🏴‍☠️☠️⚰️👎🏻🤮HATE & BIAS RULE WHERE EQUAL JUSTICE FOR ALL IS SCORNED! —THE WORST OF THE WORST FIND A HOME IN AMERICA’S STAR CHAMBERS, THANKS TO BILLY THE BIGOT, ENABLED BY A CONGRESS & ARTICLE III JUDGES UNWILLING TO STAND UP AGAINST “HATE AGENDA” IN “AMERICA’S STAR CHAMBERS!” — Noah Lanard @ Mother Jones Reports!

 

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2020/07/he-defended-anti-gay-and-anti-muslim-causes-now-hes-an-immigration-judge/

Noah Lanard writes in Mother Jones:

He Defended Anti-Gay and Anti-Muslim Causes. Now He’s an Immigration Judge.

Brandon Bolling argued that Islam was incompatible with the First Amendment and homosexuality was not innate.

For indispensable reporting on the coronavirus crisis and more, subscribe to Mother Jones’ newsletters.

During the 2014–2015 school year, Caleigh Wood started to learn about Islam as part of her 11th grade world history class. Upon discovering this, Caleigh’s dad, John, wrote on Facebook that he “just about fucking lost it,” adding in response to a commenter, “A 556 round [of ammunition] doesn’t study Islam and it kills them fuckers everyday.” John told the school’s vice principal that “you can take that fucking Islam and shove it up your white fucking ass,” according to federal court records. After saying that he was going to create a “shit storm like you have never seen,” he got banned from the La Plata, Maryland, high school.

That could have been the end of the story. Instead, Brandon Bolling and other lawyers from the Thomas Law More Center, a right-wing Christian group that declares itself “battle ready to defend America,” represented John as he sued the Charles County public school system for allegedly attempting to indoctrinate his daughter into Islam.

Last week, the Justice Department announced that it had hired Bolling, a former Marine and federal attorney, to be an assistant chief immigration judge in Texas, even though he has no discernible immigration experience. During two stints at the Thomas More Law Center—neither of which is disclosed in his government bio—Bolling worked on numerous cases that pitted his clients against Muslims and the gay community. Now Bolling will help oversee the immigration cases of people detained in El Paso, and could be responsible for deciding whether victims of persecution based on their religions and sexual orientations receive protection under US asylum laws.

Bolling is one of 46 new immigration judges recently hired by the Trump administration. Another is Matt O’Brien, who served as the research director for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, one of the country’s leading anti-immigrant groups. The decision to hire both men is an escalation of the Trump administration’s efforts to select judges sympathetic to its anti-immigration agenda. (The Justice Department’s Executive Office for Immigration Review and the Thomas More Law Center did not respond to requests for comment.)

As part of the Justice Department, immigration courts lack the independence of federal courts. The decisions they make can determine whether immigrants who have been in the United States for decades can remain, or whether asylum seekers will be deported to the countries they fled. Even when immigrants appeal their decisions, they generally stick, since the Trump administration has made a point of filling the Board of Immigration Appeals with judges known for denying nearly all asylum claims.

. . . .

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

Read the rest of Noah’s article at the link.

As the world watches America spiral downward and our institutions, once admired by democracy advocates everywhere, spinelessly crumble in the face of tyranny, nowhere is the problem more pronounced than in the clearly unconstitutional, bias-driven, and grotesquely unfair Immigration “Courts.”

Racial justice and equal justice in America will remain cruel illusions unless and until we demand an end to these Star Chambers and hold those responsible for creating and enabling their current toxicity accountable! 

Certainly giving Thomas More a bad name. And like lots of those caught up in the EOIR Star Chamber, he has no way of defending himself against the Bollings and Barrs of the world!

PWS

07-25-20

GROSS NATIONAL DISGRACE: “A Fucking Disaster That Is Designed to Fail”: How Trump Wrecked America’s Immigration Courts — Fernanda Echavarri Reports For Mother Jones On How Our Failed Justice System Daily Abuses The Most Vulnerable While Feckless Legislators &   Smugly Complicit Article III Judges Look On & Ignore The Human Carnage They Are Enabling — “ Two days after US immigration officials sent her to Tijuana, she was raped.”

Fernanda Echavarri
Fernanda Echavarri
Reporter
Mother Jones

https://apple.news/AyKjNs5gOQJqIJ2_IeeQvcg

Fernanda Echavarri reports for Mother Jones:

“A Fucking Disaster That Is Designed to Fail”: How Trump Wrecked America’s Immigration Courts

SAN DIEGO IMMIGRATION COURT, COURTROOM #2;
PRESIDING: JUDGE LEE O’CONNOR

Lee O’Connor has been in his courtroom for all of two minutes before a look of annoyance washes over his face.

Eleven children and six adults—all of them from Central America, all of them in court for the first time—sit on the wooden benches before him. They’ve been awake since well before dawn so they could line up at the US-Mexico border to board government buses headed to immigration court in downtown San Diego, Kevlar-vested federal agents in tow. Like the dozens of families jam-packed into the lobby and the six other courtrooms, they’ve been waiting out their asylum cases in Mexico, often for months, as part of the Trump administration’s controversial border policy, the Migrant Protection Protocols.

O’Connor has a docket full of MPP cases today, like every day. Before he gets to them, though, he quickly postpones a non-MPP case to January 2021, explaining to a man and his attorney that he simply doesn’t have time for them today, motioning to the families in the gallery. While he’s doing this, the little girl in front of me keeps asking her mom if she can put on the headphones that play a Spanish translation of the proceedings. A guard motions the little girl to be quiet. 

For months, immigration attorneys and judges have been complaining that there’s no fair way to hear the cases of the tens of thousands of Central Americans who have been forced to remain on the Mexican side of the border while their claims inch through the courts. MPP has further overwhelmed dockets across the country and pushed aside cases that already were up against a crippling backlog that’s a million cases deep, stranding immigration judges in a bureaucratic morass and families with little hope for closure anytime in the near future.

