⚖️ AFTER STRING OF CIRCUIT DEFEATS, BIA FINALLY BACKS DOWN ON “EQUITABLE TOLLING” — Sort Of! — Matter of Morales-Morales, 28 I&N Dec. 714 (BIA 2023)

 

https://www.justice.gov/eoir/page/file/1582681/download

Matter of Morales-Morales, 28 I&N Dec. 714 (BIA 2023)

BIA Headnote:

(1) The Board of Immigration Appeals has authority to accept what are otherwise untimely appeals, and consider them timely, in certain situations because 8 C.F.R. § 1003.38(b) (2022) is a claim-processing rule and not a jurisdictional provision. Matter of Liadov, 23 I&N Dec. 990 (BIA 2006), overruled.

(2) The Board will accept a late-filed appeal where a party can establish that equitable tolling applies, which requires the party to show both diligence in the filing of the notice of appeal and that an extraordinary circumstance prevented timely filing.

FOR THE RESPONDENT: Mario Salgado, Esquire, San Francisco, California

BEFORE: Board Panel: WETMORE, Chief Appellate Immigration Judge; MULLANE and MANN, Appellate Immigration Judges.

MULLANE, Appellate Immigration Judge [Opinion]

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

Notably, but perhaps predictably for those who follow the BIA’s generally “respondent/due process unfriendly” jurisprudence, the “good news” that the BIA has belatedly decided to follow the 2d, 5th, and 9th Circuits on equitable tolling is “tempered” by the result in this case — denial of the motion to reconsider and accept the appeal!

Evidently, among its 82,000+ backlog, the BIA was unable to identify a case where correctly applying equitable tolling would actually BENEFIT the respondent, rather than just requiring a different, largely contrived, analysis to “get to no!” This continues a depressing and highly inappropriate long-standing tendency of the BIA to provide negative examples of how to apply potentially remedial rules.

Presumably, after 17 years of the BIA’s wrong-headed precedent Matter of Liadov, everyone understands that the BIA is “programmed to deny.” What’s needed is “reprogramming” to recognize and grant motions based on “equitable tolling.”

It’s also remarkable that the “highest tribunal” of a dysfunctional organization, notorious for losing files; failing to provide timely, correct notice; cancelling hearings without notice on the hearing date; switching Immigration Judges without notice in a system where the identity of the judge is too often “outcome determinative;” and “cutting” DHS and itself almost endless “breaks” and “exceptions” for their sloppy, lazy, and sometimes ethnically questionable practices sees fit to “pontificate” so self-righteously on what’s “due diligence” and “extraordinary circumstances” for the private bar. The “message” is pretty clear: Denial is the “preferred” (or default, or de facto presumed) result!

If either of the foregoing concepts were applied to EOIR and DHS with the same stringency they are to individuals and their representatives, both agencies would have been forced out of business long ago!

This system is totally screwed up! Dems must ask themselves why Garland and his senior leadership have failed to “unscrew it,” and what can be done to deal with their democracy-and-life-threatening indolence and inattention to quality jurisprudence, due process, fundamental fairness, and best practices.

🇺🇸 Due Process Forever!

PWS

05-08-23

🤯🏴‍☠️🤡🤮👎🏽INCOMPETENCE WATCH: Lacking Integrity & Skills To Follow The Law, Tone-Deaf, Dangerous,  & Disingenuous Biden Immigration Officials Consider Additional Massive Violations Of Human Rights For Asylum Seekers! — ACLU & NDPA Ready To Resist Administration’s Latest Unwarranted Assaults on Human Rights, Common Sense, & Human Decency!

Stephen Miller Monster
Who would have thought that the Biden Administration would be dumb and treacherous enough to let this neo-Nazi xenophobe and refugee hater “own” human rights “policy” in a Dem Administration? But, it appears they have! Attribution: Stephen Miller Monster by Peter Kuper, PoliticalCartoons.com

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/01/us/politics/biden-immigration-asylum-restrictions.html

From Michael Shear & Eileen Sullivan the NY Times:

WASHINGTON — The Biden administration is considering substantial new limits on the number of migrants who could apply for asylum in the United States, according to people familiar with the proposal, which would expand restrictions similar to those first put in place along the border by former President Donald J. Trump.

The plan is one of several being debated by President Biden’s top aides as the country confronts a high number of illegal crossings at the border. It would prohibit migrants who are fleeing persecution from seeking refuge in the United States unless they were first denied safe harbor by another country, like Mexico.

People familiar with the discussions said the new policy, if adopted, could go into effect as soon as this month, just as the government stops using a public health rule that was put in place at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic by the Trump administration and became a key policy to manage the spike in crossings during Mr. Biden’s tenure. A federal judge has ordered the administration to stop using the health rule on Dec. 21.

But the idea of broadly prohibiting migrants from seeking asylum strikes directly at the heart of decades of American and international law that has shaped the United States’ role as a place of safety for displaced and fearful people across the globe.

. . . .

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

Read the complete article at the link.

[U.S. District Judge Emmet ]Sullivan wrote that the federal officials knew the order “would likely expel migrants to locations with a ‘high probability’ of ‘persecution, torture, violent assaults, or rape’ ” — and did so anyway.

“It is unreasonable for the CDC to assume that it can ignore the consequences of any actions it chooses to take in the pursuit of fulfilling its goals,” Sullivan wrote. “It is undisputed that the impact on migrants was indeed dire.”

What part of Judge Sullivan’s very clear ruling on their “crimes against humanity” and knowing violations of U.S. and international law doesn’t the “Biden Administration Clown Show” 🤡 understand? Just follow the asylum law and due process, already! If you can’t do that, resign and let folks who can do the job (of which there are plenty out here in the “real world”) take over and do the job you have been failing at for two years!

In any event, the talent is out here in the private/NGO sector and will resist this latest insult to humanity and degradation of the rule of law and due process that Administration officials are “pondering!” “Studying and deciding whether or not to violate the law (again)?” Sounds like a potential criminal conspiracy to me! 

In any event, expert litigators like Lee Gelernt of the ACLU and other NDPA superstars are prepared to “beat the Biden Administration’s brains (if any) out” in court again if they try to implement any more of their illegal and immoral immigration gimmicks!

“If the Biden administration simply substitutes the unlawful and anti-asylum Trump transit ban for Title 42,” Mr. Gelernt said, “we will immediately sue, as we successfully did during the Trump administration.”

The Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations committee was also “not on board” with the Biden Administration’s latest harebrained ideas on diminishing human rights that they have substituted for basic competence over the past two years of disasters, and unforgivable policy screw-ups on immigration, human rights, and racial justice issues:

“If the reported story is true, the Biden administration would further step away from our nation’s commitment to offer refuge to asylum seekers,” Senator Bob Menendez, Democrat of New Jersey and the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, said in a statement on Thursday. “I will firmly oppose this misguided attempt to rewrite our asylum laws without congressional approval, just as I firmly opposed the same efforts under President Trump.”

I also have to wonder how Judge Sullivan will react when he learns how Biden Administration officials are using his “reluctantly granted” five weeks of delay in implementing his “cease and desist order.” Instead of, at long last, getting their collective tails in gear to finally put in place a competent legal system for re-establishing legal asylum at the southern border, these disgraceful petty bureaucrats and so-called “policy” officials have been scheming to evade the rule of law and commit yet more “crimes against humanity.”

The NDPA is not going to let them get away with it. Even if it means ripping apart the “so-called Democratic Coalition” going into the 2024 elections!

 

🇺🇸 Due Process Forever! Tyranny & Stupidity From either Dems or the GOP, never!

PWS

12-05-22

CATHERINE RAMPELL @ WASHPOST — The GOP’s “Performative Cruelty” Is Bad Policy!

Catherine Rampell
Catherine Rampell
Opinion Columnist
Washington Post

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/19/immigrants-marthas-vineyard-desantis-performative/

. . . .

Not to mention that even the Trump administration (the Trump administration!) found that refugees and asylees are a net positive for public budgets over the long run. That is, despite typically arriving penniless, these immigrants ultimately pay more in taxes than they receive in government benefits.

Michele L. Norris: What Greg Abbott and Ron DeSantis don’t understand about America

Contra DeSantis’s insinuations about immigrant moochers, these are people who want to work and become economically self-sufficient. That’s presumably why DeSantis’s own henchmen promised fictitious jobs to lure the asylum seekers onto flights.

. . . .

If Republican officials actually wanted to reduce the number of people coming to the border without advance permission, there are plenty of things these politicians could do. They could push for expansion of guest-worker visas, for instance. Or more funding for the refugee admissions program. Or really any other legal, orderly pathway to come to the United States.

After all, the main reason there is such a crush at the border — and why the asylum system in general is so overwhelmed — is that right now this is one of the very few legal ways to get to America.

Yes, I said legal: The families being hoodwinked and shipped around the country like chattel on chartered buses and flights are here lawfully, based on what’s been publicly reported. They turned themselves in upon crossing the border precisely so that they can apply for asylum, as is their legal right. The federal government has screened them, and granted them humanitarian parole while they pursue their asylum cases in court.

