sessions, I wouldn’t expect much improvement under Barr. Barr thought Sessions was “the greatest thing since sliced bread.” That, more than the Mueller investigation, should have caused all Democrats to vote against his confirmation. He’ll just “lose” some of the overtly racist and inflammatory lingo of the White Nationalist restrictionists and attack immigrants on the basis of bogus “strict enforcement” platitudes.

Every American who believes in our Constitution and thinks that America is different from the “Banana Republics” we often criticize will be threatened by this development. Malicious harm to the most vulnerable among us is harm to all; and the collapse of one of the “building blocks” at the “retail level” of the American justice system will adversely affect everybody’s ability to get justice with fairness and impartiality.

Many of us don’t think we will need fair, independent, and impartial courts until we do. Once the Trump Administration destroys them, they won’t easily be rebuilt.

Who will defend your rights when the time comes if you stand by and watch the rights of others being trampled?

PWS

02-14-19

CALL US CRAZY, BUT . . . . THERE ARE SOLUTIONS TO THE IMMIGRATION COURT BACKLOG PROBLEM THAT WILL ENHANCE FAIRNESS & DUE PROCESS WITHOUT BREAKING THE BANK — It Just Requires Some Imagination, Initiative, & An Unswerving Commitment To Putting Due Process & Fairness First — The “Lister-Schmidt Proposal”

CALL US CRAZY, BUT . . . . THERE ARE SOLUTIONS TO THE IMMIGRATION COURT BACKLOG PROBLEM THAT WILL ENHANCE FAIRNESS & DUE PROCESS WITHOUT BREAKING THE BANK — It Just Requires Some Imagination, Initiative, & An Unswerving Commitment To Putting Due Process & Fairness First — The “Lister-Schmidt Proposal”

The other day I got a call from my good friend and UW Law classmate, retired Wisconsin State Judge Tom Lister. The conversation went something like this:

TOM: Schmidt, I’ve been reading about the backlog in your blog — 1.1 million cases! No way it’s going to be solved just by hiring more judges. But, hey, I’m out here living well in retirement, and I’d be happy to help out. And there are hundreds, perhaps thousands of other retired judges throughout the U.S who probably would be willing to pitch in too.

ME: Yeah, sounds nice Tom, but I doubt there is any money in the EOIR budget for hiring retired judges. They once claimed they would bring back some of my retired colleagues, but the program doesn’t seem to have gone anywhere.

TOM: I don’t need a salary. I’m willing to volunteer! Just pay my incidentals.

ME: Well, then there’s this thing called the Anti-Deficiency Act that prevents agencies like DOJ from accepting free services. It would take some kind of statutory waiver . . . .

By that time, I felt that I was retreating into just the type of bureaucratic “yes-buts” or “passive yeses” that I used to hate during my days as a bureaucrat right up until the present.

But, what if Congress created an independent Immigration Court free of the “bureaucratic no-nos” that plague the DOJ bureaucracy? And what if the system were run by actual sitting judges committed to using “teamwork and innovation” to solve problems, institute “best practices,” and aspire to become “the world’s best tribunals” guaranteeing fairness and Due Process for all?”

Maybe we’d have things like this:

SENIOR JUDICIAL DUE PROCESS BRIGADE

Retired judges of all types would be trained and available to assist the Immigration Courts in dealing with “surges,” retirement waves, changes in the law, and other “emergencies” on a volunteer basis.

DIVISION A: RETIRED IMMIGRATION JUDGES

They could be trained to handle all types of immigration cases on a volunteer “as needed” basis. This would be very similar to the Senior Judge Corps used by other Federal Courts.

DIVISION B: RETIRED JUDGES FROM OUTSIDE THE IMMIGRATION BENCH

They could be trained to handle certain types of Immigration Court adjudications that are primarily fact-findings that would require some basic knowledge of immigration law but not the degree of specialized expertise that might be expected of a permanent Immigration Judge. Like “Division A” they would be volunteers, requiring expense reimbursement only.

Obvious candidates for “Division B Judges:”

Cancellation of Removal all types where basic eligibility is uncontested and the only issues are hardship and discretion;
Bonds where there are no statutory eligibility issues;
Adjustments of Status;
“Voluntary Departure Only” cases;
Master Calendars;
Withdrawals and other stipulated cases;
Status Conferences;
In Absentia dockets.

ASYLUM OFFICER MAGISTRATE BRIGADE

Put the Asylum Officers under the Immigration Courts where they can be used for a wide range of adjudications much like U.S. Magistrate Judges. This would include, but not be limited to, asylum, withholding, and CAT cases. Another obvious candidate would be certain Non-Lawful-Permanent Resident Cancellation of Removal cases.

Since the existing USCIS program would be folded in, the expenses of this conversion would be minimal and the possibilities for improving justice, due process, and efficiency limitless!

This is by no means the full extent of what could be done to improve the delivery of justice and fairness in the U.S. Immigration Courts. But, to let the “creative juices and efficiencies flow,” it will require Congress to move the Immigration Courts out of the DOJ and create an independent court where judges are free to work as a team and with “stakeholders” to solve problems, rather than creating new ones or aggravating existing ones.

PWS

02-14-19

TRAC IMMIGRATION: Latest Stats Strongly Suggest That Immigration Court Bond Decisions Are At Best A “Crapshoot,” & At Worst A Farce — Factors Other Than Due Process, Fairness, & Consistent Application Of Transparent Criteria Appear To Control Freedom From So-Called “Civil” Imprisonment Without Conviction!

==========================================
Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse
==========================================
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

The chances of being granted bond at hearings before immigration judges vary markedly by nationality, as do required bond amounts. Court hearing locations also appear to influence bond outcomes even for the same nationality.

Currently less than half of detained immigrants with bond hearings were granted bond – 48 percent during FY 2018, and 43 percent thus far during FY 2019. The median bond amount was $7,500 in FY 2018, and rose to $8,000 during the first two months of FY 2019.

Differences among nationalities are striking. Currently more than three out of every four individuals from India or Nepal, for example, were granted bond, while only between 11 and 15 percent of immigrants from Cuba received a favorable ruling. And those from China were less likely to receive a favorable ruling than are those from India or Nepal.

The median bond for immigrants from the Philippines was just $4,000, while those from Bangladesh were required to post $10,000-$12,000. These and many other findings are based on a detailed analysis of court records covering all of FY 2018 and the first two months of FY 2019 by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University. The bond hearing-by-bond hearing records were obtained by TRAC under the Freedom of Information Act from the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR).

A brand new free web query tool now allows the public for the first time to examine in detail the bond experience by hearing location for any nationality. The new app covers outcomes in Immigration Court bond hearings as well as subsequent case dispositions after detained immigrants are granted bond.

To read the full report, go to:

https://trac.syr.edu/immigration/reports/545/

To examine the underlying results for any nationality, go to:

https://trac.syr.edu/phptools/immigration/bond/

In addition, many of TRAC’s free query tools – which track the court’s overall backlog, new DHS filings, court dispositions and much more – have now been updated through November 2018. For an index to the full list of TRAC’s immigration tools go to:

https://trac.syr.edu/imm/tools/

If you want to be sure to receive notifications whenever updated data become available, sign up at:

https://tracfed.syr.edu/cgi-bin/tracuser.pl?pub=1&list=imm

or follow us on Twitter @tracreports or like us on Facebook:

http://facebook.com/tracreports

TRAC is self-supporting and depends on foundation grants, individual contributions and subscription fees for the funding needed to obtain, analyze and publish the data we collect on the activities of the U.S. federal government. To help support TRAC’s ongoing efforts, go to:

http://trac.syr.edu/cgi-bin/sponsor/sponsor.pl

David Burnham and Susan B. Long, co-directors
Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse
Syracuse University
Suite 360, Newhouse II
Syracuse, NY 13244-2100
315-443-3563

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The U.S. Immigration Court System has deep Constitutional Due Process, fundamental fairness, and quality control issues that are being intentionally swept under the carpet by the Trump Administration in an attempt to just “move ’em out, to hell with the law, Constitution, or human rights.” And, while the Article IIIs occasionally step in, they are basically complicit in allowing this parody of justice affecting life and freedom to go on without honest, effective, professional judicial administration and accountability. Don’t get me started on Congress which created and then abandoned this dysfunctional mess that they mindlessly allow to continue in a “death spiral” that threatens to take the integrity of the entire U.S. justice system down with it.