I went last month to San Diego—home to one of the busiest MPP courts, thanks to its proximity to Tijuana and the more than 20,000 asylum seekers who now live in shelters and tent cities there—expecting to see logistical chaos. But I was still surprised at how fed up immigration judges like O’Connor were by the MPP-driven speedup—and by the extent to which their hands were tied to do anything about it.

Once O’Connor is done rescheduling his non-MPP case, he leans forward to adjust his microphone, rubs his forehead, and starts the group removal hearing. The interpreter translates into Spanish, and he asks if the adults understand. “Sí,” they say nervously from the back of the courtroom. O’Connor goes down his list, reading their names aloud with a slight Spaniard accent, asking people to identify themselves when their names are called. He reprimands those who do not speak up loud enough for him to hear.

O’Connor, who was appointed to the bench in 2010, is known for being tough: Between 2014 and 2019, he has denied 96 percent of asylum cases. He explains to the migrants that they have the right to an attorney, although one will not be provided—there are no public defenders in immigration court. O’Connor acknowledges finding legal representation from afar is difficult, but he tells them it’s not impossible. He encourages them to call the five pro bono legal providers listed on a sheet of paper they received that day. The moms sitting in front of me have their eyes locked on the Spanish interpreter, trying to absorb every bit of information. Their kids try their best to sit quietly.

As he thumbs through the case files, O’Connor grows increasingly frustrated: None of them has an address listed. “The government isn’t even bothering to do this,” he grumbles. The documents for MPP cases list people’s addresses as simply “Domicilio Conocido,” which translates to “Known Address.” This happens even when people say they can provide an address to a shelter in Mexico or when they have the address of a relative in the United States who can receive their paperwork. “I’ve seen them do this in 2,000 cases since May,” O’Connor says, and the Department of Homeland Security “hasn’t even bothered to investigate.” He looks up at the DHS attorney with a stern look on his face, but she continues shuffling paperwork around at her desk.

O’Connor picks up a blue form and explains to the group that they have to change their address to a physical location. The form is only in English; many of the adults seem confused and keep flipping over their copies as he tells them how to fill it out. O’Connor tells them they have to file within a week—perhaps better to do it that day, he says—but it’s unclear to me how they could follow his exacting instructions without the help of an attorney. He points out other mistakes in the paperwork filed by DHS and wraps up the hearing after about 45 minutes. The families don’t know that’s typical for a first hearing and seem perplexed when it ends. 

O’Connor schedules the group to come back for their next hearing in five weeks at 8:30 a.m. That will mean showing up at the San Ysidro port of entry at 4:30 a.m.; the alternative, he says, is being barred from entering the United States and seeking forms of relief for 10 years. “Do you understand?” he asks. The group responds with a hesitant “Sí.”

The Trump administration designed MPP to prevent people like them from receiving asylum, and beyond that, from even seeking it in the first place. First implemented in San Diego in late January 2019 to help stem the flow of people showing up at the southern border, the policy has since sent somewhere between 57,000 and 62,000 people to dangerous Mexican cities where migrants have been preyed upon for decades. Their cases have been added to an immigration court that already has a backlog of 1,057,811 cases—up from 600,000 at the time when Obama left office—according to data obtained by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University.

The skyrocketing immigration court backlog

View on the original site.

According to immigration judge Ashley Tabaddor, who spoke to me in her capacity as union president of the National Association of Immigration Judges, MPP has constituted a fundamental change to the way courts are run. DHS, she says, is “creating a situation where they’re physically, logistically, and systematically creating all the obstacles and holding all the cards.” The MPP program has left the court powerless, “speeding up the process of dehumanizing the individuals who are before the court and deterring anyone from the right to seek protection” All this while the Department of Justice is trying to decertify Tabbador’s union—the only protection judges have, and the only avenue for speaking publicly about these issues—by claiming its members are managers and no longer eligible for union membership. Tabaddor says the extreme number of cases combined with the pressure to process them quickly is making it difficult for judges to balance the DOJ’s demands with their oath of office.

Immigration attorneys in El Paso, San Antonio, and San Diego have told me they are disturbed by the courtroom disarray: the unanswered phones, unopened mail, and unprocessed filings. Some of their clients are showing up at border in the middle of the night only to find that their cases have been rescheduled. That’s not only unfair, one attorney told me, “it’s dangerous.” Central Americans who speak only indigenous languages are asked to navigate court proceedings with Spanish interpreters. One attorney in El Paso had an 800-page filing for an asylum case that she filed with plenty of time for the judge to review, but it didn’t make it to the judge in time. 

As another lawyer put it, “The whole thing is a fucking disaster that is designed to fail.”

Guillermo Arias/Getty People line up at the San Ysidro border crossing in Tijuana in May 2019.

COURTROOM #4; PRESIDING: JUDGE PHILIP LAW

Down the hall, a Honduran woman I’ll call Mari stands up next to her attorney and five-year-old son, raises her right hand, and is sworn in. 

Mari’s hearing isn’t much of a hearing at all. Stephanie Blumberg, an attorney with Jewish Family Service of San Diego, who is working the case pro bono, asks for more time because she only recently took the case; Judge Philip Law says he will consolidate the cases of mother and child into one; and he schedules her next hearing for the following week at 7:30 a.m., with a call time of 3:30 a.m. at the border.

Just as it’s about to wrap up, Bloomberg says her client is afraid to return to Mexico. “I want to know what is going to happen with me. I don’t want to go back to Mexico—it’s terrible,” Mari says in Spanish, an interpreter translating for the judge. “I have no jurisdiction over that,” Law says. “That’s between you and the Department of Homeland Security.” Law then turns to the DHS attorney, who says he’ll flag the case and “pass it along.”

While nine families begin their MPP group hearing, Mari tells me back in the waiting room that she and her son crossed the border in Texas and then asked for asylum. They were detained for two days and then transported by plane to San Diego, where she was given a piece of paper with a date and time for court and then released in Tijuana. She didn’t know anyone, barely knew where she was, and, trying to find safety in numbers, stuck with the group released that day. Two days after US immigration officials sent her to Tijuana, she was raped.