It’s not an ideal system. Or an especially fast one. It would be much better to fix the rest of our broken legal immigration system so that those other, more orderly pathways are available. Especially the pathways that offer quicker access to work permits, given America’s current massive labor shortages.

It’s true that Democrats have also put forth relatively little effort to fix these problems. In some cases Democrats seem fearful of appearing too pro-immigrant, having apparently bought into the GOP lore that deep down Americans are xenophobes. But even what little Democrats have tried to do they generally can’t do without 60 Senate votes. Which Democrats don’t have.

Democrats need Republicans to cooperate on immigration reform, and Republicans won’t. Even when those reforms are coupled with investments in border security that Republicans claim to want. The GOP would rather keep around a dragon they can perpetually promise to slay one day — and better yet, to taunt and torture for a while, in public, first.

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

Read Catherine’s complete article at the link. Interesting that Catherine understands so much so well, while those in the Biden Administration charged with immigration and human rights policy are so clueless, timid, and inept!

In the meantime, the Dems have done little to make the current laws relating to refugees and asylum work. The much-hyped “asylum rule changes” at DHS have had little, if any, discernible positive impact. EOIR is a national disgrace — continuing the “death spiral” that accelerated during the Trump kakistocracy. The refugee system remains in shambles. The proposed 15,000 allocation of refugee admissions for FY 2023 to Latin American and the Caribbean is an insult and a “signal” to other receiving nations in the area that we are not serious about addressing the problem. There is no rational resettlement program for asylum seekers crossing the border, thus providing an unnecessary opening for the “performative cruelty” of  clowns like DeSantis and Abbott.

None of these things are “rocket science” or “budget busters.” They just require knowledgeable leadership, values, and the courage to act on them. Apparently, faced with the cruelty and desecration of values by the “MAGA GOP,” the Dems think that “all they have to do is show up, smile, and mumble platitudes” to seem like the only choice for Americans who believe in democracy. Maybe — but I wouldn’t count on it!

I think that Catherine “hit the nail on the head” with this assessment of the spineless policy officials driving refugee and asylum policies in the Biden Administration: “In some cases Democrats seem fearful of appearing too pro-immigrant, having apparently bought into the GOP lore that deep down Americans are xenophobes.” Cowardice on immigrants, immigrants’ rights, and racial justice has become an endemic problem in the Democratic Party.

🇺🇸 Due Process Forever!

PWS
09-22-22

 

💤😴GARLAND DOZES AS COURTS CRUMBLE!☠️

Rip Van Winkle
“Like this gentleman of yore, AG Garland takes a rather “laid back” approach to the ongoing due process disaster in his Immigration Courts.”
Scott Bixby
Scott Bixby
National Reporter
The Daily Beast

 

 

https://www.thedailybeast.com/fatally-flawed-immigration-court-system-should-be-taken-out-of-its-misery

Scott Bixby reports for The Daily Beast:

As the immigration court system strains under the weight of its biggest case backlog in history, the Biden administration is racing to fix it before it breaks entirely.

But breaking the system might be the only way to save it.

On the campaign trail, Joe Biden repeatedly vowed to create a “fair and humane immigration system,” replacing a faltering and faceless bureaucracy with swift due process. the Biden administration has since announced measures intended to alleviate the increasing pressure on a strained system once deemed “death penalty cases in a traffic court setting.”

But the sweeping, by government standards, tactics announced by the administration last month—which include adding as many as 100 new immigration court judges to the bench under Biden’s latest budget proposal, allowing asylum officers to evaluate some cases instead of those same overburdened judges, and encouraging Immigration and Customs Enforcement attorneys to clear “low priority” cases—may still not be enough to make a real dent in the backlog of cases that has reached its highest point ever.

“Trial dates that used to be scheduled out two, three, even five years sometimes, now don’t even get a hearing or a judge assigned,” said Michael Wildes, a second-generation immigration attorney who has represented high-profile clients from Pelé to Melania Trump. “My litigation team leader was in court this past Monday in Newark, where a judge there advised that she has cases open from the ’90s!”

One hundred new judges, Wildes said, “will be a drop in the bucket compared to the problem.”

“The current structure of the system is fatally flawed,” said Judge Dana Leigh Marks, the former president of the National Association of Immigration Judges who served for 35 years on the bench. “In the immigration removal system, any violation of law, no matter how minor and no matter how strong counterbalancing equities are, has resulted in placing people in removal proceedings. As long as that situation persists, it would be reasonable to anticipate that the court will be unable to clear its backlog or stay current.”

Marks, who coined the “traffic court” description of the immigration legal system, joined nearly a dozen other leading figures in the immigration law space in telling The Daily Beast that the long-term solution to the backlog of cases pending before immigration courts lies not in hiring more judges, but in removing the courts from the Department of Justice’s jurisdiction entirely.

“The cases are growing in complexity, the average judge is less experienced than ever, and every new surge of filings results in a new prioritization system imposed on the courts,” said David Bier, a research fellow with a focus on immigration at the Cato Institute and an expert on the immigration legal system, who said that even doubling the number of judges, as Biden once promised, wouldn’t be sufficient to stop the growth in the backlog.

“Staffing matters,” Bier said, “but the courts need structural reforms to improve their efficiency.”

With a little more than six weeks until the end of Title 42, the much-maligned public health order that has effectively barred asylum admissions at the U.S. southern border since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic in March 2020, the administration is bracing for a massive uptick of crossings at the U.S. southern border.

That surge—estimated by the Department of Homeland Security to reach as many as 18,000 people apprehended at the U.S.-Mexico border a day—will further heap cases on top of the largest backlog in immigration cases in history, now at 1.7 million cases and counting. That’s more than double the number of pending cases half a decade ago.

The Biden administration has taken steps to reduce the pressure on immigration judges to reduce the backlog at the expense of due process, eliminating a Trump-era requirement that judges clear at least 700 cases per year and requesting that more than 80 percent of a requested budget increase for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services go towards caseload and backlog reductions.

But increasing the number of immigration judges by 15 percent, as Biden did in his first year in office, has yet to change the stalled pace of case clearance. The estimated processing time for asylum cases—which make up roughly one in four cases in the backlog—is now at longer than 63 months, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

“It’s basically a big mess,” summed up Jason Dzubow, an immigration attorney in Washington, D.C., “and so far, throwing more immigration judges at the problem has not reduced the backlog.”

….

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

Read Scott’s full article at the link.

One could tire of saying the same things over and over. But, with “Team Garland” the obvious becomes the unattainable.

White Nationalists Jeff  “Gonzo Apocalypto” Sessions and “Billy the Bigot” Barr more than doubled the number of IJs while tripling the already out of control backlog. 

As every expert told the Biden Administration from the “git go,” more judges without drastic personnel changes and major structural, procedural, “cultural,” attitude, and quality control reforms won’t solve the problem. Indeed, all empirical indications are that it will make things worse!

While Garland hasn’t accomplished much in his time in office, he did prove the truth of the latter statement. While increasing the number of IJs by a modest 15%, he has built new backlog at the fastest rate ever, with more than 1.8 million pending cases!

But, that’s not all folks. Even in the “garden days” of EOIR “off docket” cases were an issue. Now, following four years of “maliciously incompetent” Trump regime meddling with EOIR, I’ve got to believe that there are thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of “off docket” cases floating around the bowels of EOIR, maybe never to be heard of again. So, it’s almost certain that EOIR’s “official numbers” (ask TRAC experts about the reliability of EOIR stats) understate the real scope of the problem.

One essential reform that was needed right off the bat that Garland ignored was better judges, not necessarily more judges! It should be obvious, even to someone as willfully blind as Garland, that the Sessions/Barr program of “packing” the BIA and the Immigration Courts with judges who lacked immigration and human rights expertise, were biased against asylum seekers, would “go along to get along” with stomping due process and immigrants’ rights, or all of the foregoing was a prescription for disaster. 

What “moves” a system is expert, “practical scholar” judges, operating with some independence and courage, who can recognize the many pending grantable cases on the docket, also identify those that don’t belong on the docket, group them using “practical precedents” on what a successful case looks like, and motivate, or if necessary cajole or force the parties to get together and complete these cases. Many of them could be completed, without appeals, on “short dockets” or returned to DHS for completion.

Then, the courts could concentrate on the much smaller number of cases that actually have issues needing litigation and requiring expert decision-making.

Instead, the EOIR system, from top to bottom, screws around trying to come up with specious ways of limiting relief, avoiding jurisdiction, creating procedural and evidentiary hurdles, or denying grantable cases. Additionally, gimmicks like “Aimless Docket Reshuffling” and “expedited dockets” are mis-used to “max out” the number of in absentia orders. But, as many of those latter must be reopened, some only after protracted litigation all the way up to the Courts of Appeals, that only adds to the chaos, false narratives, and squandered resources. Not to mention that it makes the entire system chronically unfair — a parody of justice!