These problems can be solved! But, not as long as politicos in the DOJ are involved and improperly and unethically using the Immigration Courts as an adjunct of ICE Enforcement.

And, remember that ability to be released on bond pending removal proceedings is often “outcome determinative.” Those free on bond can usually get attorneys, prepare and document a case for relief, and have a decent chance of prevailing. Those forced to proceed in DHS detention (a/k/a the “New American Gulag”) are usually “shot like fish in a barrel” — with little chance of understanding, preparing, or presenting a case.

Then, there is the intentionally and inherently coercive effect of detention in the DHS’s substandard, sometimes life threatening, “Gulag.” Detainees too often are treated like statistics rather than human beings with rights. That’s how politicos “jack up” removal statistics. But, it bears little resemblance to Due Process or justice in any independent court system in America.

That’s why we need the “New Due Process Army” fighting every day to make the unkept, now openly disregarded, promise of “guaranteeing fairness and Due Process to all” of those appearing in our Immigration Courts a reality rather than a sick joke!

PWS

02-13-19

AOC & CO. ARE RIGHT TO SPEAK OUT ON INEFFECTIVE, INHUMANE, WASTEFUL, OFTEN ILLEGAL DHS POLICIES DRIVEN BY A WHITE NATIONALIST AGENDA – But, They Might Be Better Served By Holding Their Fire For Meaningful Oversight & The Next Budget Cycle – Like It Or Not, DHS Is Here & Isn’t Going Anywhere & We Do Need An Orderly System For Controlling Migration & Processing Refugees At Our Border!

https://www.wsj.com/articles/liberals-urge-democrats-to-take-a-hard-line-on-border-11549323945

Kristina Peterson & Louise Radnofsky report for the WSJ:

WASHINGTON—House Democratic leaders held firm through the five-week government shutdown that ended last month. Still, the party’s liberal wing is keeping up pressure on leadership as negotiations over a border-security deal heat up.

A group of liberal House Democrats and advocacy groups are urging Democrats in a bipartisan negotiating committee to refuse further funding for the Homeland Security Department, which oversees the border with Mexico. The group’s 17 lawmakers have less than two weeks to reach a deal before government funding expires again.

President Trump has said several times he is pessimistic lawmakers can reach a deal that he would accept, and he has threatened to take action to build his long-promised border wall on his own, including possibly declaring a national emergency.

Congressional leaders have been optimistic the group of House and Senate lawmakers can reach an agreement, but any bipartisan deal is unlikely to appease some in the party’s left wing.

A letter to House Democrats, written by freshman Democratic Reps. Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, and signed by at least three others, criticizes Homeland Security for practices including prosecution and detention of immigrants.

The department and its frontline enforcement units—Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection—have become high-profile targets as they implement the Trump administration’s attempts to step up deportations and the zero-tolerance policy that last year resulted in family separations at the border.

“These agencies have promulgated an agenda driven by hate—not strategy,” the lawmakers wrote. They argue that the agencies’ ability to shift funds makes it impossible to prevent money from being used for policies that Democrats generally oppose.

Refusing funding for the agency housing the president’s top political priority isn’t going to draw Republican support, a House Democratic aide said, which the committee would need to produce a deal.

“It’s totally unrealistic,” Sen. Roy Blunt (R., Mo.), who is in the negotiating group, said of the Democratic letter. “That basically says you don’t want to secure the border.”

Democrats overall say they favor border security, just not Mr. Trump’s border wall, and immigration advocates said their task is to counter the president.

. . . .

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Read the complete WSJ report from these “emerging stars on the immigration beat.”

There hasn’t been any meaningful oversight of DHS or the mess DOJ politicos have created at EOIR in two years. So, while there certainly should not be additional funding for DHS’s already overused and abused detention system, for now, Democrats should probably work with DHS as the “only game in town” on the Southern Border.

Over the next year, DHS and DOJ politicos should be required to testify and should be held accountable for the absolute, largely avoidable, chaos and inefficiency they have intentionally, incompetently, or maliciously created in immigration enforcement, our Immigration Courts, the refugee and asylum system, and the system for granting immigration benefits.

Then, based on the record, make rational, fact-based proposals for needed improvements in immigration enforcement, administration, and adjudication for the next budget cycle.

PWS

02-05-19

ANOTHER UGLY TRUMP MILESTONE: Administration’s “Malicious Incompetence” Jacks Immigration Court Backlog To 1.1 Million! — Even With 17% Increase In Judges, Trump & Sessions Incredibly DOUBLED Backlog In Under Two Years!

https://trac.syr.edu/immigration/reports/536/

Immigration Court Backlog Surpasses One Million Cases

Figure 1. Immigration Court Workload, FY 2018

The Immigration Court backlog has jumped by 225,846 cases since the end of January 2017 when President Trump took office. This represents an overall growth rate of 49 percent since the beginning of FY 2017. Results compiled from the case-by-case records obtained by TRAC under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) from the court reveal that pending cases in the court’s active backlog have now reached 768,257—a new historic high.

In addition, recent decisions by the Attorney General just implemented by the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) have ballooned the backlog further. With a stroke of a pen, the court removed 330,211 previously completed cases and put them back on the “pending” rolls. These cases were previously administratively closed and had been considered part of the court’s completed caseload[1].

When the pending backlog of cases now on the active docket is added to these newly created pending cases, the total climbs to a whopping 1,098,468 cases! This is more than double the number of cases pending at the beginning of FY 2017.

Pending Cases Represent More Than Five Years of Backlogged Work

What does the pending case backlog mean as a practical matter? Even before the redefinition of cases counted as closed and cases considered pending, the backlog had reached 768,257 cases. With the rise in the number of immigration judges, case closures during FY 2018 rose 3.9 percent over FY 2016 levels, to 215,569. In FY 2017, however, closure rates had fallen below FY 2016 levels, but last year the court recovered this lost ground[2].

At these completion rates, the court would take 3.6 years to clear its backlog under the old definition if it did nothing but work on pending cases. This assumes that all new cases are placed on the back burner until the backlog is finished.

Now, assuming the court aims to schedule hearings eventually on all the newly defined “pending” cases, the backlog of over a million cases would take 5.1 years to work through at the current pace. This figure again assumes that the court sets aside newly arriving cases and concentrates exclusively on the backlog.

Table 1. Overview of Immigration Court Case Workload and Judges
as of end of FY 2018

	Number of Cases/Judges	Percent Change Since Beginning of FY 2017
New Cases for FY 2018	287,741	7.5%
Completed Cases for FY 2018	215,569	3.9%
Number of Immigration Judges	338/395*	17.0%
Pending Cases as of September 30, 2018:
On Active Docket	768,257	48.9%
Not Presently on Active Docket	330,211	na
Total	1,098,468	112.9%

* Immigration Judges on bench at the beginning and at the end of FY 2018; percent based on increase in judges who served full year.
** category did not exist at the beginning of FY 2017.

Why Does the Backlog Continue To Rise?