Mari’s voice gets shaky, and she tries to wipe the tears from her eyes, but even the cotton gloves she’s wearing aren’t enough to keep her face dry. I tell her we can end the conversation and apologize for making her relive those moments. She looks at her son from across the room and says she’d like to continue talking.

“I thought about suicide,” she whispers. “I carried my son and thought about jumping off a bridge.” Instead, she ended up walking for a long time, not knowing what to do or what would happen to them because they didn’t have a safe place to go.

“I haven’t talked to my family back home—it’s so embarrassing because of the dream I had coming here, and now look,” she says. “We’re discriminated against in Mexico; people make fun of us and the way we talk.” Her boy was already shy but has become quieter and more distrusting in recent months.

In the last year, I’ve spoken to dozens of migrants in border cities like Ciudad Juárez and Tijuana who share similarly horrific stories. Human Rights First has tracked more than 800 public reports of torture, kidnapping, rape, and murder against asylum seekers sent to Mexico in the last year. A lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union, Southern Poverty Law Center, and Center for Gender and Refugee Studies is challenging MPP on the grounds that it violates the Immigration and Nationality Act, and the “United States’ duty under international human rights law” not to return people to dangerous conditions.

“The system has not been set up to handle this in any way,” says Kate Clark, senior director of immigration services with Jewish Family Service of San Diego, one of the groups listed on the pro bono sheet Judge O’Connor handed out earlier in the day. They’re the only ones with a WhatsApp number listed, and their phones are constantly ringing because “it’s clear that people don’t know what’s going on or what to expect—and they’re in fear for their lives,” Clark says. Still, her 8-person team working MPP cases can only help a small percentage of the people coming through the courtroom every day.

Later that afternoon, shortly after 5, two large white buses pull up to the court’s loading dock. Guards in green uniforms escort about 60 people out from the loading dock. Moms, dads, and dozens of little kids walk in a straight light to get on a bus. They are driven down to the border and sent back to Tijuana later that night.

A few days later, Mari’s attorney tells me that despite raising a fear of retuning to Mexico in court, US port officials sent Mari back to Tijuana that night.

COURTROOM #2; PRESIDING: JUDGE LEE O’CONNOR

I find myself back in O’Connor’s courtroom for his afternoon MPP hearings. This time, the only people with legal representation is a Cuban family who crossed in Arizona in July 2019 and turned themselves in to Border Patrol agents. This is their first time in court, and their attorney calls in from out of state.

Right away, O’Connor wants to address a different kind of clerical error from the one that bothered him earlier in the day—and one that he thinks matters even more. It involves the first document that DHS issues to “removable” immigrants, known as a Notice to Appear (NTA) form. Although the form allows agents to check a box to categorize people based on how they encountered immigration officials, O’Connor points out that in this case it was left blank—and that “this is fairly typical of the overwhelming majority of these cases.”

He isn’t the first or only judge to notice this; I heard others bring up inconsistent and incomplete NTAs. Border officials are supposed to note on the form if the people taken into custody are “arriving aliens,” meaning they presented at the port of entry asking for asylum, or “aliens present in the United States who have not been admitted or paroled,” meaning they first entered illegally in between ports of entry. Thousands of MPP cases have forms without a marked category. As far as O’Connor is concerned, that’s a crucial distinction. He believes that this Trump administration policy shouldn’t apply to people who entered the country without authorization—meaning countless immigrants who applied for MPP should be disqualified from the get-go.

In the case of the Cuban family, like dozens more that day, the DHS attorney filed an amended NTA classifying them as “arriving aliens.” O’Connor points out is not how they entered the United States. The DHS attorney is unphased by the judge’s stern tone and came prepared with piles of new forms for the other cases of incomplete NTAs. The family’s lawyer says maybe the government made a mistake. O’Connor, unsatisfied, interrupts her: “There was no confusion. I’ve seen 2,000 of theseâ¦the government is not bothering to spend the time.” After a lengthy back-and-forth, a testy O’Connor schedules the family to come back in three weeks.

O’Connor’s stance and rulings on this issue have broader implications. He terminated a case in October because a woman had entered the country illegally before turning herself in and wrote in his decision that DHS had “inappropriately subjected respondent to MPP.” He is among the loudest voices on this issue, saying that MPP is legal only when applied to asylum-seekers presenting at legal ports of entry—though it’s unclear to many lawyers what it might mean for their clients to have their cases terminated in this way. Would these asylum seekers end up in immigration detention facilities? Would they be released under supervision in the United States? Would they be deported back to their home countries?

Since MPP cases hit the courts last March, asylum attorneys have been critical of DHS for not answering these questions. I was present for the very first MPP hearing in San Diego and saw how confused and frustrated all sides were that DHS didn’t seem to have a plan for handling these cases. Now, almost a year later, little has changed.

Tabaddor, the union president, tells me that “there are definitely legal issues that the MPP program has presented” and that judges are having to decide whether the documents “are legally sufficient.” “The issue with DHS—frankly, from what I’ve heard—is that it seems like they’re making it up as they go,” she says.

Last week, Tabaddor testified in front of the House Judiciary Committee and for the independence of immigration courts from the political pressures of federal law enforcement. There are approximately 400 immigration judges across more than 60 courts nationwide, and almost half of those judges have been appointed during the Trump era. (According to a recent story in the Los Angeles Times, dozens of judges are quitting or retiring early because their jobs have become “unbearable” under Trump.)

California Democrat Zoe Lofgren, an immigrants’ rights supporter in Congress, argued during the hearing that the immigration courts are in crisis and the issue requires urgent congressional attention. “In order to be fully effective, the immigration court system should function just like any other judicial institution,” she said. “Immigration judges should have the time and resources to conduct full and fair hearings, but for too long, the courts have not functioned as they should—pushing the system to the brink.”