There is absolutely no reason why Garland shouldn’t have installed a merit-based “re-competition” system for many of the judges hired or promoted during the Trump regime — starting with the precedent-setting BIA — a gang of “Dr. Nos and Don’t Buck the Party Liners” if I’ve ever seen one!

There are plenty of “other” attorney positions in the DOJ or elsewhere in the Executive branch for attorneys who can do certain types of legal work, but aren’t “best qualified” to be Immigration Judges under today’s conditions. IJs are DOJ attorneys in the so-called “excepted service;” they certainly are not entitled to “life tenure” in any particular attorney position. At most, those who aren’t selected after merit re-competition could expect “reassignment” to another government attorney position at the same pay. Happens all the time, particularly at the DOJ!

A merit selection system for Immigration Judges at both the trial and appellate levels requires substantial outside expert participation. That’s a marked change from the opaque, highly bureaucratic, too often “insider tilted” system used by DOJ and EOIR.

Fortuitously for Garland, there are good “models” out there for such a merit system that could be “tweaked” for EOIR. The DC Courts, U.S. Magistrate Judges, and U.S. Bankruptcy Judges merit-selection systems are among them. Sadly, however, Garland has been “asleep at the wheel” as his  broken “court” system veers off the road and goes down the embankment.

It’s not just immigrant justice that is dying here. While Garland and his lieutenants might choose to be “in denial,” the Immigration Courts are the “retail level” of today’s American justice system. When they finally give way and crumble, as they surely will do without Congressional intervention or better-performing Attorney General, the rest of our legal system is likely to come crashing down with them.

But, you’ve heard it all before on Courtside. Just tragic for our nation that the right folks aren’t paying any attention while there is still time to rescue the system.

🇺🇸Due Process Forever!

PWS

04-14-22

⚖️😎👍🏼DUE PROCESS PROGRESS! — House EOIR Appropriations Bill Contains $50 Million For Representation Of Kids & Families Seeking Asylum!

 

Kids in court
“This is due process?”
PHOTO: The Daily Beast

From: Jennifer Quigley <QuigleyJ@humanrightsfirst.org>

Subject: Fw: [EXT]-Good news on funding for legal representation!

Date: July 16, 2021 at 9:40:20 AM EDT

To: Asylum Working Group <asylum-working-group@googlegroups.com>

ICYMI

From: Greg Chen <GChen@aila.org>

Sent: Friday, July 16, 2021 9:30 AM

To: amigos@theimmigrationhub.org <amigos@theimmigrationhub.org>

Subject: [EXT]-Good news on funding for legal representation!

Email originates externally.

Greetings colleagues,

Yesterday House Appropriations Committee passed the CJS appropriations bill for FY 2022 for the Justice Department and other agencies. Importantly, the bill includes a historic $50 million for DOJ to pilot legal representation programs for people in removal proceedings. This is a big step for federal funding for legal counsel. Hooray!

Kudos to all the organizations in the working group on legal representation and access to counsel who have been fighting for this.Of course, we don’t have the money yet and will need to protect this language in the House and get comparable language, hopefully even more funding in the Senate. We have collectively been pushing for $200M.

The bill and draft report language are below.Collected resources on legal representation are available here: Ensuring Legal Representation for People Facing Removal. i

Committee-passed bill text on legal representation:

“(29) $50,000,000 for a grant pilot program to provide legal representation to immigrant children and families seeking asylum and other forms of legal protection in the United States;

Committee-passed report language on legal representation:

“Legal Representation Pilot for Immigrant Children and Families.—The Committee provides $50,000,000 for the Department to establish a competitive grant program to qualified non-profit organizations for a pilot program to increase representation for immigrant children and families in civil proceedings. The amount is $35,000,000 above the request and $50,000,000 above the fiscal year 2021 level. The Committee recognizes the compelling need to ensure due process for children and families who seek asylum and who must navigate a complex legal system for processing of asylum claims. The Committee supports coordination with grantees and organizations who offer other types of legal assistance or services to immigrants seeking asylum or other forms of legal protection. As with any new pilot program, the Committee expects the Department to assess this program with metrics that will be scaled appropriately to evaluate how this initial investment could be further enhanced to represent a larger portion of un-represented individuals and the impact that it may have on improving attendance rates and decreasing court costs. Within 90 days of enactment of this Act, the OJP shall brief the Committee on its implementation plan for this pilot.

Gregory Z. Chen, Esq.

Senior Director of Government Relations

Direct: 202-507-7615 I Cell: 202.716-5818 I Email: gchen@aila.org

American Immigration Lawyers Association

Main: 202.507.7600 I Fax: 202.783.7853 I www.aila.org

1331 G Street, NW, Suite 300, Washington, DC 20005

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

Congrats to all involved! Let’s keep up the momentum until we get universal representation!

🇺🇸Due Process Forever!

PWS

07-16-21

☠️⚰️🤮INSIDE THE GULAG: ICE’S CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY: Scofflaw Faux “Law-Enforcement” Agency Operates Outside Feckless U.S. Legal System Afraid to Crack Down on Deceit & Hold Officials Accountable For Illegal Actions — Outlaw Agency Leaves Trail of Health Threats, Broken Federal Judicial System In Its Wake!

https://apple.news/AK1rxkwd-SjSaeHO4DA1r8w

Spencer Ackerman writes in The Daily Beast:

At the end of April, Florida federal Judge Marcia Cooke ruled that Immigration and Customs Enforcement prisons were such a tinderbox for the novel coronavirus that ICE had to begin efforts at letting people out. The dangers of the pandemic inside three immigrant-detention centers in the state threatened to put ICE on the wrong side of constitutional prohibitions on cruel and unusual punishment. 

Thousands of miles away, in Arizona, several lawsuits on behalf of people detained by ICE were in various stages of advancement. One, brought in April by the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project, sought to release at least eight people at risk of contracting COVID-19 into sponsor custody.

But instead of preparing to release migrants in detention, ICE did something both the Centers for Disease Control and the Justice Department’s Bureau of Prisons had warned against. They transferred 74 detainees to a for-profit prison in central Virginia called ICA Farmville.

Both medical staff and already-overtaxed employees at ICA Farmville, according to court documents and interviews, had warned ICE against taking in new detainees. ICE had even assured Farmville staff it would use a different Virginia prison as a way-station to quarantine people should transfers have to go through.

Instead, in early June, ICE sent the 74 people—from Arizona’s Florence and Eloy detention centers and Florida’s Krome—directly to ICA Farmville. Staff fears manifested almost immediately. Fifty-one detainees tested positive for COVID-19.

A month later, ICA Farmville is in crisis. It has at least 268 out of around 360 detained people positive for the virus, making the jail by far the most stricken facility in ICE’s network of lockups. While ICA Farmville is claiming that vanishingly few are symptomatic, detainees, backed by medical records seen by The Daily Beast, say in dire terms that isn’t true.

“We think we’re going to die at any time. The help we need we’re not getting,” said a man detained at ICA Farmville whom The Daily Beast will call Michael. “We think we’re going to die without seeing our families. A lot of people here are suffering.”

Former employees say the coronavirus has exposed longstanding failings at ICA Farmville—namely, a company that values making money over protecting either detainees or its staff. At least 22 guards have contracted the coronavirus; others have responded to desperate, panicked and agitated detainees with at least three incidents of violence between June 20 and July 1. “There was no reason to intake any more detainees,” one former employee said, “but it’s all about profit.”

To immigration attorneys and advocates, the cause of the disaster unfolding at ICA Farmville is clear: ICE’s decision to transfer detainees into the facility rather than releasing them in accordance with current and likely future judicial rulings.

ICE “appears to be shifting people around to avoid having to let people out, through being forced in lawsuits,” said Jesse Franzblau, a senior policy analyst at the National Immigrant Justice Center.

“In my opinion, to avoid releases, they’re shifting people around the country or moving them to other detention facilities outside of south Florida,” said Heriberto Hernandez, a Florida immigration attorney who had a client at Krome in Miami, one of the jails cited in Judge Cooke’s ruling, moved into ICA Farmville.

Hernandez said his client at Farmville has tested positive for COVID-19 and “all they did was give him cold medicine.”

“There’s no question whatsoever that this [transfer] was the result of the lawsuits,” said Marc Van Der Hout, an Arizona attorney who sued ICE to release a husband and wife from the “tremendous outbreak” at the Eloy detention center. “There are four lawsuits I’m personally aware of, and possibly more. There’s no doubt in my mind they were doing this to avoid the repercussions of the lawsuits.”

ICE denies conducting any legal shell game over the detainees, and says its motivations were about the health of the detainees.

. . . .

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

Read the rest of the article at the link.

Of course, this a is a shell game! You don’t need a law degree to figure that out. And, the claim that this is all about detainee heath is patently absurd. The best interests and health of detainees never enter into it except to the minimal extent necessary to avoid wrongful death suits (not very difficult given the Supreme’s tilt in favor of protecting officials who kill people of color).