No single reason accounts for this ballooning backlog. It took years to build and new cases continue to outpace the number of cases completed. This is true even though the ranks of immigration judges since FY 2016 have grown by over 17 percent[3] while court filings during the same period have risen by a more modest 7.5 percent[4].

Clearly the changes the Attorney General has mandated have added to the court’s challenges. For one, the transfer of administratively closed cases to the pending workload makes digging out all the more daunting. At the same time, according to the judges, the new policy that does away with their ability to administratively close cases has reduced their tools for managing their dockets.

There have been other changes. Shifting scheduling priorities produces churning on cases to be heard next. Temporary reassignment and transfer of judges to border courts resulted in additional docket churn. Changing the legal standards to be applied under the Attorney General’s new rulings may also require judicial time to review and implement.

In the end, all these challenges remain and the court’s dockets remain jam-packed. Perhaps when dockets become overcrowded, the very volume of pending cases slows the court’s ability to handle this workload – as when congested highways slow to a crawl.

Footnotes

^[1] The court also recomputed its case completions for the past ten years and removed these from its newly computed completed case counts. Current case closures thus appear to have risen because counts in prior years are suppressed. Further, the extensive judicial resources used in hearing those earlier cases are also disregarded.

^[2] For consistency over time, this comparison is based upon the court’s longstanding definition, which TRAC continues to use, that includes administratively closed cases in each year’s count. Under this standard, numbers are: 207,546 (FY 2016), 204,749 (FY 2017), 215,569 (FY 2018).

^[3] The court reports that the numbers of immigration judges on its rolls at the end of the fiscal year were: 289 (FY 2016), 338 (FY 2017), and 395 (FY 2018). The 17 percent increase only considers judges who were on the payroll for the full FY 2018 year. See Table 1. For more on judge hires see: https://www.justice.gov/eoir/page/file/1104846/download

^[4] New court cases based upon court records as of the end of FY 2018 were: 267,625 (FY 2016), 274,133 (FY 2017), and 287,741 (FY 2018). Due to delays in adding new cases to EOIR’s database, the latest counts may continue to rise when data input is complete. TRAC’s counts use the date of the notice to appear (NTA), rather than the court’s “input date” into its database. While the total number of cases across the FY 2016 – FY 2018 period reported by TRAC and recently published by EOIR are virtually the same, the year-by-year breakdown differs because of the court’s practice of postponing counting a case until it chooses to add them to its docket.

TRAC is a nonpartisan, nonprofit data research center affiliated with the Newhouse School of Public Communications and the Whitman School of Management, both at Syracuse University. For more information, to subscribe, or to donate, contact trac@syr.edu or call 315-443-3563.

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This is truly “Kakistocracy in Action.” Remember these numbers are as of the end of FY 2018, September 30, 2018. Trump’s Shutdown added another 80,000 to 100,000 to the backlog. Combined with “normal mismanagement,” the backlog is probably over 1.3 million by now and growing daily.

Unfortunately, this isn’t going to stop until either Congress or the Article III courts step in, put an end to this travesty, and force due process, fairness, and administrative competence back into this dysfunctional national disgrace.

PWS

02-05-19

PAUL WALDMAN @ WASHPOST: Why True Bipartisan Immigration Reform In Our National Interest Will Require “Regime Change:” “[I]t’s highly unlikely that we’ll achieve such reform, even reform most Republicans could live with, without both houses of Congress and the White House in Democratic hands. But that will happen sooner or later. Then we’ll see if we can get closer to a solution that everyone can live with over the long run.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/01/31/never-mind-wall-theres-more-important-question-we-need-answer/

Waldman writes:

As immigration policy hangs over the ongoing conflict over whether the government is going to remain open, there’s something missing from this discussion, something so fundamental that it’s quite remarkable that we all seem to have forgotten to even ask about it. The president is demanding his border wall, Democrats are fighting against him, and occasionally we bring up issues like the fate of the Dreamers and those here under Temporary Protected Status.

But what nobody asks is this: What kind of immigration system do we actually want?

Not what might happen in the next negotiation or what each side would be willing to give up, but what does each side see as the ultimate goal they’re working toward? If they could look forward ten or twenty years and say “This is where we should get to,” what would that look like?

It’s a vital question, because whatever we’re doing at the moment should be guided by our long-term goals. Once we understand what those goals are, we can think more clearly about where we should go after we get this whole shutdown ridiculousness behind us. And we all ought to be able to agree that there is some future we’re trying to arrive at, a point at which we have a system that works to our satisfaction and immigration isn’t something we’re constantly at each other’s throats about.

That may not be possible, but I’ll start with what liberals would like to see. There are certainly disagreements not just on the left generally but among immigration advocates as well, but there is a basic vision one can identify.

The first thing they want, of course, is to take the 11 million or so undocumented immigrants who are in the country now and give them a path to citizenship. That’s something even some Republicans agree with, and if you put requirements like learning English and paying back taxes on it, support becomes nearly universal.

Second, liberals would like to see an expansion of the legal immigration system, which is a consistent source of frustration and a driver of illegal immigration. When it can take decades to get approved to move to the United States, of course many people are going to opt for the illegal route, even if it can be dangerous and uncertain. If the legal immigration works, people will go through it and not around it.

And if you have a well-functioning legal system, you can make illegal immigration less attractive, with things like an E-Verify process that makes it harder to find work if you’re undocumented. There may always be some kind of black market for workers, but if you’re simultaneously offering people a legal path — both toward permanent residency and with temporary work visas for people who are looking only to make some money and then return to their home countries — it will be much smaller problem.

So in the liberal vision, we might end up with about the same number of immigrants coming into the country as we have now, it’s just that the overwhelming majority would be coming legally. We’d have security at the border, but we wouldn’t need ICE breaking down doors and tearing parents from their children’s arms. We’d have a robust system to evaluate asylum claims so we wouldn’t have to be throwing people in cages. We certainly wouldn’t pretend that one day there will be no more demand in the labor market for immigrant workers.

There are many Republicans who could be okay with that future, even if it wasn’t exactly what they wanted. But the conservative vision is complicated. For years, we heard Republican politicians say, “I’m for legal immigration. I’m against illegal immigration.” They may not usually have been advocating significant increases in legal immigration, but it’s important to remember that the current venomous hostility toward immigrants was not always the standard Republican position. Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush were both far friendlier toward immigrants than Donald Trump is.

Conservatives might disagree with this characterization, but as I see it, their ultimate goal is a system in which coming into the country illegally is utterly impossible, but levels of legal immigration don’t change much. In other words, we still have immigration, but the flow slows to a trickle. And the Trump administration is making attempts to drastically reduce legal immigration. With the president’s enthusiastic support, domestic policy adviser Stephen Miller is driving a nationalist agenda that seeks to drastically reduce the inflow of immigrants to the country and even looks for every possible means to deport both legal and undocumented immigrants, even if they’ve been living here for years or decades.

That’s a somewhat extreme position even within the Republican Party, but it does reflect a discomfort with immigration that is common on the right. It’s the cultural problem, the fact that many people just don’t like having contact with people who don’t look like them or don’t speak the same language they do or eat the same foods they do. Trump very skillfully played to that discomfort by essentially telling voters he could wind back the clock to the time when they were young, before all this disconcerting change happened. His targets were the people who say “I don’t recognize my country anymore,” and when he said he would make America great again, “great again” meant “like things were when you were young.”

That’s a demand that can never be satisfied, even if it’s only a portion of the Republican electorate that really dreams of an America where there are almost no new immigrants and most of those who are already here just disappear. Unfortunately, that portion currently not only controls the White House but exercises a veto over any attempt at comprehensive immigration reform, because the rest of the GOP is so terrified of them.