Guillermo Arias/Getty Asylum seekers in Tijuana in October

COURTROOM #1; PRESIDING: JUDGE SCOTT SIMPSON

“I don’t want any more court,” a woman from Guatemala pleads just before lunchtime. “No more hearings, please.”

Unlike many of the people who were there for their first hearing when I observed court in San Diego, this woman has been to court multiple times since mid-2019. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t find a lawyer, she tells Judge Scott Simpson. She’s had enough.

“We’ve reached a fork on the road, ma’am,” Simpson says in a warm, calm tone. “You either ask for more time for an attorney to help you or you represent yourself.”

“No, it’d be a loss since I don’t know anything about the law,” the woman responds, her voice getting both louder and shakier. Simpson explains to her again the benefits of taking time to find an attorney.

“It’s been almost a year. I don’t want to continue the case. I want to leave it as is,” she tells him. After more explanation from the judge, the woman says she’d like to represent herself today so that decisions can be made. Simpson asks what she would like to do next, and the woman says, “I want you to end it.”

This woman’s pleas are increasingly common. Tabaddor says MPP has taken “an already very challenging situation and [made] it exponentially worse.” The new reality in immigration courts “is logistically and systematically designed to just deter people from seeking or availing themselves of the right to request protection,” Tabaddor says.

After hearing the Guatemalan woman ask for the case to be closed multiple times, Simpson takes a deep breath, claps his hands, and says there are four options: withdrawal, administrative close, dismissal, or termination. He explains each one, and after 10 minutes the woman asks for her case to be administratively closed. The DHS attorney, however, denies that request. Simpson’s hands are tied.

The judge tells the woman that because DHS filed paperwork on her case that day, and because it’s only in English, that he’s going to give her time to review it, because “as the judge I don’t think it would be fair for you to go forward without the opportunity to object to that.” He schedules her to come back in a month.

“MPP is not a program I created,” he says. “That decision was made by someone else.” 

Additional reporting by Noah Lanard.

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

“Malicious incompetence,” “Aimless Docket Reshuffling,” “Man’s Inhumanity to Man” — it’s all there on public display in this deadly “Theater of the Absurd.”

Here, from a recent Human Rights Watch report on over 200 of those illegally returned to El Salvador without Due Process and in violation of the rule of law:

138 Killed;

70 Sexually abused, tortured, or otherwise harmed.

Here is the HRW report as posted on Courtside:

https://immigrationcourtside.com/2020/02/06/how-americas-killer-courts-promote-crimes-against-humanity-human-rights-watch-trump-his-white-nationalist-sycophants-toadies-tout-lawless-policies-that-violate-legal-obligations-he/

Where, oh where, has our humanity and human decency gone?

And, how do spineless jurists on Article III Courts who continue to “rubber stamp” and overlook the disgraceful abrogation of Due Process and fundamental fairness going on in a grotesquely biased and mismanaged “court system” controlled by a White Nationalist, nativist regime look at themselves in the mirror each morning. Maybe they don’t.

Abuse of the most vulnerable among us might seem to them to be “below the radar screen.” After all, their victims often die, disappear, or are orbited back to unknown fates in dangerous foreign lands. Out of sign, out of mind! But, what if it were their spouses, sons, and daughters sent to Tijuana to be raped while awaiting a so-called “trial.”

Rather than serving its intended purpose, promoting courage to stand up against government tyranny and to defend the rights of individuals, even the downtrodden and powerless, against Government abuse of the law, life tenure has apparently become something quite different. That is, a refuge from accountability and the rules of human decency.

John Roberts, his “Gang of Five,” and the rest of the Article III enablers will escape any legal consequences for their actions and, perhaps more significant, inactions in the face of unspeakable abuses of our Constitution, the rule of law, intellectual honesty, and the obligations we owe to other human beings.

How about those cowardly 9th Circuit Judges who ignored the law, betrayed human decency, and enabled rapes, killings, and other “crimes against humanity” by “green lighting” the unconstitutional and clearly illegal “MPP” — better known as “Let ‘Em Die in Mexico” with their absurdist legal gobbledygook in Innovation Law Lab v. McAleenan. They are enjoying life in the ivory tower while their human victims are suffering and dying.

But, folks like Fernanda and many others are recording their abuses which will live in history and infamy, will forever tarnish their records, and be a blot on their family names for generations to come. 

There is no excuse for what is happening at our borders and in our Immigration Courts today. Constantly Confront Complicit Courts 4 Change! Flood the Article IIIs with examples and constant reminders of their handiwork and dereliction of duty! Let the bodies pile up on their collective doorsteps until the stench is so great that even they can no longer ignore and paper over their own complicity and moral responsibility with legal banalities. Force them to see their own faces and the faces of their loved ones in the scared, tormented faces and ruined lives of those destroyed by our scofflaw regime and its enablers. 

Also, if you haven’t already done so, tell your Congressional representatives that you have had enough of this grotesque circus!

Here’s what I wrote to my legislators, and some from other states, recently:

I hope you will also speak out frequently against the grotesque abuses of human rights, Due Process, and human decency, not to mention the teachings of Jesus Christ and almost all other religious traditions, that the Trump Administration is carrying out against refugees of color, many of them desperate and vulnerable women and children, at our Southern Border.

Additionally, under Trump, the U.S. Immigration Courts, absurdly and unconstitutionally located within a politically biased U.S. Department of Justice, have become a mockery of justice, Due Process, and fundamental fairness. I urge you to join with other legislators in abolishing the current failed (1.1 million case backlog) and unfair system and replacing it with an independent Article I U.S. Immigration Court. It’s time to end the abuse! This must be one of our highest national priorities.

I invite you and your staff to read more about the grotesque abuses of law, human rights, and fundamental human decency being committed daily on migrants and other vulnerable humans by the Trump Administration in my blog: immigrationcourtside.com, “The Voice of the New Due Process Army.” This is not the America I knew and proudly served for more than three decades as a Federal employee.