There is an even more serious problem: The failure of the Federal Judiciary to throw scofflaws like DHS Acting Secretary Chad Wolf and ICE Acting Director Matt Albence in jail for contempt for their agency’s overt efforts to avoid lawful court orders while endangering the health and safety of both the detainees and the public. 

What  ICE is doing in the “New American Gulag” is essentially a “crime against humanity.” We need better Federal Judges and Justices who will take their oaths to uphold our Constitution in the face of such grotesque and obvious Executive abuses seriously!

Due Process Forever! The New American Gulag, Never!

PWS

07-20-20

🏴‍☠️“BIZARRO COURTS” — THE CONSTITUTION APPLIES TO ALL PERSONS IN THE U.S., YET ICE & THEIR “PARTNERS” AT EOIR HAVE ESTABLISHED A CONSTITUTION-FREE “COURT SYSTEM” THAT OPERATES BEYOND THE LAW & MORALITY IN A LEGAL NEVER-NEVER LAND 🧚‍♂️ — How Do They Get Away With It Under The Noses Of Congress & Article III Courts? — An Outrageous Story of Gross 🤮 Institutional & Personal Failures & Ethical Lapses Across All Three Branches of Our Federal Government ☠️👎🏻!

Paul Moses
Paul Moses
Reporter
The Daily Beast
Tim Healy
Tim Healy
Reporter
The Daily Beast

 

Paul Moses and Tim Healy report for The Daily Beast:

‘The Bizarro-World’ Immigration Courts Where the Constitution Isn’t Applied Detainees can be held for weeks or months before seeing a judge. The Justice Department gave “the word of the agency under penalty of perjury” that it would fix that—but only in NY

 

·         ICE officials acknowledged that they couldn’t handle the volume of arrests their own agents made; the major clog was in getting a legal review from the agency’s understaffed legal unit.

 

·         In 11 of the 55 venues that heard more than 500 cases last year, detainees spent six weeks or more in jail before an initial hearing. Such long waits would be unconstitutional in criminal cases; the right to due process requires authorities to not only get a case filed but also to provide an arraignment promptly, generally in no more than 48 hours.

 

·         Among the 55 venues that handled 500 or more detainee cases last year, the longest waits from arrest to initial hearing were in hearing locations at privately run lockups under contract with ICE: Winn Correctional Center in Winnifield, Louisiana, a median of 140 days; T. Don Hutto Residential Center in Taylor, Texas, 72 days; Richwood Correctional Center in Richwood, Louisiana, 64 days…

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

Ironically, by his own overt corruption and open disdain for our Constitution and the rule of law, Trump has exposed the deep flaws, grotesque derelictions of duty, and unethical complicity throughout our Constitutional institutions that are supposed to protect all of us, particularly the most vulnerable among us like civil immigration detainees and asylum seekers, from abuses by would-be authoritarian tyrants like Trump!

Here’s a gem:

 

“The larger question behind this mass of numbers is why DHS is detaining so many people when both its legal office and the court lack the staffing—not only judges but support staff as well—to handle them.

‘I would just say, they are the prosecuting agency and in this context, they have complete control over the timeline,’ said Aaron Hall, an immigration lawyer who practices at the court in Aurora, Colorado, which has had substantial delays. ‘If the charging document isn’t ready to go, why are they arresting them?’”

Good question! But don’t expect a straight answer from the “malicious incompetents” at DHS. Nor will today get anything except misleading nonsense from their “partners” at EOIR (“ICE Jr.”).

DOJ was forewarned of this disaster by an independent consultant back in 2017. But, rather than solving the problem, then AG Jeff “Gonzo Apocalypto” Sessions intentionally made things even worse at EOIR. You might remember “Gonzo” as the “mastermind” behind the regime’s unconstitutional child separation policy. His victims were returned to abuse, scarred for life, or imprisoned for the “crime” of asserting their Constitutional and legal rights to fair treatment.  

All of this is wrong, plain and simple! It’s part of “Dred Scotiffication” — now playing out across our nation in many ways. Finally, the systematic “dehumanization of the other” as aided, abetted, and actually encouraged by a majority of the Supremes, is getting some much-needed and long overdue “pushback.”

But the abuses of our Constitution and our values, and the unaccountability of corrupt public officials, present and former, of the Trump immigration kakistocracy, won’t cease until we get “regime change.” That requires substantial personnel and attitude changes across all three branches of our reeling Federal Government! And that definitely includes accountability for those who have failed to insure “equal justice for all” and instead permitted and sometimes aided and abetted the existence of “Constitution-Free Zones” right under their noses!

Due Process Forever! Complicit Officials & Institutions, Never!

PWS

6-04-20

THE DAILY BEAST: “Trump Administration Has Turned Immigration Court Into ‘Public Health Hazard’” — As Federal Judges Dither & Wobble, Trump Regime Endangers Public Health! ☠️☠️☠️☠️☠️

Sam Brodey
Sam Brodey
Congressional Reporter
The Daily Beast
Scott Bixby
Scott Bixby
National Reporter
The Daily Beast

Sam Brodey & Scott Bixby report in The Daily Beast:

https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-administration-has-turned-immigration-court-into-public-health-hazard

In a country ground to a standstill by the coronavirus pandemic, there is one place normalcy reigns: immigration courts.

Overburdened judges oversee packed proceedings; attorneys shuttle clients and paperwork from room to room, often with interpreters in tow; aspiring legal citizens, or at least residents, follow closely, sitting through hearings famously described as death-penalty cases held in a traffic court.

The courts, along with visa applications, detention hearings and other immigration related bureaucracy, are seemingly the lone part of the federal government still expected to function as if a global pandemic hasn’t upended nearly every facet of American life. But those tasked with keeping the machine running say that they have received little guidance about how to keep the system running in the era of social isolation, and even less protection despite fears that immigration proceedings put some of the most vulnerable people in the country in the impossible position of choosing between their health or their home.

The Trump administration has refused to allow immigration courts and visa hearings to comply with the same social isolation standards followed by nearly every other civil aspect of government, and has not allowed for previously scheduled hearings to be postponed. The administration has also issued little in the way of guidance for judges, immigration attorneys or immigrants, whose hearings—which often take years to schedule—directly conflict with stay-at-home orders across the county.

“The immigration court’s refusal to adopt policies that protect the health of respondents, lawyers, judges and immigration court staff during the current pandemic forces immigrant families and their lawyers to make an impossible decision: endanger public health or risk being deported,” said Nadia Dahab, senior litigation attorney at Innovation Law Lab, one of half a dozen immigrants-rights groups that on Friday filed an emergency order challenging the operation of immigration courts despite the crisis.

“We are in the middle of a global pandemic, but the immigration court system is continuing to operate as if it’s business as usual,” said Melissa Crow, senior supervising attorney with the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Immigrant Justice Project. “The government has turned the court system into a public health hazard.”

. . . .

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

Read the rest of the article at the link. 

With very few exceptions, deportations are hardly “essential” during a worldwide pandemic. Indeed, given that even asymptomatic individuals can and have spread the disease, deportation will certainly spread the risk to other countries that likely won’t be able to control it. 

There is currently no cure, no vaccine, and no known way of controlling the coronavirus other than staying home. While this well-known information might have gone over the heads of EOIR and Article III Judges, you really wouldn’t need a law degree of even be very smart to figure out that Immigration Courts and the DHS Gulag need to be shut down. Now! No Article III Judge would actually want to trust his or her life to operating under the messed up “guidelines” issued by EOIR! So why is it OK for others?

Statistics show that the longer we wait to keep everyone home, the more individuals who will die! Why is that such a hard concept for EOIR officials and Article III Judges to grasp? 

This is a time for “radical prudence” not “criminal recklessness.” The Government should have to demonstrate “clear and convincing” reasons and “best health practices” to go forward with any individual removal case during the pandemic.

Because so many Federal Judges have little understanding of what it means to appear in the Immigration “Courts” (which are not “courts” in any sense of the word) and because they use exceptionally  poor judgement in believing regime bureaucrats who have no credibility on issues of public health or anything else, over experts in the field, individuals will unnecessarily suffer and die.

At some point in the future, there will have to be an accounting for the whole mess that has been allowed to unfold as a result of Trump’s biased and irrational immigration policies. Examination of the unconscionably poor response by the Article III Judiciary must be part of that process. They are a key part of unnecessarily “endangering public health” as described in this article.

The Article III Judges we have now are what we have — they have life tenure. But, going forward we can do better — much better. And, our lives and the future of humanity will depend on it.

Due Process Forever! Better Judges For A Better Future! Constantly Confront Complicit Courts 4 Change!