Which is why it’s highly unlikely that we’ll achieve such reform, even reform most Republicans could live with, without both houses of Congress and the White House in Democratic hands. But that will happen sooner or later. Then we’ll see if we can get closer to a solution that everyone can live with over the long run.

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

Right on, Paul! You “nailed” it! Pretty much what I’ve been saying on “Courtside” all along!

However, the unlikelihood of achieving “comprehensive immigration reform” in the “Age of Trump” shouldn’t prevent the parties from working together in a bipartisan manner on “smaller fixes” such as that relating to child marriage suggested by Nolan Rappaport, posted earlier this week. See https://wp.me/p8eeJm-3Hu

Progress is progress, even by “small steps.”

PWS

02-01-19

TRUMP’S IMMIGRATION POLICY: “MALICIOUS INCOMPETENCE!” — Also, ICE Intentionally Falsifies Court Hearing Dates — Where Is The Accountability?

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/incompetence-plus-malice-add-up-to-trumps-losing-formula-on-immigration/

Bill Boyarsky writes for Truthdig:

From the beginning of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, the immigration issue has defined his political profile. More than anything else, it has opened a window on his authoritarian mind, his disdain for the truth and for democratic institutions. Such contempt has revealed the dangers of Trumpism to much of a nation governed, often imperfectly, by the law. The way immigrants are locked up in detention centers without trial warns us of the possibility of a police state.

Last week, the president’s braggadocio crumbled in the face of facts and the strategic opposition of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. She clearly saw beyond the façade as she took the measure of her opponent.

Trump’s signature combination of untruthfulness, ignorance and arrogance became evident to the country on Friday when maps appeared on cable television showing planes stacking up at airports, sending passengers into a state of exasperation that transcends partisan politics. Those deficiencies were further exposed when he, while putting an end to the protracted government shutdown, used his concession speech in the White House Rose Garden on Friday to rehash his lying attacks on immigrants.

Trump repeated his call for a wall, arguing that only a wall would stop the drug dealers and other criminals from coming across the southern border. But he pulled back from the “Build the Wall” promises that stirred nationalistic crowds at his rallies. “We do not need 2,000 miles of concrete wall from sea to shiny [sic] sea—we never did,” he said, insisting that he had never proposed one.

On the contrary, as Linda Qiu and Michael Tackett wrote in The New York Times:

Dozens of times during the 2016 campaign, Mr. Trump promised to build a wall along the southwestern border, usually saying it would be 1,000 miles at varying heights and costs. At times the building materials changed. He mentioned concrete, steel and, at one point, even a wall that would have solar panels. But a wall and the unsupported pledge that Mexico would pay for it were foundational elements of his campaign, and Mr. Trump has continued to make similar assertions throughout his presidency.

Except on Friday. Qiu and Tackett also picked up that detail: “ … notable was something Mr. Trump did not say, namely that Mexico would pay for the wall. …”

As he had from the beginning of his presidential campaign, Trump trafficked in falsehoods Friday in the Rose Garden when he described the immigrants trying to cross the border into the United States as dangerous criminals.

Figures from Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Clearinghouse(TRAC), a respected compiler of immigration statistics, refute his claim.

As of June 30, 2018, Immigration and Customs Enforcement had 44,435 immigrants in custody. Of these, four out of five had no criminal record or had committed only a minor offense, such as a traffic violation. Of the remainder, only 16 percent had committed crimes considered serious, which includes selling marijuana, now legal in many states. Of those eventually convicted of a crime, most were for illegal entry into the United States, a misdemeanor.

Another factor to consider is the incompetence of the way Trump administers his anti-immigrant policy. His former Attorney General Jeff Sessions drastically reduced the grounds for immigrants seeking asylum in the United States. Under his plan, dangers posed to immigrants by criminal gangs or domestic violence were no longer accepted as reasons for granting asylum—a devastating legislative blow to those fleeing gang-ridden Central American countries.

Other restrictions on asylum were also imposed. When immigrants present themselves to border officers and ask for sanctuary, they are arrested for illegal entry. They are then placed in detention, awaiting a hearing in immigration court, or are deported, although courts have ordered some released.

Sessions also ordered judges in immigration courts to speed up their hearings and decision-making protocols. He claimed this directive was aimed at reducing the backlog of cases awaiting hearing in immigration court that involve immigrants either in detention or freed through the legal intervention of immigrant advocates.

The backlog, TRAC said, totals 1,098,468—more than double the waiting list in January 2017 when Trump took office. It would take immigration courts more than five years to work their way through the backlog. This explains why so many immigrants are held in detention for years without a trial in onerous conditions, and why those freed from detention are in legal limbo, subject to being stopped, questioned and improperly arrested.

When Trump shut down the government, most immigration hearings were cancelled. That gave the president a lesson in the law of unintended consequences. Rather than carry out his intent—hustling the immigrants out of the country—he has done the opposite and has increased the logjam.

In short, incompetence plus evil intentions have brought the country to this point.

Trump has been able to paper over his incompetence with bluster. The mass media has served as an accomplice. Too many stories focus on his performance. Sometimes, even his critics offer grudging admiration.

The shutdown ripped away the mask. Immigration was the central issue behind Trump’s closure of the federal government. His lies about immigration were exposed, as was his bungling execution of a cruel policy.

Bill Boyarsky

Political Correspondent

Bill Boyarsky is a political correspondent for Truthdig. He is a former lecturer in journalism at the Annenberg School for Communication of the University of Southern California. Boyarsky was city editor of….

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

Meanwhile, over at CBS News, Kate Smith continues her great coverage of the illegal and unethical behavior that has become the norm at DHS and which is enable and tolerated by an enfeebled politically dominated EOIR.

ICE agents told hundreds of immigrants to show up to court on Thursday or risk being deported. But lawyers say many of those hearings won’t happen because the dates ICE provided are fake.

Immigration attorneys in Chicago, Miami, Texas, and Virginia told CBS News their clients or their colleagues’ clients were issued a Notice to Appear (NTA) for hearings scheduled Jan. 31. The attorneys learned the dates weren’t real when they called the courts to confirm. ICE is required to include court dates with court notices, per a Supreme Court decision last summer, but most don’t actually reflect scheduled hearings.

The American Immigration Lawyers Association issued a “practice alert” on Tuesday evening, warning members “the next upcoming date on NTAs that appears to be fake is this Thursday.”

On Wednesday evening, the Executive Office of Immigration Review, the body that oversees all the immigration courts, instructed all attorneys with a January 31 NTA “to confirm the time and date of any hearing.”

“There will be another episode of mass confusion in the immigration courts [Thursday] as a result of the DHS’s decision to issue Notice to Appear with fake immigration court dates,” Brian Casson, a Virginia-based immigration attorney, said in an email to CBS News.

In a statement Thursday morning, an ICE spokesperson said the agency was working with the Department of Justice “regarding the proper issuance of Notices to Appear.” The spokesperson said the government shutdown “delayed” that process, “resulting in an expected overflow of individuals appearing for immigration proceedings today/January 31.”

The fake notices stem from a Supreme Court ruling last summer. Prior to the decision, ICE officials used to send immigrants NTAs with date listed as “TBD” – or “to be determined.” The immigration court would issue the migrant an official hearing notice later, said Casson.

One effect of this: The NTAs could block an immigrant’s eligibility for “cancellation of removal,” a legal residency status granted to some undocumented immigrants after 10 uninterrupted years of living in the U.S. A NTA, even without a hearing date, would interrupt the 10-year “clock,” said Jeremy McKinney, a Charlotte, North Carolina-based immigration attorney, in a telephone interview with CBS News.

A Supreme Court ruling last summer — Pereira v. Sessions — banned the practice, requiring all appearance notices to use actual dates.