Due Process Forever; Trump’s Perverted View of America Never!

Thanks again.

With my appreciation and very best wishes,

Paul Wickham Schmidt

U.S. Immigration Judge (Retired)

Adjunct Professor, Georgetown Law

Due Process Forever; Complicit Courts & Feckless Legislators, Never!

PWS

02-07-20

 

JUSTICE FARCE: BARR PACKS APPEALS BOARD WITH “JUDGES” KNOWN AS ANTI-ASYLUM ZEALOTS! — Body Charged With Insuring Impartiality & Due Process Now Serves As “Chief Persecutor” Of Asylum Applicants — This Is America?

Noah Lanard
Noah Lanard
Reporter
Mother Jones

 

https://apple.news/A4TEHyWG1TfmB-yGzUmx3YA

 

Noah Lanard reports for Mother Jones:

The Trump Administration’s Court-Packing Scheme Fills Immigration Appeals Board With Hardliners

In his first six years as an immigration judge in New York and Atlanta, from 1993 to 1999, William Cassidy rejected more asylum seekers than any judge in the nation. A few years ago,Earle Wilson overtook Cassidy as the harshest asylum judge on the Atlanta court, which has long been considered one of the toughest immigration courts in the country.

Now both men have been elevated to the Board of Immigration Appeals, which often has the final say over whether immigrants are deported, as part of a court-packing scheme by the Trump administration that is likely to make it even more difficult for migrants fleeing persecution to gain asylum.

Between 2013 and 2018, the average immigration judge in the country approved about 45 percent of asylum claims. The sixjudges newly promoted to the board have all approved fewer than 20 percent. Cassidy granted 4.2 percent of asylum claims. Another appointee, Stuart Couch, approved 7.9 percent. For Wilson, the figure was just 1.9 percent. 

Paul Schmidt, who chaired the Board of Immigration of Appeals from 1995 to 2001, says the administration’s goal is to build a “deportation railway” in which cases move through the system as quickly as possible and then get “rubber-stamped by the Board.”

Until last year, the board had 17 members. The Trump administration expanded the board to 21 members, arguing it was necessary to handle an increase in appeals. That has allowed Attorney General William Barr to fill the panel with immigration hardliners. It’s reminiscent of President Franklin Roosevelt’s ill-fated 1937 effort to overcome Supreme Court resistance to the New Deal by adding up to six additional justices—only immigration courts are part of the Justice Department, giving the department the power to expand the Board and fill the new openings with judges sympathetic to the administration’s immigration crackdown.

The promotions of the six judges this month, first reported by the San Francisco Chronicle, are part of an intensifying effort to reshape immigration courts. Earlier this month, the Justice Department moved to eliminate the immigration judges’ union, which has been highly critical of the administration’s policies. On Monday, a regulation took effect that gives the head of the immigration courts, a political appointee, the power to decide appeals if judges do not hear them quickly enough. A rule that gives board members more authority to summarily deny appeals without issuing a full opinion takes effect on Tuesday. 

Lawyers who have appeared before Cassidy, Couch, and Wilson say all three have intense tempers. All of them had many of their asylum denials reversed by the Board of Immigration Appeals. Now they’ll be the ones deciding those appeals. (The Justice Department’s Executive Office for Immigration Review, which oversees the immigration court system, did not respond to a request to comment on details in this story.)

Cassidy is most associated with his decision to deport Mark Lyttle, a US citizen who did not speak Spanish, to Mexico during a mass deportation hearing. One Georgia attorney I spoke to blamed Immigration and Customs Enforcement for Lyttle’s removal, but Lyttle asserted that he told Cassidy twice about his US citizenship.

Glenn Fogle, an Atlanta immigration attorney, concluded in 2001, “You could have Anne Frank in front of him and he would say it was implausible that she could have hidden in the house for years and not be caught.” Now he says his feelings about Cassidy haven’t changed. He described a recent case in which Cassidy rejected a Congolese client who said he had scars on his back from being persecuted in his home country. Cassidy, presiding via an aging video system, asked the man to lift up his shirt and show the scars, then said he couldn’t see them. “Judge, how on earth could you see anything with this video?” Fogle recalls asking. Cassidy denied the asylum claim, noting in his decision that he couldn’t observe the scars.

Peter Isbister, a senior attorney with the Southern Poverty Law Center, says Cassidy sometimes writes orders denying bond requests while Isbister is still opening his argument. If he tries to finish, Cassidy can get frustrated and say something like, “You can take it up with the board. We’re done!”

In 2010, Cassidy had an asylum denial overturned because he had written the ruling before the hearing even began. The next year, Cassidy sat down in another judge’s courtroom in his judicial robe. In what one observer described as a “surreal” scene, Cassidy then raised his hand and told how the judge how the case should be handled. Assistant Chief Immigration Judge Deepali Nadkarni admonished Cassidy for his “inappropriate conduct.” In 2016, Cassidy compared an immigrant arriving at the border to “a person coming to your home in a Halloween mask, waving a knife dripping with blood.”

Cassidy and Couch have both suggested that asylum seekers are dishonest and trying to scam their way into the country. A Charlotte immigration attorney, who requested anonymity because Couch is now handling appeals, heard Couch say he believes 85 percent of asylum seekers are lying, that 10 percent are telling the truth but not eligible for protection, and that 5 percent are both honest and eligible for asylum. Couch is also skeptical of lawyers. When an out-of-state lawyer couldn’t make it to a hearing because of a funeral, Couch called the funeral home to verify the claim, according to the Charlotte attorney. 