PWS

04-02-20

 

KILLER “COURTS:” DUE PROCESS TAKES A DIVE, AS TRUMP REGIME’S WHITE NATIONALIST POLICIES SUPPRESS ASYLUM GRANT RATES IN NEW YORK AND OTHER IMMIGRATION “COURTS” — “Oh, Jesus Christ!” Menkin shouted at the lawyers when he learned a reporter had been present for the hearing. “Don’t you people look around the room? What’s the matter with you?” After the judge expressed his alarm, the reporter was ejected with Gloria’s tearful assent, and so the basis for Judge Menkin’s ruling on Gloria’s asylum petition is not known. The outcome is, though: denied, 30 days to appeal.”

Paul Moses
Paul Moses
Reporter
The Daily Beast
Tim Healy
Tim Healy
Reporter
The Daily Beast

https://apple.news/AYWheKLcqSvWk_toIFrDVLg

Paul Moses, Tim Healy in The Daily Beast:

‘ALL RIGHT, STOP’

Here’s Why the Rejection Rate for Asylum Seekers Has Exploded in America’s Largest Immigration Court in NYC

“It’s basically like the same problem with putting quotas on police officers for tickets.”

The rate of asylum petitions denied in New York City’s busy immigration court has shot up about 17 times times faster than in the rest of the country during the Trump administration’s crackdown—and still Ana was there, a round-faced Honduran woman with a black scarf wrapped turban-like over her hair, a look of fright crossing her dark eyes as the judge asked if she faced danger in her home country.

Her eyes darted over to her helper, a Manhattan lighting designer with New Sanctuary Coalition volunteers to offer moral support—she couldn’t find a lawyer to take her case for free. Then Ana turned back to the judge, or rather, to the video screen that beamed him in from Virginia, and whispered to the court interpreter in Spanish: “My spouse and my son were killed.” Tears welled in her eyes as she said a notorious transnational gang had carried out the slaying.

“Yes we were receiving threats from them,” she added. And that was why, months before her husband and son were slain, she and her 5-year-old daughter had come “through the river,” entering the United States near Piedras Negras, Mexico.

After ruling that she was deportable, the judge gave Ana—The Daily Beast is withholding her real name because of the danger she faces in Honduras—three months to submit a claim for asylum, a possible defense against her removal. “You should start working on that,” the judge told her. As she left the courtroom, Ana hugged the volunteer who’d accompanied her, Joan Racho-Jansen.

New York’s immigration court has long been the asylum capital; it has made two out of every five of the nation’s grants since 2001, while handling a quarter of the caseload. With approval of 55 percent of the petitions in the fiscal year ended Sept. 30, it still grants a greater percentage of asylum requests than any other courts except San Francisco and Guam.

But New York’s golden door is slamming shut for far more asylum seekers than in the past, especially for women like Ana.

The asylum denial rate in the New York City immigration court rose from 15 percent in fiscal year 2016, the last full year of the Obama administration, to 44 percent in fiscal year 2019, which ended Sept. 30.  The rest of the country, excluding New York, has been relatively stable, with denials going from 69 percent to 74 percent. That is, the rate of denials in the rest of the country increased by one-ninth, but in New York they almost trebled.

There are other courts where the rate of denials has shot up sharply over the same period: Newark, New Jersey (168 percent); Boston (147 percent); Philadelphia (118 percent). But because of the volume of its caseload, what’s happening in New York is driving the national trend against asylum. For now, in sheer numbers, New York judges still granted more asylum requests over the last year than those in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Arlington, Virginia, the next three largest courts, combined.

An analysis of federal data compiled by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University and interviews with former immigration judges, lawyers, immigrant advocates and experts finds multiple reasons for the sharp shift in the nation’s largest immigration court as compared to the rest of the country:

—Many more migrants are coming to the New York court from Mexico and the “Northern Triangle” of El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala, and the judges have been far more likely to deny them asylum than in the past: from two out of five cases in the 2016 fiscal year to four out of five cases in the 2019 fiscal year.

—Many veteran New York judges retired, and most of the replacements have a prosecutorial, military, or immigration enforcement background. In the past, appointments were more mixed between former prosecutors and immigrant defenders. Immigration judges are appointed by the U.S. attorney general and work for the Justice Department, not the federal court system.

—All the judges are under heavier pressure from their Justice Department superiors to process cases more quickly, which gives asylum applicants little time to gather witnesses and supporting documents such as police reports. New judges, who are on two years of probation, are under particular pressure because numerical “benchmarks” for completing cases are a critical factor in employee evaluations.

“You have a huge number of new hires in New York,” said Jeffrey Chase, a former New York immigration judge. “The new hires are mostly being chosen because they were former prosecutors. They’re normally of the background that this administration thinks will be statistically more likely to deny cases.”

Judge Jeffrey L. Menkin, who presided in Ana’s case via video hookup, began hearing cases in March. He is based in Falls Church, Virginia, the home of the Executive Office of Immigration Review, the Justice Department agency that runs the immigration courts. He’d been a Justice Department lawyer since 1991, including the previous 12 years as senior counsel for national security for the Office of Immigration Litigation.

Menkin can see only a portion of his New York courtroom on his video feed and as a result, he didn’t realize a Daily Beast reporter was present to watch him conduct an asylum hearing for a Guatemalan woman—we’ll call her Gloria—and her three young children, who were not present.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement took Gloria into custody at the Mexican border in March. Released on bond, she made her way to New York and had an initial immigration court hearing on June 26, one of many cases on a crowded master calendar. She was scheduled for an individual hearing four months later.

At the hearing scheduled three months later on the merits of her case, she decided to present an asylum defense to deportation. Her lawyer asked for a continuance—that is, a new hearing date—while his client waited to receive documentation she’d already requested from Guatemala. The papers were on the way, Gloria said.

Judges in such cases—those that the Department of Homeland Security designates as “family unit”—have been directed to complete them within a year, which is about 15 months faster than the average case resolved for the year ending Sept. 30. Down the hall, other types of cases were being scheduled for 2023. Menkin called the lawyer’s unexpected request for a continuance “nonsense” and “malarkey” and asked: “Are you and your client taking this case seriously?”

The judge then asked if Gloria was requesting a case-closing “voluntary departure,” a return to her homeland that would leave open the option she could apply again to enter the United States.

But Gloria had no intention of going back to Guatemala voluntarily.  So Menkin looked to the government’s lawyer: “DHS, do you want to jump into this cesspool?” The government lawyer objected to granting what would have been the first continuance in Gloria’s case.

And so Menkin refused to re-schedule, telling Gloria and her lawyer that they had to go ahead right then if they wanted to present an asylum defense. Gloria began testifying about threats and beatings that stretched back a decade, beginning after a failed romance with a man who was influential in local politics. Details are being withheld to protect her identity.

She finally fled, she said, when extortionists threatened to hurt her children if she didn’t make monthly payoffs that were beyond her means. When she observed that she and her children were being followed, she decided to leave. After she said she had gone to police three times, Menkin took over the questioning.

“Are you familiar with the contents of your own asylum application?” he asked, pointedly.

“No,” Gloria responded.

Menkin said her asylum application stated she had gone to police once, rather than three times, as she’d just testified. Gloria explained that she had called in the information for the application to an assistant in her lawyer’s office, and didn’t know why it was taken down wrong.

When her lawyer tried to explain, Menkin stopped him, raising his voice: “I did not ask you anything.”

Later, Menkin came back to the discrepancy he’d picked up on. “I don’t know why,” Gloria responded.

“All right, STOP,” Menkin told the woman, who cried through much of the two-hour hearing. Again, he sought to terminate the case, asking the DHS lawyer, “Do I have grounds to dismiss this now?”

“I’m trying to be fair,” she replied.

“We’re all trying to be fair,” Menkin said.

And to be fair, it should be noted that since October 2018, the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) has been evaluating judges’ performance based on the numbers for case completions, timeliness of decisions and the percent of rulings upheld on appeal. “In essence, immigration judges are in the untenable position of being both sworn to uphold judicial standards of impartiality and fairness while being subject to what appears to be politically-motivated performance standards,” according to an American Bar Association report that assailed what it said were unprecedented “production quotas”  for judges.

The pressure is especially strong on judges who, like Menkin, are new hires. They are probationary employees for two years.

Denise Slavin, a former president of the National Association of Immigration Judges who retired from the bench in April after 24 years of service, said the judges’ union had tried to talk EOIR Director James McHenry out of his quotas. “It’s basically like the same problem with putting quotas on police officers for tickets,” she said. “It suggests bias and skews the system to a certain extent.” Told of the details of Gloria’s hearing, she added, “That’s a prime example of the pressure these quotas have on cases… the pressure to get it done right away.”

Kathryn Mattingly, spokeswoman for the Executive Office of Immigration Review, said by email that she couldn’t comment on individual cases, but that all cases are handled on their individual merits. “Each asylum case is unique, with its own set of facts, evidentiary factors, and circumstances,” she wrote. “Asylum cases typically include complex legal and factual issues.”  She also said that Menkin could not comment: “Immigration judges do not give interviews.”