However, systems weren’t in place for ICE to see the court’s schedule, so ICE issued fake dates instead. Immigrants were instructed to appear on weekends, midnight, and dates that just didn’t exist, like Sept. 31, multiple attorneys told CBS News.

On October 31, hundreds of immigrants received phony NTAs. They showed up to court for non-existent hearings to find “extraordinarily long lines,” according the recent alert from the immigration lawyers’ organization.

“It was complete dysfunction and confusion,” said McKinney.

The problem became so pervasive that on Dec. 21, the Executive Office of Immigration Review issued a rare policy memo telling ICE agents and DHS that courts would “reject any NTA in which the date or time of the scheduled hearing is facially incorrect.”

Matthew Kriezelman, a Chicago-based immigration attorney, has four clients with hearings scheduled for tomorrow. After checking with the court earlier this week, he found out that two of those appearances weren’t real: administrators had no record of the hearings and told Kriezelman his clients would have to wait until the court itself sent them a hearing date.

Kriezelman’s clients are among the lucky ones; experts estimate less than half of immigrants have legal representation. That means hundreds won’t realize their Jan. 31 hearing date was phony and will show up anyway, said Kriezelman.

The court in Chicago handles all the immigration cases in Wisconsin, Illinois and Indiana, meaning many immigrants could be traveling for hours on Thursday morning for a hearing that doesn’t actually exist, Kriezelman said.

When they show up, nobody will be able to assist — because of the extreme cold weather, the Chicago immigration court is scheduled to be closed on Thursday, Kriezelman said.

Failure to show up to an immigration hearing can result in immediate removal proceeding, making immigrant especially wary when they hear they don’t need to come into court after all, said Kriezelman.

“They feel like someone is screwing with them or playing a terrible joke,” Kriezelman said. “It’s really confusing for a lot of people, especially ones that are unrepresented.”

Read more CBS News immigration coverage: The country’s busiest border crossing will allow 20 people to claim asylum a day. They used to take up to 100

These Central Americans have a second chance at asylum after being “unlawfully” deported. First ICE needs to bring them back

Every congressperson along southern border opposes border wall funding

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

Bill and Kate must be “reading my mind.” Keep on exposing the truth about this cruel, dishonest, and incompetent Administration and all of the “ethics-free minions” who carry out often illegal orders! What goes around, comes around, folks.

Anybody and I mean anybody, could need a fair, impartial, and honest justice system at some point in life. Why are so many folks standing by and letting Trump and his toadies destroy it? Piece by piece, the most important foundations of our democracy are being destroyed right in plain daylight!

Also congrats to my good friend and long-time fellow member of the Beverley Hills Community United Methodist Church family Mike Tackett of the NY Times and his colleague Linda Qiu for their continuing outstanding coverage of the truth about Trump’s disingenuous, wasteful, and cruel immigration policies. You’re making a difference, Mike and Linda! Keep at it!

There was a time when dishonesty and falsely filling out official government documents (known as fraud or willful misrepresentation in some criminal law circles) would get a Government employee fired, prosecuted, or disciplined. Not any more. With our country headed by a grifter “Liar-in-Chief” “anything goes” unless you are a migrant, a minority, or a member of the LGBTQ community. In that case, expect “no mercy.”

Also remember that White Nationalist former AG Jeff “Gonzo Apocalypto” Sessions disingenuously pontificated about “the rule of law,” called DHS “a partner of EOIR,” and referred to immigration attorneys as “dirty lawyers.” He tried to cover up his gross mismanagement and political manipulation of the Immigration Courts by falsely blaming migrants, their attorneys, and the Immigration Judges themselves for the mess he himself, and also to a large extent DHS, caused.

He also spread false narratives about “widespread asylum fraud” and made the demonstrably false claim that asylum applicants were somehow a “major cause” of 11 million (mostly hard-working and law-abiding) “illegals” as he liked to contemptuously call them in his racist lingo. I doubt that there have even been 11 million asylum applicants total since the enactment of the Refugee Act of 1980.

Certainly, the causes for our “extra-legal” immigration system go far beyond alleged asylum fraud (which, in fact, does exist on a much smaller scale and in my experience is generally effectively uncovered, investigated, and aggressively prosecuted by DHS). They are a direct result of outdated and misguided policies that failed to recognize legitimate market forces in creating legal immigration categories and a failure to fully carry out in a good faith manner our humanitarian obligations under the refugee laws and international conventions.

Fact is, even if restrictionists like Sessions won’t admit it, the vast majority of the 11 million undocumented individuals should have been screened and admitted under our legal immigration system. The U.S. Government created the problem; so far, they have lacked the honesty, leadership, and courage to fix it in a fair and humane way that will benefit both our country and the migrants, current and future. Immigrants are America. And, except for our Native American brothers and sisters, we are all immigrants!

That’s why we have the “New Due Process Army!” Enlist today, and help fight the forces of “malicious incompetence” everywhere and for as long as it takes to win the battle and vindicate the Constitutional right of everyone in American to enjoy the benefits of Due Process of law.

PWS

01-31-19

PROVING MY POINT: DOJ/EOIR “NO-SHOW” STATS LIE, PARTICULARLY WHEN IT COMES TO ASYLUM SEEKERS!

http://immigrationimpact.com/2019/01/30/asylum-seekers-show-up-for-court/

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick writes for Immigration Impact:

Immigration restrictionists have often repeated a bold and erroneous claim: that there is a serious problem of asylum seekers who come to the U.S. border and disappear once released from detention. But both fact-checkers and independent studies show this is not true. In reality, the vast majority of asylum seekers diligently attend all of their immigration court hearings.

Given that studies consistently show a high appearance rate for asylum seekers, why do some people keep getting this wrong? Boiled down to its simplest answer: the only government measurement on failures to appear in court has been unreliable for years.

If an immigrant fails to appear for a scheduled immigration court hearing, they may be issued an order of removal “in absentia” (or “while absent”). Each year, the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) reports the total number of cases that were “completed” by immigration judges. The government report looks at cases that finished with a grant of relief from removal or an order of removal, as well as the percent of case completions which involved an order of removal for failure to appear.

In Fiscal Year 2017, there were 41,384 orders of removal for failure to appear issued out of 149,436 total cases completed. EOIR reported this as a 28 percent failure to appear rate. However, immigration court cases often require multiple hearings before they can be completed and, due to skyrocketing backlogs in the last decade, the average immigration court case takes almost three years to complete.

The government’s statistic counts failures to appear only against the number of cases that are fully completed. By doing this, it neglects to account for the many immigrants who appeared in court in ongoing cases that have not yet reached completion.

As a result, because tens of thousands of immigrants appeared in court in 2017 but did not have a case completed, EOIR’s number does not represent the rate at which immigrants missed court.

Since there are now more than 800,000 people in immigration court, the failure to include these incomplete cases is extremely misleading.

In addition, by only reviewing initial case completions, the statistic doesn’t consider cases where an immigrant missed court through no fault of their own (like in the event of an emergency) and then successfully overturned a removal order. According to an analysis from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), excluding cases where the immigrant successfully overturned a removal order for failure to appear “significantly impacts and reduces the calculated rates.”

From 2012 to 2017, over 1.25 million new cases were filed in immigration court, but only 151,000 removal orders were issued for failure to appear; 13.5 percent of the total. When looking only at 2017, cases in which an immigrant was ordered removed for failure to appear constituted just five percent of the 802,503 cases pending or completed in immigration court.

Despite the flaws with using the failure to appear rate as a proxy for the rate at which immigrants miss court proceedings, the government continues to use this number to make policy. This is a mistake; good policy can only be made based on good data.

Given this error, what is the actual rate at which immigrants fail to appear in court? Unfortunately, there is no exact answer for this. But a series of studies has made one thing clear: the vast majority of asylum-seekers attend all their immigration court hearings.