In 2004, Couch, then a military prosecutor, attracted widespread attention for refusing to prosecute a Guantanamo detainee because he had been tortured. But as an immigration judge, Couch has almost always ruled against people who say they’ve been persecuted. He is best known among immigration attorneys for his 2015 decision to deny asylum to a woman who said she had been repeatedly physically and sexually abused by her ex-husband. One year later, the Board of Immigration Appeals overturned Couch’s ruling and ordered him to grant her asylum. But Couch again declined to do so. The case gained prominence when Jeff Sessions, then the attorney general, used it to issue a sweeping precedent that made it much harder for asylum seekers to claim domestic violence as a reason for asylum. (Couch isn’t uniformly anti-immigration—Jeremy McKinney, a North Carolina attorney and the vice president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, saw him lobby North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis to greatly expand Central Americans’ access to temporary visas—but has a narrow view of who qualifies for asylum.)

Wilson has the highest asylum denial rate of the six new appointees. His most notable habit is leaning back in his chair while respondents are testifying and closing his eyes so that it looks like he’s sleeping. In one case, according to an observer from Emory University’s law school, Wilson leaned back with his eyes closed for 23 minutes as an asylum seeker described the murder of her parents and siblings. 

Like the others, Wilson has often been overturned by the appeals board he is now a part of. In one case, he ruled against a victim of domestic violence partly on the grounds that she had been able leave her abuser and reach the United States. “We disagree,” the Board decided. “Although the respondent did ultimately come to the United States to escape her abuser, by definition, any person applying for asylum in the United States has fled the harm that they experienced.”

Under the regulation that goes into effect Tuesday, Board members will have more authority to summarily deny appeals without providing any justification. Charles Kuck, an Atlanta attorney and former president of the American Immigration Lawyers Associations, expects that to lead to an assembly-line system like the one that existed under the George W. Bush administration, when Board members sometimes issued more than 50 decisions a day.

Two decades later, one Cassidy case still sticks with Fogle. His client was a former Ethiopian government official. As he was telling his story, Fogle remembers, Cassidy jumped up, turned off the court’s audio recorder, and yelled, “Bullshit!” His client insisted he was telling the truth.

Fogle says it was among the most unprofessional behavior he has ever seen from a judge. “I’ve been around,” he says. “I will never forget that.” He adds, “That’s the guy that’s going to be adjudicating appeals from other immigration judges.

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Sounds like a Third World kakistocracy to me. And, over my years working on asylum cases, I became familiar with many of those. Never imagined the U.S. would hit these depths.

PWS

08-29-19

SANE & HUMANE SOUTHERN BORDER POLICIES: Meissner, De Pena, Clemons, Schmidt With Practical Solutions That Would Control The Border & Treat Asylum Seekers Fairly!

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/05/what-would-it-actually-take-to-fix-the-asylum-system/

Doris M. Meissner, Senior Fellow, Migration Policy Institute

Me

Kristie De Pena, Director of Immigration, Niskanen Center

Michael Clemons, Senior Fellow, Center for Global Development

Noah Lanard, Reporter, Mother Jones

Noah Lanard reports in Mother Jones:

In April 2018, the Department of Homeland Security began using a new word to describe the situation at the southern border: crisis. The number of parents and children crossing the border to seek protection under US asylum laws was climbing to nearly 10,000 per month, up from barely a thousand at the start of the Trump administration. Trump did everything in his power to stop families from coming. He deployed the military to the border, separated parents from children, turned away asylum seekers at official border crossings, and then tried to make it illegal to request asylum unless people went to those crossings.

Nothing worked. More than 58,000 parents and children traveling togethercrossed the border last month, the seventh record-high in eight months. DHS officials have upped their hyperbolic rhetoric, saying that the immigration system is “on fire” and in “meltdown.”

At first, Democrats dismissed Trump’s fearmongering on immigration by pointing out that the total number of border crossers was still near historic lows. But as the number of parents and children coming to the border continues to skyrocket and the backlog of asylum seekers awaiting court hearings swells, it’s becoming clear to people across the political spectrum that doing nothing is not an option. Solutions are needed—the question is, what do they look like?

Mother Jones interviewed a half-dozen immigration experts from the left and center to see how they would create a fairer, more efficient, more humanitarian system for asylum seekers. Here’s what they recommend.

1. Hire more immigration judges

A backlog of nearly 900,000 asylum cases means that families seeking asylum often spend years living in the United States before their cases are decided by immigration judges. Most asylum seekers from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras have not won their cases in recent years, and it’s even harder now that the Trump administration has limited protections for victims of gang and domestic violence, the most common forms of persecution in these “Northern Triangle” countries. Many of those who receive deportation orders, either because they lost their case or they did not apply for asylum after being released at the border, remain in the country as undocumented immigrants.

The backlog, combined with ICE’s limited ability to find people who don’t comply with removal orders, creates the accurate perception among migrants that families who turn themselves in to border agents are highly unlikely to be quickly deported. That presents an incentive for families unlikely to win asylum to cross the border anyway. More than 260,000 parents and children crossed the southern border between the 2016 and 2018 fiscal years. ICE deported about 7,000 family members during that period.

Trump has increased the number of immigration judges from 289 in 2016 to 435. But the backlog has been increasing by more than 100,000 cases per year,faster than under Barack Obama. That’s partly because of the surge in asylum claims but also because indiscriminate immigration enforcement has led to a dramatic increase in arrests of immigrants without criminal histories and forced judges to reopen cases they had set aside. The president is asking to fund 100 new judges in his 2020 budget, while Democrats have called for hiring at least 300 judges over four years.

Those numbers of hires would barely put a dent in the backlog in the short term. That’s why some experts think the administration should bring entire new classes of judges into the fold. Paul Schmidt, who served as an immigration judge from 2003 to 2016, suggests training retired state judges to handle bond and scheduling hearings so that judges have more time to handle asylum decisions. Kristie De Peña, director of immigration at the center-right Niskanen Center, proposes appointing emergency judges to decide asylum cases, and says that to assuage concerns about the Trump administration’s hiring, these judges could be selected by groups such as the American Bar Association and signed off on by governors. 