It’s true that each asylum case has its own complex factors. But a 2016 study by the U.S. Government Accountability Office took many of them into account—the asylum seeker’s nationality, language, legal representation, detention status, number of dependents—and determined that there are big differences in how the same “representative applicant” will be treated from one court and one judge to another.

“We saw that grant rates varies very significantly across courts and also across judges,” said Rebecca Gambler, director of the GAO’s Homeland Security and Justice team.

Some experts say that changes in the way the Justice Department has told immigration judges to interpret the law may be having an outsize effect in New York.

Starting with Jeff Sessions, the Trump administration’s attorneys general have used their authority over immigration courts to narrow the judges’ discretion to grant asylum or, in their view, to clarify existing law.

Asylum can be granted to those facing persecution because of “race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.” In June 2018, Sessions overturned a precedent that many judges in New York had been using to find that victims of domestic assaults or gang violence could be members of a “particular social group,” especially when police were complicit or helpless. Justice’s ruling in the Matter of A-B-, a Salvadoran woman, seems to have had a particular impact in New York.

“Where there’s a question about a ‘particular social group,’ judges in other parts of the country may have taken a narrower view” already, said Lindsay Nash, a professor at Cardozo Law School in New York and co-director of the Kathryn O. Greenberg Immigration Justice Clinic.

Mauricio Noroña, a clinical teaching fellow at the same clinic, said new judges would be especially careful to follow the lead in the attorney general’s ruling.

Andrew Arthur, a fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington and a former immigration judge in York, Pennsylvania, said Sessions’ decision in the Matter of A-B- would particularly affect Central American applicants, whose numbers have increased sharply in New York’s court. Data show that just 8.5 percent of the New York asylum cases were from Central America or Mexico in 2016; in the past year, 32.6 percent were.

Arthur said a larger portion of the New York court’s asylum rulings in the past were for Chinese immigrants, whose arguments for refuge—persecution because of political dissent, religious belief, or the one-child policy—are fairly straightforward under U.S. asylum law. Although the number of Chinese applicants is still increasing, they have fallen as a portion of the New York caseload from 60 percent in 2016 to 28 percent in the past year.

Sessions’ determination against A-B- is being challenged, and lawyers have been exploring other paths to asylum in the meantime. “It’s extremely complicated to prepare cases in this climate of changing law,” said Swapna Reddy, co-executive director of the Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project. But, she said, “That’s not to say advocates and judges can’t get back to that [higher] grant rate.”

Gloria continued to cry; the DHS lawyer asked that she be given a tissue. The government lawyer’s cross-examination was comparatively gentle, but she questioned why Gloria didn’t move elsewhere within Guatemala and seek police protection.

“He would find out before I even arrived at the police station,” she said of the man she feared. And, she added, “They’re always going to investigate and as for always being on the run, that’s no life for my kids.”

In closing arguments, Gloria’s lawyer said his client had testified credibly and that she legitimately feared her tormentor’s influence. The DHS lawyer did not question Gloria’s credibility, but she said Gloria’s problem was personal, not political—that she could have moved to parts of Guatemala that were beyond the reach of the man’s political influence.

Judge Menkin then declared a 20-minute recess so that he could compose his decision. In the interim, the lawyers discovered that a man sitting in one corner of the small courtroom was a reporter and, when the judge returned to the bench to rule, so informed him.

Immigration court hearings are generally open to the public. There are special rules for asylum cases, however. The court’s practice manual says they “are open to the public unless the respondent expressly requests that they be closed.”

“Oh, Jesus Christ!” Menkin shouted at the lawyers when he learned a reporter had been present for the hearing. “Don’t you people look around the room? What’s the matter with you?”

After the judge expressed his alarm, the reporter was ejected with Gloria’s tearful assent, and so the basis for Judge Menkin’s ruling on Gloria’s asylum petition is not known. The outcome is, though: denied, 30 days to appeal.

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

Sound like Due Process to you? Only if it’s not your life at stake! Wonder how Judge Menkin and others like him would feel if they and their families were subjected to the same type of “judicial” procedure.

In viewing Judge Menkin’s ridiculous denial of a routine continuance, it’s important to understand that the precedent decisions binding Immigration Judges have intentionally over-emphasized the importance of documenting claims – even though documentation is often unavailable or time-consuming to obtain, have properly translated, and serve on the Immigration Judge and ICE in advance of the hearing. Therefore, denying a first continuance for needed preparation is tantamount to “giving the finger” to Due Process!

“Women in Honduras” has been found to be a valid “particular social group” by a number of Immigration Judgers elsewhere. Given the corruption of the Government of Honduras, the political influence of Ana’s tormentor, and the high rate of femicide, it’s highly unlikely that Ana would receive government protection.

The ICE attorney made an absurdist argument that Ana could “safely resettle” elsewhere in Honduras. Honduras is a small country, about the size of Virginia. It has an astronomical murder rate, highly corrupt police, snd almost no viable infrastructure, all important considerations in a legitimate inquiry into relocation. Under these conditions, there is no way that Ana had a “reasonably available internal relocation alternative” in Honduras as described in Federal Regulations. A “real” judge might have grilled ICE counsel about her legally and factually untenable position. But, not Menkin. He apparently had already made up his mind to deny regardless of the law or facts.

In short, before a “fair and impartial” judge with expertise in asylum law this could and should have been an “easy grant” of asylum, even without the additional documentation that could have been presented if the judge had granted a continuance. Instead, it was “orbited” off into a dysfunctional administrative appellate system where results are akin to “Refugee Roulette” highly dependent on the “panel” or individual “Appellate Immigration Judge” to which the case is assigned at the BIA. In this respect, it’s also noteworthy that Barr recently appointed six Immigration Judges with some of the highest asylum denial rates in the country to the BIA. Some “fair and impartial” judiciary!

It also appears that Menkin belatedly and improperly “duressed” Ana into agreeing to a “closed” hearing. Most of the time, once asylum applicants’ attorneys carefully explain to them that public observation and exposure of this “rigged” process might be the only way of getting pressure to change it, they readily agree to have the press present. Also, generally everybody tends to perform better and more professionally when the press or other observers are present (obviously, however, in this particular case, not so much).

First the Trump Regime artificially suppresses asylum grant rates with skewed hiring, improper interpretations of the law, unethical quotas, and pressure on the “judges” to crank out more removal orders. Then, they use the bogus statistics generated by the intentionally flawed and biased process to make a case that most of the asylum claims are non-meritorious.

Notably, even under this clearly biased, overtly anti-asylum procedure, the majority of asylum claims that get decided “on the merits” in New York are still granted. Imagine what the grant rate would be in a truly fair judicial system that properly applied asylum law and the Constitution: 70%, 80%, 90%? We’ll never know, because the regime fears the results of a fair asylum process that fully complies with Due Process: The “dirty little secret” the regime doesn’t want you to know! Talk about “fraud, waste, and abuse!” Something to remember the next time you hear “Cooch Cooch,” “Markie,” Albence, and other Trump sycophants at DHS and DOJ falsely claim that the overwhelming number of asylum applications are without merit.

Judges likes Menkin might want to remember that the truth will eventually “out’ even if too late to save the life of Ana and others like her. When that happens, those judges who put expediency, their jobs, and homage to the Trump Regime’s White Nationalist agenda before the law, Due Process, and human lives will find their “legacies” tarnished forever.

Many thanks to Judge Jeffrey S. Chase and Judge Denise Slavin of our Roundtable of Former Immigration Judges for their usual incisive comments. And a shout out to journalists like Moses and Healy who continue to shed light on the outrageous abuses taking place every day in our Immigration “Courts!”

Ultimately, legal and moral responsibility is on Congress, the Article III Courts, and the voters for allowing this clearly unconstitutional, deadly mess to continue to unfold in the Immigration “Courts” every day. That’s why it’s critical that the New Due Process Army “Constantly Confront Complicit Courts 4 Change.”

Due Process Forever; Complicit (& Corrupt) Courts Never!

 

PWS

 

12-03-19

 

 

SCOTT BIXBY @ THE DAILY BEAST: Trump Puts U.S. Immigration Courts Into Freefall – Judges & Experts Doubt It Can Be Fixed Without Major Due Process Enhancements — “Fixing the backlog without sacrificing undocumented immigrants’ right to due process—a prospect with which Trump has already publicly flirted—could require a wholesale reconfiguration of the immigration court system, Marks said, starting with removing it from the purview of the Department of Justice.”

https://apple.news/A8VLzlyN7QImERHmUEChNnA

Scott Bixby reports for The Daily Beast:

President Donald Trump’s record-long shutdown may be over, (for now), but immigration judges and attorneys worry that its disastrous effects on the immigration court system will last for years.

The 35-day government shutdown, ignited over Trump’s demands for congressional funding of his long-promised border wall, exacerbated the very immigration crisis the president claims the barrier would solve, halting nearly all immigration court cases and putting three in four immigration judges on furlough. Hearings on asylum cases, deportation, and appeals against orders of removal were delayed indefinitely, pending a “reset” upon the government’s re-opening that shuffled tens of thousands of cases to the back of the line.