The Detaining Families report, for example, reviewed every case between 2001 and 2016 where a family was detained by ICE and then released. It determined that 86 percent of families had not missed a single court hearing. This number rose to 96 percent when a member of the family filed an application for asylum.

Other studies have come to similar conclusions. According to a review of immigration court records by TRAC, only 22.9 percent of the 167,219 women and children who entered the United States between 2014 and 2017 were ordered removed for failure to appear. Those who managed to obtain counsel were the most likely to appear for their hearings; only 2.3 percent of that group were ordered removed for failure to appear.

Even government studies show similar results. In 2018, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services published a study analyzing the outcomes of every person encountered by Customs and Border Protection in 2014. Of the roughly 60,000 individuals who sought asylum at the border that year, only 14 percent had been issued an order of removal that ICE was not able to carry out—likely because the asylum-seeker failed to appear in court and fled.

As long-term studies show, when you actually track individual cases from start to finish, most asylum-seekers diligently appear in court. The government should make policy based on this reality and not their own flawed metrics.

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

Trump, Miller, Nielsen, Sessions, Whitaker, and the rest of the “Band of Sycophants” make immigration policy based on a false White Nationalist agenda incorporating intentional lies, distortions, misrepresentations, and racist myths.

Not only do the stats show that asylum applicants show up for Immigration Court, but the also show a high correlation between represented respondents and appearance.

Rather than disgracefully wasting money on all sorts of expensive, ineffective, and often illegal “gimmicks,” one of the best things the Government could do is work with NGOs, pro bono organizations, and the private bar to achieve “universal representation.” It’s much more “doable” and infinitely more effective than the “Wall folly.” The Government could also help facilitate more trained, non-attorney “accredited representatives” to increase Asylum Office and Immigration Court representation.

Instead, Jeff Sessions slandered and went out of his way to disrespect immigration lawyers and make their already difficult jobs next to impossible. And, Nielsen went out of her way to bar, that’s right, bar, attorneys from initial interviews under her inaptly named “Migrant Protection Protocols.” Those protocols also obviously are a thinly veiled attack on representation at the Immigration Court level.

The Trump Administration and its motley crew of corrupt political officials should be confronted with and held accountable for their tireless lies and White Nationalist distortions that endanger the lives and rights of migrants. Harm to one of the most vulnerable among us is harm to all! And, intentional and unnecessary harm to the most vulnerable is a staple of the Trump Administration!

PWS

01-31-19

MAJOR VICTORY FOR DHS ON PEREIRA JURISDICTION ISSUE: 9th Approves BIA Precedent In Matter of Bermudez-Cota! — KARINGITHI v WHITAKER

stop time — 9th

Karingithi v. Whitaker, 9th. Cir., 01-28-19, Published

PANEL: M. Margaret McKeown, William A. Fletcher, and Jay S. Bybee, Circuit Judges

OPINION BY: Judge McKeown

COURT STAFF SUMMARY:

The panel denied Serah Karingithi’s petition for review of the Board of Immigration Appeals’ denial of relief from removal, holding that a notice to appear that does not specify the time and date of an alien’s initial removal hearing vests an immigration judge with jurisdiction over the removal proceedings, so long as a notice of hearing specifying this information is later sent to the alien in a timely manner.

The Supreme Court recently held in Pereira v. Sessions, 138 S. Ct. 2105 (2018), that a notice to appear lacking the time and date of the hearing before an immigration judge is insufficient to trigger the stop-time rule for purposes of cancellation of removal relief. In light of Pereira, Karingithi argued that a notice to appear lacking the time and date of the hearing was insufficient to vest jurisdiction with the immigration court.

The panel rejected this argument. The panel noted that Pereira addressed the required contents of a notice to appear in the context of the stop-time rule and the continuous physical presence requirement for cancellation of removal under 8 U.S.C. §§ 1229(a), 1229b, but was not in any way concerned with the immigration court’s jurisdiction. The panel held that Pereira’s narrow ruling does not control the analysis of the immigration court’s jurisdiction because, unlike the stop-time rule, the immigration court’s

* This summary constitutes no part of the opinion of the court. It has been prepared by court staff for the convenience of the reader.

KARINGITHI V. WHITAKER 3

jurisdiction does not hinge on §1229(a). The panel explained that the issue of immigration court jurisdiction is instead governed by federal immigration regulations, including 8 C.F.R. §§1003.13, 1003.14(a),1003.15(b), which do not require that the charging document include the time and date of the hearing.

The panel noted that its reading of the regulations was consistent with the Board’s recent decision in Matter of Bermudez-Cota, 27 I. & N. Dec. 441 (BIA 2018), which held that “a notice to appear that does not specify the time and place of an alien’s initial removal hearing vests an Immigration Judge with jurisdiction over the removal proceedings . . . so long as a notice of hearing specifying this information is later sent to the alien.” The panel also concluded that the Board’s decision in Bermudez-Cota warranted deference.

Because the charging document in this case satisfied the regulatory requirements, and Karingithi received subsequent timely notices including the time and date of her hearing, the panel held that the immigration judge had jurisdiction over the removal proceedings.

The panel declined to consider Karingithi’s argument, in the alternative, that Pereira renders her eligible for cancellation of removal, because cancellation relief was a new claim that was not part of the present petition for review.

The panel addressed the merits of Karingithi’s petition for review of the denial of asylum and related relief in a contemporaneously filed memorandum disposition.

Here’s another helpful summary from “Our Gang” Member Retired IU.s. Immigration Judge Polly Webber:

Dear Colleagues,

Today a panel of the Ninth Circuit (McKeown, Fletcher and Bybee) denied a PFR of Serah Njoki Karingithi holding that a notice to appear that does not specify the time and date of an alien’s initial removal hearing vests an immigration judge with jurisdiction over the removal proceedings, so long as a notice of hearing specifying this information is later sent to the alien in a timely manner. In so doing, the panel read Pereira narrowly,finding that it addressed the required contents of a notice to appear in the context of the stop-time rule and the continuous physical presence requirement for cancellation of removal, but was not in any way concerned with the immigration court’s jurisdiction. It also noted that its reading of the regulations was consistent with Bermudez-Cota, and it found that that decision warranted deference.

The panel found that the immigration court’s jurisdiction does not hinge on §1229(a). The panel explained that the issue of immigration court jurisdiction is instead governed by federal immigration regulations, including 8 C.F.R. §§1003.13, 1003.14(a),1003.15(b), which do not require that the charging document include the time and date of the hearing.

Serah Njoki Karingithi v. Whittaker, Case No. 16-70885, January 28, 2019.

Long-time SF immigration lawyer, Ruby Lieberman, represented the Petitioner, and Lonny Hoffman, Professor of Law, University of Houston Law Center, filed an Amicus brief. Representing OIL were Greg Mack, Leslie McKay, Terri Scadron and Joseph Hunt.

I assume someone will ask for an en banc hearing.

Polly

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

Thanks, Polly! Sorry there wasn’t “better” news. But, we have to take and publish the bad along with the good.

By the way, congrats to my former Arlington Immigration Court colleague and NAIJ Official, Judge Lawrence Owen “The Burmanator” Burman who “called” this one exactly right when we were walking to the subway after the AILA Holiday Party! Also, as an “early critic” of Bermudez-Cota, I must acknowledge that so far, notwithstanding some “rough sledding” in the District Courts, the BIA’s decision has won deference from the circuits that have considered the question.