2. Process asylum claims more efficiently

While serving as Bill Clinton’s top immigration official in the 1990s, Doris Meissner eliminated a similar asylum backlog with a series of technical fixes. Previously, asylum seekers were eligible for work permits immediately, even if their cases wouldn’t be resolved for years, giving people with weak asylum cases an incentive to come to the United States and start working. To remove that incentive, Meissner imposed a six-month waiting period before asylum seekers were eligible for work permits and made sure that nearly all cases were decided within six months. The number of new asylum applications fell by more than half within a year, and the share of claims that were approved eventually more than doubled.

Meissner, now a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute, proposes another change that could have a huge impact on the backlog: letting asylum officers, not immigration judges, make the initial decisions in asylum cases.

Those officers already decide many asylum cases—for people who weren’t stopped at the border—and conduct all the “credible fear” interviews that determine whether asylum seekers have a strong enough case to go before an immigration judge. If officers took the place of immigration judges in asylum cases, migrants arriving at the border with strong claims would have their asylum approved more quickly, allowing them to bring their families to the United States rather than waiting years for a hearing before being allowed to bring relatives. Those with weaker claims, sensing that they’d be denied quickly and deported, might skip the trip and avoid taking on massive debts in a futile attempt to win asylum.

Another solution that could spare asylum seekers a long and uncertain trip to the United States and cut down on the backlog would be letting Central Americans apply for refugee status from their home countries. The Obama administration started a program along these lines, but the Trump administration quickly ended it. Democrats are calling for bringing back an expanded version so people have an alternative to traveling to the border.

Schmidt also thinks attorneys should be provided to asylum seekers so they’re informed of their legal rights and cases run more smoothly. The problem for the Trump administration, he says, is that fairer hearings would likely lead to more people winning their cases. Instead of running an effective asylum system, the Trump administration practices what Schmidt calls “malicious incompetence,” a noxious mix of bureaucratic dysfunction and intentional undermining of legal protections for asylum seekers. “If you had a competent administration willing to put the money in the right places,” he says, “you could solve this problem, and it wouldn’t cost as much as all the stuff they’re doing now.”

3. Consider alternatives to family detention

There’s no issue where the government and immigrant advocates differ more sharply than immigrant detention. The vast majority of families are quickly released at the border because of detention capacity constraints and the Trump administration’s recognition that short-term detention doesn’t do much to deter immigration. Under both Obama and Trump, DHS has sought to detain families for longer than the current legal limit of about 20 days and quickly deport them if they lose their cases.

Indefinite family detention is a nonstarter for immigrant advocates, who point to the government’s abysmal track record on immigration detention, the traumatic impact detention can have on children, and the challenges of fighting cases from behind bars. Immigrant advocates and Democrats in Congress oppose all family detention, preferring to release immigrants and track them with ankle monitors and check-ins with case workers.

De Peña is trying to find a middle ground. She proposes a solution that would avoid prolonged detention and the quick releasing of families at the border,while taking advantage of a move Trump already made. Trump has cut refugee admissions to record lows, forcing resettlement agencies to close offices and lay people off. De Peña wants to bring some work back to these agencies by having the government contract with them to house families seeking asylum. Under her plan, the families would be located in proximity to one another and have access to schools, medical facilities, and lawyers. They could move about freely, though they’d be monitored with ankle bracelets, as they often are now. That way, families seeking asylum wouldn’t be locked up like criminals, but they would also be less likely to disappear into undocumented life in American cities.

4. Send foreign aid—but don’t rely on it

Almost everyone in both parties supports sending foreign aid to Central America.Senate Democrats’ border plan, which was first introduced in October, provides $3 billion in aid to address the “root causes” of migration from the Northern Triangle, specifically poverty and violence. The outlier is Trump, who is moving to cut off aid to Central America despite his own acting DHS secretary’s support for that assistance.

But that foreign aid is not likely to be a quick fix. Michael Clemens, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development, and researcher Hannah Postel concluded in a 2018 article that the chance of deterring migration through development assistance is “weak at best.” To greatly impact migration, theyfound, aid would have to work in “unprecedented ways” over multiple generations. There is some evidence that security assistance for neighborhood-level programs such as community policing can reduce migration, but economic aid could actually have the opposite effect, boosting migration from the poorest areas of the Northern Triangle by giving people the resources needed to reach the border. Clemens considers Trump’s decision to cut off aid “vacuous and nihilistic,” but he believes foreign aid mostly gets as much attention as it does because it’s a “political winner”not an actual short- or medium-term solution to the migration challenge. 

5. Open up economic visas

People are leaving the Northern Triangle to escape intense gang violence, find jobs, or reunite with relatives—often all three. The problem is that economic and family concerns aren’t valid grounds for asylum, but asylum is essentially the only way for most Central Americans to come to the United States legally. (The State Department rejects nearly all tourist visa applications from low-income Central Americans, worried that they’ll overstay their visas.) But asylum doesn’t have to be the only path into the United States.

 Last year, the Department of Labor approved nearly 400,000 guest workers recruited by US employers to work in agriculture and other seasonal industries. The vast majority of the temporary work visas have gone to Mexicans, many of whom have longstanding relationships with specific employers. The United States could easily require or encourage employers to hire more Central Americans. Clemens calls this the “lowest-hanging fruit” for accommodating people whose countries are passing through the same phase of economic development that caused migrants to come to the United States from everywhere from Sweden to South Korea in previous generations.

Opening up more visas for Central Americans wouldn’t require legislation and could be done “literally next month,” Clemens says. And given that Trump and his family already employ many of these guest workers, he says, “they know all about it.”

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

These problems can be solved. But, not by “malicious incompetence.”

The biggest and most critical statutory change has nothing at all to do with “closing” bogus “loopholes” in asylum law that have been invented to further the White Nationalist narrative.

If I could make just one statutory change, it would be an independent Article I Immigration Court. Over time, a “real” court would establish a fair and efficient administration of the existing asylum laws and would hold the Government accountable for violating and ignoring those laws.