The only way to solve the pileup, one prominent immigration judge told The Daily Beast, is a trade: Dump Trump’s demand for a 2,000-mile wall, and instead double the number of immigration judges to deal with cases.

“If we’ve got a million cases backlogged, we need a thousand judges,” said Judge Dana Leigh Marks, an immigration judge in San Francisco and president emeritus of the National Association of Immigration Judges. The current roster of roughly 400 judges, she said, “is less than half of what we need.”

“We’re having a tsunami of retirements because working conditions have become so unbearable,” said Marks. “It is incredibly stressful, because we know that the consequences of our cases are literally life and death.”

The Department of Justice, which oversees the immigration court system, already had a crisis on its hands before the shutdown, Marks said, with a backlog of at least 800,000 cases in a system with too few judges and too little funding.

The swell of asylum seekers from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, combined with the Trump administration’s crackdown on undocumented immigrants in the United States, had created a years-long backlog of pending immigration court cases. The number of pending immigration court cases grew by 84 percent since the end of 2013, according to the Department of Justice’s Executive Office for Immigration Review, and jumped by 26 percent just since the end of 2016.

“They allowed the courts to get to the anemic state that we were in prior to the shutdown,” said Marks, who has served as an immigration judge for 33 years. With the cancellation of tens of thousands of immigration cases that will now be shuffled to the back of a years-long line, “the shutdown’s effects will last for years.”

That backlog—which doesn’t even include an estimated 300,000 closed “low-priority” cases that the Justice Department ordered reopened in May—is currently being pushed through a mere 60 immigration courts across the United States. The roughly 400 immigration judges who keep that system moving have been given the Sisyphean task of clearing their dockets, a mission that even the most industrious judges think may be unfeasible.

“Most of us are extremely pessimistic about the current state of our dockets,” said Marks, noting that immigration judges are optimally supposed to go through four three-hour hearings per day. “They’re booked in an unrealistically heavy-packed manner that will not mean that we can finish all of the cases that are set on a given day.”

In a bid to speed through the backlog, the Department of Justice announced in April that it would impose quotas on judges, requiring the completion of 700 immigration cases per year to earn a “satisfactory performance” rating, as well as less than 15 percent of their cases remanded to a higher court—meaning that judges have to both increase the speed of their proceedings while decreasing errors that could lead to an appeal.

“The purpose of implementing these metrics is to encourage efficient and effective case management while preserving immigration judge discretion and due process,” wrote then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions when the policy was announced.

That new policy, Marks said, would only increase the pressure on the judge to serve two competing masters: the Department of Justice quotas and due process.

“The quintessential skill of a judge is knowing how to schedule your dockets, and yet we’re being told for political reasons, for the optics, how to do so,” said Marks, who warned that forcing judges to speed along complex proceedings encourages future appeals based on questions of judicial motivation.

“These are not simple and straightforward” cases, said Marks, who once famously likened deportation proceedings to “doing death penalty cases in a traffic court setting.”

“An immigration judge is shifting through four or five different times that the story has been told to see whether it’s consistent or inconsistent… Political optics is at tension, if not in conflict, with a judge’s role to ensure that each case in front of us provides the individual with due process.”

Add in a shutdown, immigration attorneys told The Daily Beast, and an overburdened system risks collapsing into chaos.

“Each day that there’s a government shutdown, you’re setting yourself up to add months” before a hearing, said Michael Wildes, an immigration attorney who represented Melania Trump and her parents in their immigration proceedings. “There will be enormous delays. For undetained individuals with court dates… they will back up even more egregiously than they have.”

Unclogging the dockets may be impossible, said Jason Dzubow, a Washington D.C.-based immigration attorney specializing in asylum law, leaving clients with good cases waiting for years to have their day in court.

“It’s just gonna be way too complicated to give people any kind of priority—which then, of course, causes a huge chain reaction, because it’s already a big mess,” Dzubow said. “What are they going to tell their families?”

Fixing the backlog without sacrificing undocumented immigrants’ right to due process—a prospect with which Trump has already publicly flirted—could require a wholesale reconfiguration of the immigration court system, Marks said, starting with removing it from the purview of the Department of Justice.

“People feel like there’s a thumb on the scales… because of the historically close relationship between the prosecutors‚ the Department of Homeland Security and the judges,” said Marks. “Judges have become, in a way, the sacrificial lamb in this process, because so much pressure has been applied to us. If we don’t follow, it renders us subject to personal discipline or training for evaluations that we are performing poorly, which can affect our very ability to retain our jobs.”

Such a dynamic, Marks said, has “a tremendous chilling effect.”

“A political branch is not the proper administrator for a neutral legal system.”

But in the meantime, both judges and attorneys working in the clotted immigration system feel that the $5.7 billion Trump has demanded for his border wall would be put to better use in hiring more immigration judges.

“There is an enormous divide between the amount of traffic and judges,” said Wildes. “In many ways, immigration has been looked upon as a stepchild in our legal system, where people recognize that it’s only a civil matter rather than a criminal matter. It actually has greater import—particularly when someone is facing banishment from the country.”

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

Yup! Should be no surprise to readers of “Courtside.” In my experience, EOIR never really recovered from the mindless 2013 shutdown. Anybody with any real knowledge or who cared about our Government, our Constitution, and real immigration enforcement could have seen this coming “from a million miles away.” But, we’re saddled with a Kakistocracy — a “Clown Administration” if you will. 🤡

PWS

01-30-19

NQRFPT: I’M ALREADY PROVED RIGHT ON NIELSEN’S LATEST HAREBRAINED SCHEME TO SCREW ASYLUM SEEKERS: Mexico is “Completely Unprepared,” DHS is Massively Incompetent, The “Real Experts” Among Advocacy Groups & NGOs Are Sharpening Their Litigation Knives, & The House Is Getting Ready To Hold Nielsen & Her Toadies Accountable For The Inevitable Deaths, Rapes, & Assaults On Asylum Seekers In Mexico!

https://apple.news/ABxGIu1zQSumaDYsJutu1uA

Scott Bixby reports for The Daily Beast:

Opponents of the Trump administration’s plan requiring all migrants seeking asylum in the United States to remain in Mexico for the duration of their immigration proceedings have vowed to challenge the policy, which they say—like nearly every other aspect of President Donald Trump’s immigration agenda—almost certainly violates constitutional protections, international treaties, and federal law.

The policy, dubbed the “Migration Protection Protocols” by the Department of Homeland Security, is “disgraceful and illegal” and “will result in the loss of life for vulnerable people seeking safety,” said Michelle Brané, director of the Migrant Rights and Justice program at the Women’s Refugee Commission. “This president has, again, chosen to exploit and endanger the lives of women and children to advance his own self-serving agenda.”

“Pushing asylum-seekers back into Mexico is absolutely illegal under U.S. immigration law,” Eleanor Acer, senior director for refugee protection at the nonprofit Human Rights First, told reporters on a conference call on Friday morning. “This scheme will increase, rather than decrease, the humanitarian debacle at the border.”

Under the proposed rule change, migrants who attempt to claim asylum in the United States at the southern border will almost universally be held in Mexico for the duration of their immigration proceedings, a process that could take years.

Calling the move “a historic measure,” the Department of Homeland Security revealed the plan on Thursday, at the same time Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen was being grilled by members of the House Judiciary Committee on the Trump administration’s numerous immigration controversies, including its family separation policy (the existence of which Nielsen denied) and the recent death of a 7-year-old migrant girl in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

In the announcement, Nielsen said that “aliens trying to game the system to get into our country illegally will no longer be able to disappear into the United States, where many skip their court dates.” Instead, “they will wait for an immigration court decision while they are in Mexico. ‘Catch and release’ will be replaced with ‘catch and return.’ ”

Mexico’s foreign ministry, contradicting the foreign policy platform that helped sweep the country’s new president into power, said that it “will authorize, for humanitarian reasons and temporarily, the entry of certain foreign persons from the United States who have entered the country through a port of entry or who have been apprehended between ports of entry, have been interviewed by the authorities of migratory control of that country, and have received a summons to appear before an immigration judge.” (The country’s top immigration official now says that Mexico is completely unprepared to fulfill its end of the bargain.)

Organizations on the ground say that the policy is a clear violation of both federal and international law, as well as constitutional guarantees of due process—and plan to fight it in court.

“This administration knows that the border area is unsafe for women and children,” Brané said, “and still, this administration doubles down on policies that make everyone less safe.”

“The administration seems to have no plan for implementation,” said Kennji Kizuka, a senior researcher and refugee protection policy analyst at Human Rights First. “Will lawyers be able to visit their clients before hearings? Where will those hearings take place?… Access to counsel is one of the most important factors in whether or not an asylum seeker is able to live in safety in the United States.”