PWS

01-29-19

INCONVENIENT TRUTH: HALEY SWEETLAND EDWARDS @ TIME TELLS WHAT TRUMP, MILLER, COTTON, SESSIONS, & THEIR WHITE NATIONALIST GANG DON’T WANT YOU TO KNOW: Human Migration Is A Powerful Force As Old As Human History; It’s A Plus For Receiving Nations; It Won’t Be Stopped By Walls, Jails, Racist Laws, Or Any Other Restrictionist Nonsense; But, It Can Be Intelligently Controlled, Channeled, Harnessed, & Used For The Benefit Of The U.S. & The Good Of The Migrants! — “But to maximize that future good, governments must act rationally to establish humane policies and adequately fund an immigration system equipped to handle an influx of newcomers.”

http://time.com/longform/migrants/

Haley Sweetland Edwards writes in Time Magazine:

But they were willing to do whatever it took. Going back to Guatemala was simply not an option, they said. Monterroso explained that in October, their family was forced to flee after a gang threatened to murder the children if they didn’t pay an exorbitant bribe, five months’ worth of profits from their tiny juice stall. The family hid for a day and a half in their house and then sneaked away before dawn. “There is nobody that can protect us there,” Monterroso said. “We have seen in the other cases, they kill the people and kill their children.” Her voice caught. “The first thing is to have security for them,” she said of her kids, “that nothing bad happens to them.”

All told, more than 159,000 migrants filed for asylum in the U.S. in fiscal year 2018, a 274% increase over 2008. Meanwhile, the total number of apprehensions along the southern border has decreased substantially—nearly 70% since fiscal year 2000. President Donald Trump has labeled the southern border a national crisis. He refused to sign any bill funding the federal government that did not include money for construction of a wall along the frontier, triggering the longest shutdown in American history, and when Democrats refused to budge, he threatened to formally invoke emergency powers. The President says the barrier, which was the centerpiece of his election campaign, is needed to thwart a dangerous “invasion” of undocumented foreigners.

But the situation on the southern border, however the political battle in Washington plays out, will continue to frustrate this U.S. President, and likely his successors too, and not just because of continuing caravans making their way to the desert southwest. Months of reporting by TIME correspondents around the world reveal a stubborn reality: we are living today in a global society increasingly roiled by challenges that can be neither defined nor contained by physical barriers. That goes for climate change, terrorism, pandemics, nascent technologies and cyber-attacks. It also applies to one of the most significant global developments of the past quarter-century: the unprecedented explosion of global migration.

. . . .

They abandoned their homes for different reasons: tens of millions went in search of better jobs or better education or medical care, and tens of millions more had no choice. More than 5.6 million fled the war in Syria, and a million more were Rohingya, chased from their villages in Myanmar. Hundreds of thousands fled their neighborhoods in Central America and villages in sub-Saharan Africa, driven by poverty and violence. Others were displaced by catastrophic weather linked to climate change.

Taken one at a time, each is an individual, a mixture of strengths and weaknesses, hope and despair. But collectively, they represent something greater than the sum of their parts. The forces that pushed them from their homes have combined with a series of global factors that pulled them abroad: the long peace that followed the Cold War in the developed world, the accompanying expansion of international travel, liberalized policies for refugees and the relative wealth of developed countries, especially in Europe and the U.S., the No. 1 destination for migrants. The force is tidal and has not been reversed by walls, by separating children from their parents or by deploying troops. Were the world’s total population of international migrants in 2018 gathered from the places where they have sought new lives and placed under one flag, they would be its fifth largest country.

The mass movement of people has changed the world both for better and for worse. Migrants tend to be productive. Though worldwide they make up about 3% of the population, in 2015 they generated about 9% of global GDP, according to the U.N. Much of that money is wired home—$480 billion in 2017, also according to the U.N.—where the cash has immense impact. Some will pay for the passage of the next migrant, and the smartphone he or she will keep close at hand. The technology not only makes the journey more efficient and safer—smugglers identify their clients by photos on instant-messaging—but, upon arrival, allows those who left to keep in constant contact with those who remain behind, across oceans and time zones.

Yet attention of late is mostly focused on the impact on host countries. There, national leaders have grappled with a powerful irony: the ways in which they react to new migrants—tactically, politically, culturally—shape them as much as the migrants themselves do. In some countries, migrants have been welcomed by crowds at train stations. In others, images of migrants moving in miles-long caravans through Central America or spilling out of boats on Mediterranean shores were wielded to persuade native-born citizens to lock down borders, narrow social safety nets and jettison long-standing humanitarian commitments to those in need.

. . . .

The U.S., though founded by Europeans fleeing persecution, now largely reflects the will of its Chief Executive: subverting decades of asylum law and imposing a policy that separated migrant toddlers from their parents and placed children behind cyclone fencing. Trump floated the possibility of revoking birthright citizenship, characterized migrants as “stone cold criminals” and ordered 5,800 active-duty U.S. troops to reinforce the southern border. Italy refused to allow ships carrying rescued migrants to dock at its ports. Hungary passed laws to criminalize the act of helping undocumented people. Anti-immigrant leaders saw their political power grow in the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Sweden, Germany, Finland, Italy and Hungary, and migration continued to be a factor in the Brexit debate in the U.K.

These political reactions fail to grapple with a hard truth: in the long run, new migration is nearly always a boon to host countries. In acting as entrepreneurs and innovators, and by providing inexpensive labor, immigrants overwhelmingly repay in long-term economic contributions what they use in short-term social services, studies show. But to maximize that future good, governments must act -rationally to establish humane policies and adequately fund an immigration system equipped to handle an influx of newcomers.

. . . .

But protocols and treaties can, at best, hope to respond to the human emotions and hard realities that drive migration. No wall, sheriff or headscarf law would have prevented Monterroso and Calderón, or Yaquelin and Albertina Contreras, or Sami Baladi and Mirey Darwich from leaving their homes. Migrants will continue to flee bombs, look for better-paying jobs and accept extraordinary risks as the price of providing a better life for their children.

The question now is whether the world can come to define the enormous population of international migrants as an opportunity. No matter when that happens, Eman Albadawi, a teacher from Syria who arrived in Anröchte, Germany, in 2015, will continue to make a habit of reading German-language children’s books to her three Syrian-born kids at night. Their German is better than hers, and they make fun of her pronunciation, but she doesn’t mind. She is proud of them. At a time when anti-immigrant rhetoric is on the rise, she tells them, “We must be brave, but we must also be successful and strong.” —With reporting by Aryn Baker/Anröchte, Germany; Melissa Chan, Julia Lull, Gina Martinez, Thea Traff/New York; Ioan Grillo/Tijuana; Abby Vesoulis/Murfreesboro, Tenn.; and Vivienne Walt/Paris •

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

I strongly encourage everyone to read Haley’s outstanding article at the link. It is one of the best and most easily understandable explanations of a complex phenomenon that I have seen recently. As I always say, “lots of moving parts.” But Haley and her colleagues have distilled the fundamental truths concealed by this complexity. Congrats and appreciation to Haley and everyone who worked on this masterpiece!

Haley debunks and eviscerates the restrictionist, racist “fear and loathing” baloney that Trump and his White Nationalist gang peddle. The simple truth always has been and continues to be that America needs more immigration.

The only real question is whether we are going to be smart and funnel it into expanded legal and humanitarian channels or dumb like Trump and push the inevitable migration into an extra-legal system. The latter best serves neither our country nor the humans pushed into an underground existence where they can be exploited and are artificially prevented from achieving their full potential for themselves and for us. Right now, we have a mix skewed toward forcing far, far too many good folks to use the extra-legal system.

We’ll only be able to improve the situation by pushing the mix toward the legal and the humanitarian, rather than the extra-legal. That’s why it’s virtually impossible to have a rational immigration debate with folks like Trump who start with the racist-inspired fiction that migrants are a “threat” who can be deterred, punished, and diminished.