A border control system focused on administering asylum laws, rather than avoiding, flouting, or intentionally misinterpreting them, would look much different and undoubtedly would produce different results. That, in turn, would force the Government to establish and carry out real border law enforcement, rather than just targeting asylum seekers. Without a credible independent Immigration Court system to insure the integrity of the law, no statutory change in immigration law will be fully effective.

PWS

05-29-19

 

PARTY OF INFAMY AND GROSS INDECENCY: GOP’S WHITE NATIONALIST WING SEEKS TO DESTROY U.S. ASYLUM LAW, SCREW THE MOST VULNERABLE – Want To Turn America Into A “Rogue Nation” That Trashes Human Rights! – THEY MUST BE EXPOSED AND STOPPED!

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/10/trumps-immigration-proposal-could-make-it-radically-harder-to-get-asylum/

Noah Lanard reports for Mother Jones:

“When people arrive at the border seeking asylum from persecution, the United States gives them the benefit of the doubt. As long as they can show there’s a “significant possibility” that they deserve protection, they’re allowed to stay and make their case to an immigration judge. President Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress want to change that.

On Sunday, the Trump administration demanded that Congress overhaul the US asylum system as part of any legislation to protect the nearly 700,000 undocumented immigrants known as Dreamers from deportation. The White House’s asylum proposal, laid out in nine bullet-pointed items as part of the broader immigration plan, appears to be modeled on the Asylum Reform and Border Protection Act, a bill that Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee approved in July. The bill, which has not been passed by the full House, would make it easier for the Department of Homeland Security to quickly reject asylum claims and force most asylum seekers to remain in detention while their cases are decided. The overall effect would be to transform a system for protecting persecuted people, created in the wake of World War II, into a much more adversarial process.  

At a hearing in July, Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) warned that the GOP proposal would “all but destroy the US asylum system.” Now Trump is trying to fold those changes into a deal to protect the Dreamers—undocumented immigrants who came to the country as children—who were previously covered by Barack Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.

Eleanor Acer, an expert on refugees at the advocacy group Human Rights First, saidin a statement Monday that Trump’s demands will “block those fleeing persecution and violence from even applying for asylum, and punish those who seek protection by preventing their release from immigration detention facilities and jails.”

But Republicans like Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) argue that asylum reform is needed to address “pervasive” fraud, such as false claims of persecution. Asylum claims from the “Northern Triangle” countries of Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras have been a major focus for Republicans. Between 2013 and 2015, there were more asylum claims from the Northern Triangle, which has been terrorized by MS-13 and other gangs, than in the previous 15 years combined. A 2015 report from the Government Accountability Office found that the United States has “limited capabilities to detect asylum fraud.” But the scope of the problem is not known. Leah Chavla, a program officer at the Women’s Refugee Commission, says going after fraud is misguided in light of the many checks and balances that are already in place. 

The real “fraudsters” here are the GOP restrictionists, led by folks like Goodlatte, Miller, and Sessions, trying to fob off their knowingly false and contrived narrative on America. Shame!

Second, the current system intentionally denies lawyers to the respondents in detention in obscure locations along the Southern Border, specifically selected to make it difficult for individuals to exercise their rights. Raising the standards would virtually guarantee rejection of all such asylum seekers without any hearing at all. The standard for having asylum granted is supposed to be a generous “well-founded fear” (in other words, a 10% chance or a “reasonable chance”). In fact, however, DHS and EOIR often fail to honor the existing legal standards. Forcing unrepresented individuals in detention with no chance to gather evidence to establish that it is “more likely than not” that they would be granted asylum is a ridiculous travesty of justice.

Third, access to lawyers, not detention, is the most cost-effective way to secure appearance at Immigration Court hearings. Individuals who are able to obtain lawyers, in other words those who actually understand what is happening, have a relatively low rate of “failure to appear.” In fact, a long-term study by the American Immigration Council shows that 95% of minors represented by counsel appear for their hearings as opposed to approximately 67% for those who are unrepresented. See,e.g., https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/research/taking-attendance-new-data-finds-majority-children-appear-immigration-court

Rather than curtailment of rights or expensive and inhumane detention, the best way of insure that all asylum applicants appear for their scheduled hearings and receive full due process would be to insure that the hearings take place in areas with adequate supplies of pro bono and “low bono” counsel and that hearings are scheduled in a predictable manner that does not intentionally outstrip the capabilities of the pro bono bar.

Fourth, a rational response to fraud concerns would be building better fraud detection programs within DHS, rather than denying vulnerable individuals their statutory and constitutional rights. What would a better system look like:  more traditional law enforcement tools, like undercover operations, use of informants to infiltrate smuggling operations, and much better intelligence on the operations of human trafficking rings. And, there’s plenty of resources to do it. DHS just lacks the ability and/or the motivation. Many of the resources now wasted on “gonzo” interior enforcement and mindless detention — sacking up janitors and maids for deportation and detaining rape victims applying for asylum — could be “redeployed” to meaningful, although more challenging, law enforcement activities aimed at rationally addressing the fraud problem rather than using it as a bogus excuse to harm the vulnerable.

Fifth, Goodlatte’s whole premise of fraud among Southern Border asylum applications is highly illogical. Most of the Southern Border asylum claims involve some variant of so-called “particular social groups” or “PSGs,” But, the entire immigration adjudication system at all levels has traditionally been biased against just such claims. and, it is particularly biased against such claims from Central America. PSG claims from Central America receive “strict scrutiny’ at every level of the asylum system! No fraudster in his or her right mind would go to the trouble of “dummying up” a PSG claim which will likely be rejected. No, if you’re going to the trouble of committing fraud, you’d fabricate a “political or religious activist or supporter claim”  of the type that are much more routinely granted across the board.

Don’t let Trump, Miller, Sessions, Goodlatte, and their band of shameless GOP xenophobes get away with destroying our precious asylum system! Resist now! Resist forever! Stand up for Due Process, or eventually YOU won’t any at all! Some Dude once said “as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.” While arrogant folks like the restrictionists obviously don’t believe that, it’s still good advice.

PWS

10-10-17