Contrary to Trump and the White Nationalists, the real immigration problems facing America are 1) how can we best integrate the millions of law-abiding and productive undocumented individuals already residing here into our society, and 2) how can we most fairly and efficiently insure that in the future individuals like them can be properly screened and come to our country through expanded humanitarian and legal channels. Until we resolve these, American will continue to founder with immigration and fail to maximize its many benefits. That’s bad for us, for migrants, and for the future of our nation.

As a reminder, in the context of Congressional negotiations on border security, I recently put together a list of “practical fixes” to the immigration system which would address border security, humanitarian relief, and improved compliance with Constitutional Due process without major legislative changes — mostly “tweaks” and other common sense amendments that would make outsized improvements and certainly would be an improvement on squandering $5.7 billion and getting nothing but a largely symbolic “instant white elephant” border wall in return. So, here it is again in all its hypothetical glory: “THE SMARTS ACT OF 2019:

https://wp.me/p8eeJm-3E3

SECURITY, MIGRATION ASSISTANCE RENEWAL, & TECHNICAL SYSTEMS ACT (“SMARTS ACT”) OF 2019

Federal Employees

Restart the Government

Retroactive pay raise

Enhanced Border Security

Fund half of “Trump’s Wall”

Triple the number of USCIS Asylum Officers

Double the number of U.S. Immigration Judges and Court Staff

Additional Port of Entry (“POE”) Inspectors

Improvements in POE infrastructure, technology, and technology between POEs

Additional Intelligence, Anti-Smuggling, and Undercover Agents for DHS

Anything else that both parties agree upon

Humanitarian Assistance

Road to citizenship for a Dreamers & TPSers

Prohibit family separation

Funding for alternatives to detention

Grants to NGOs for assisting arriving asylum applicants with temporary housing and resettlement issues

Require re-establishment of U.S. Refugee Program in the Northern Triangle

Asylum Process

Require Asylum Offices to consider in the first instance all asylum applications including those generated by the “credible fear” process as well as all so-called “defensive applications”

Immigration Court Improvements

Grants and requirements that DHS & EOIR work with NGOs and the private bar with a goal of achieving 100% representation of asylum applicants

Money to expand and encourage the training and certification of more non-attorneys as “accredited representatives” to represent asylum seekers pro bono before the Asylum Offices and the Immigration Courts on behalf of approved NGOs

Vacate Matter of A-B-and reinstate Matter of A-R-C-G-as the rule for domestic violence asylum applications

Vacate Matter of Castro-Tum and reinstate Matter of Avetisyan to allow Immigration Judges to control dockets by administratively closing certain “low priority” cases

Eliminate Attorney General’s authority to interfere in Immigration Court proceedings through “certification”

Re-establish weighing of interests of both parties consistent with Due Process as the standard for Immigration Court continuances

Bar AG & EOIR Director from promulgating substantive or procedural rules for Immigration Courts — grant authority to BIA to promulgate procedural rules for Immigration Courts

Authorize Immigration Courts to consider all Constitutional issues in proceedings

Authorize DHS to appeal rulings of the BIA to Circuit Courts of Appeal

Require EOIR to implement the statutory contempt authority of Immigration Judges, applicable equally to all parties before the courts, within 180 days

Bar “performance quotas” and “performance work plans” for Immigration Judges and BIA Members

Authorize the Immigration Court to set bonds in all cases coming within their jurisdiction

Fund and require EOIR to implement a nationwide electronic filing system within one year

Eliminate the annual 4,000 numerical cap on grants of “cancellation of removal” based on “exceptional and extremely unusual hardship”

Require the Asylum Office to adjudicate cancellation of removal applications with renewal in Immigration Court for those denied

Require EOIR to establish a credible, transparent judicial discipline and continued tenure system within one year that must include: opportunity for participation by the complainant (whether Government or private) and the Immigration Judge; representation permitted for both parties; peer input; public input; DHS input; referral to an impartial decision maker for final decision; a transparent and consistent system of sanctions incorporating principles of rehabilitation and progressive discipline; appeal rights to the MSPB

International Cooperation

Fund and require efforts to work with the UNHCR, Mexico, and other countries in the Hemisphere to improve asylum systems and encourage asylum seekers to exercise options besides the U.S.

Fund efforts to improve conditions and the rule of law in the Northern Triangle

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

No, it wouldn’t solve all problems overnight. But, everything beyond “Trump’s Wall” would make a substantial improvement over our current situation that would benefit enforcement, border security, human rights, Due Process, humanitarian assistance, and America. Not a bad “deal” in my view!

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

PWS

01-27-19

SPECIAL COURTSIDE “PRESS RELEASE” — “Court Chaos”

COURT CHAOS

“It’s chaos on top of disaster. By the end of next week, Trump will have added at least 100,000 cases to the already existing backlog of 800,000 + cases, plus another 300,000 that former A.G. Sessions diabolically and unnecessarily promised to artificially force back into the system. That’s 4-5 years of work for the Courts even with no new filings! People with good cases are denied justice while others postpone their day of reckoning indefinitely.

Many of these cases will never be decided unless Congress reforms this broken system by removing political control from the DOJ. I call this “Aimless Docket Reshuffling” (“ADR”) — cases being moved around by incompetent politicos at the DOJ without ever being completed. And under Sessions, the DOJ excelled at ADR, unnecessarily and artificially “jacking” the backlog by an incredible 50%+ in less than two years of politically biased and incompetent maladministration of the system. And, that’s even with more judges on the bench! Trump and his cronies have effectively destroyed one of America’s largest and most important court systems.

It must be reformed into a court independent of Executive overreach and incompetence. A new court must be established run by apolitical expert judges with the assistance of professional court administrators accountable to those judges, not Administration politicos. It’s not rocket science, just common sense, fundamental fairness, and above all, Constitutional Due Process.”

Category: Interior Enforcement

“SIMPLY BRILLIANT” — Retired U.S. Immigration Judge Carol King Tells Us All We Need To Know About The Deplorable State Of EOIR & Practice In The Largely “Due Process Free” Zone Of Today’s Immigration Courts In Her Keynote Address To The AILA Northwest Regional Immigration Law Conference!

TAL @ SF CHRON WITH SOME GOOD NEWS ABOUT WHAT’S IN THE “BORDER SECURITY” BILL THAT TRUMP (APPARENTLY) WILL SIGN BEFORE DECLARING HIS TOTALLY BOGUS “NATIONAL EMERGENCY!”

Funding deal blocks ICE from arresting adults taking in undocumented children

ANOTHER UGLY TRUMP MILESTONE: Administration’s “Malicious Incompetence” Jacks Immigration Court Backlog To 1.1 Million! — Even With 17% Increase In Judges, Trump & Sessions Incredibly DOUBLED Backlog In Under Two Years!

Immigration Court Backlog Surpasses One Million Cases

Pending Cases Represent More Than Five Years of Backlogged Work

Why Does the Backlog Continue To Rise?

TRUMP’S IMMIGRATION POLICY: “MALICIOUS INCOMPETENCE!” — Also, ICE Intentionally Falsifies Court Hearing Dates — Where Is The Accountability?

Bill Boyarsky

PROVING MY POINT: DOJ/EOIR “NO-SHOW” STATS LIE, PARTICULARLY WHEN IT COMES TO ASYLUM SEEKERS!

MAJOR VICTORY FOR DHS ON PEREIRA JURISDICTION ISSUE: 9th Approves BIA Precedent In Matter of Bermudez-Cota! — KARINGITHI v WHITAKER

SPECIAL COURTSIDE “PRESS RELEASE” — “Court Chaos”

COURT CHAOS

PWS

01-25-19

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COURT CHAOS

PWS

01-25-19

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