In addition to Article 33 of the United Nations Convention and Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees, which prevents the forcible return of asylum-seekers to countries where they face persecution, torture or death—dubbed the principle non-refoulement in international law—advocates pointed to laws passed by Congress that mandate the admission of unaccompanied children seeking asylum at the U.S. border as being blatantly violated by the president’s policy.

“Refusing to process children very clearly violates the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, written specifically to protect this vulnerable population,” said Lisa Frydman, vice president for regional policy and initiatives at Kids in Need of Defense (KIND), a nonprofit that works on behalf of unaccompanied children who enter the U.S. immigration system alone. Speaking on a call with reporters, Frydman recounted interviews with unaccompanied children held in shelters in Tijuana, the conditions of which are “squalid,” Frydman said.

“Unaccompanied children are being systematically denied access to apply for protection in the United States” as they seek asylum protections, Frydman said, and their efforts to avoid both U.S. and Mexican immigration authorities are putting them in even more danger of exploitation.

Some of the children have even taken to living on the streets of Tijuana, Frydman said, where they have no access to medical treatment, food, or protection from those who might exploit them. The dangers are extreme: just this week, two Honduran children were murdered in Tijuana after being stopped by would-be robbers as they attempted to move from one shelter to another.

“All of our organizations have been on the ground in Tijuana recently and are united in our assessment that conditions there are very unstable and very unsafe,” said Wendy Young, president of KIND. Those conditions, Young continued, “are going to further deteriorate” as the number of asylum-seekers stuck at the border increases.

A 2017 study by Human Rights First documented 921 crimes against migrants committed by federal or state officials in Mexico, where nearly 70 percent of migrant children are held in “prison-like” immigration detention facilities, according to a report from Human Rights Watch, despite Mexican laws prohibiting children from being held in such facilities.

These unsafe conditions in Mexico make forcing asylum-seekers to remain their a blatant violation of the principle of non-refoulement, advocates said, and therefore a violation of international law.

“These migrant camps are not safe for children,” said Dr. Alan Shapiro, a pediatrician who co-founded Terra Firma, an organization that provides medical care to undocumented children. “They are not enclosed camps, they do not have roofs over their head.” On a recent visit to one camp in Tijuana, Dr. Shapiro said, he saw a two-year-old child who had recently suffered a seizure and had no access to medical care, or even proper food.

“This child was eating powdered baby formula out of the can—there was no water for them to mix it with,” Shapiro said.

“There are very real risks to unaccompanied children,” said Leah Chavla, a policy adviser at the Women’s Refugee Commission. “This is a system that is ripe for exploitation… Mothers that we’ve spoken with have flagged that there are a lot of new faces around the camps and they don’t necessarily feel comfortable leaving their children with strangers.”

Advocates also pointed to serious logistical hurdles for asylum-seekers to receive proper legal counsel as they navigate the labyrinthine immigration system from outside the United States, pointing to those difficulties as potential violations of due process.

“It is unclear how attorneys in the United States would be able to work in and access their clients in Mexico—if at all,” said Jennifer Podkul, senior director for policy and advocacy at KIND. “Moreover, legal services capacity in Mexico would be insufficient to address these needs or to ensure the provision of accurate legal information and preparation of cases in accordance with U.S., rather than Mexican, law.”

Those difficulties are doubled for unaccompanied children, Podkul said, in light of their age and limited ability to testify in their own defense. “Without quality legal representation, unaccompanied children and other asylum seekers will be unable to fully present their cases for protection, and as a result, may be returned to harm, danger, or death.”

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Imagine what it would be like to have a Government committed to following the law, including the generous humanitarian standards for asylum, rather than coming up with costly, impractical, and often illegal schemes to avoid the law.

Of course, following the law would likely result in many more asylum seekers being rapidly accepted after screening and settling down to lead peaceful, law-abiding, productive lives in the U.S. That would be good for the country, but bad for the racist White Nationalist agenda that this Administration peddles to its so-called “base” (which actually represents a minority of U.S. opinion, but a minority that strategically props up a minority government controlled by a minority party and an incompetent, out of control, would-be autocrat).

PWS

12-23-18

TRUMP’S “APPLY AT THE PORT OF ENTRY” ASYLUM DIRECTIVE IS A CRUEL HOAX – The Administration Already Is Failing In Its Legal Obligation To Give Those Applying At The Ports Reasonable Access To The System – And There Are No Known Plans To Remedy The Obvious Staffing Shortages, Despite Advance Notice!

https://apple.news/A25H8GAtMQTi8685OH1RqpQ

Justin Glawe reports for the The Daily Beast:

EL PASO, Texas—Huddled in blankets on a crisp morning last Tuesday, Gerson Valeriano and Yossira Gil were first in line on the Paso Del Norte bridge from Mexico to apply for asylum in the United States. It was their eighth day waiting with more than 100 migrants for Border Patrol to let them pass an invisible line just five feet away to apply for asylum.

The Trump administration wants all migrants and refugees to apply for asylum this way thanks to an executive order issued Friday that will make migrants who illegally cross at places other than ports of entry like Paso Del Norte ineligible for asylum. The administration would ram more people into bottlenecks like Paso Del Norte without providing more capacity to process aslyum-seekers, immigrant advocates and attorneys say.

“This administration is narrowing down their interpretation of who qualifies for asylum while literally physically preventing people from seeking asylum in the so-called right way,” said Alan Dicker, a volunteer with the Detained Migrant Solidarity Community in El Paso.

Trump achieves this by having federal law enforcement prevent migrants from entering the U.S. to claim asylum, often forcing them into making a difficult decision of whether to enter illegally. Doing so after the executive order is signed will make them ineligible for asylum.

The 100 migrants in line behind Valeriano and Gil—about half of them children—would wait even longer to apply for asylum, if they made it at all. Most wouldn’t, because Mexican immigration authorities kicked the migrants off the bridge on Friday afternoon, an advocate in El Paso told The Daily Beast.

CBP said in a statement it put officers on the bridge to “ensure that arriving travelers have valid entry documents in order to expedite the processing of lawful travel. That being said, CBP processes undocumented persons as expeditiously as possible without negating the agency’s overall mission, or compromising the safety of individuals within our custody.”

But even when there isn’t a line—as was the case in June, at the height of the family separation crisis—migrants are sometimes told by Border Patrol agents that there is “no room” in processing centers at ports of entry like Paso Del Norte. Both in June and in recent weeks, agents have stood at the apex of the bridge here, preventing migrants from physically entering United States territory where the government will then be legally required to process them for asylum if they simply say the word, asilo.

The Department of Homeland Security’s Office Inspector General confirmed these “turnbacks” after having denied it over the summer. The inspector general’s office noted that the practice sometimes resulted in migrants crossing illegally.

“If you are physically present in the U.S. you can apply for asylum, which is why [Customs and Border Patrol] has gone out of its way over the summer and now to prevent people from entering,” said Iliana Holguin, an El Paso immigration attorney.

CBP said its facilities were not “designed to hold hundreds of people at a time who may be seeking asylum” and that “as in the past when we’ve had to limit the number of people we can bring in for processing at a given time, we expect that this will be a temporary situation.”

Trump’s executive order seeks to bar those who enter illegally from applying for asylum. Instead, they’ll have to seek other forms of relief from deportation, proving that they have a “reasonable fear” of persecution in their home countries as opposed to the much lower threshold of “credible fear” that’s required as part of asylum cases, Holguin said.

“Those protections are much more difficult to obtain, have a much higher burden of proof, and are much, much harder to prove than asylum claims,” Holguin said.

Attorneys for every migrant who fails a reasonable fear interview and is processed for deportation, Holguin said, will almost surely file appeals and lawsuits on their clients’ behalf alleging Trump’s order is in violation of U.S. law. Those cases will be in addition to the lawsuits that will be filed by aid and advocacy organizations as soon as the executive order is entered into the federal register.

“I don’t think Trump understands, and I don’t think he cares, that this will not reduce the caseload in immigration court but increase it,” Holguin said. “Like sending troops to the border, I think he’s doing this for show. I think he’s doing it to look tough against desperate migrants who are fleeing violence and poverty.”

Instead of sending troops to the border, Holguin, Dicker and others say, the Trump administration should be allocating more resources to process asylum claims to reduce the backlog at ports of entry like Paso Del Norte.

“The administration is not interested in solving this complex humanitarian situation that is forcing families and children to flee for their lives and come to our border,” Greg Chen of the American Immigration Lawyers Association told The Daily Beast. “It’s a gross waste of American taxpayer dollars to deploy thousands of troops to the border instead of doing what would really address the problem, which is sending more asylum and refugee officers to screen the vulnerable people that are arriving.”

Valeriano and Gil fled Honduras because of rampant violence there. After a few years living in Mexico, the pair took a bus to Juarez, where they got in line with hundreds of other migrants from South America, Cuba and elsewhere.

“I believe that God has the power to give us the opportunity to be an American,” Valeriano said.

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

It’s hardly news that the Trump Administration has no intention of solving immigration problems. It’s all a political show for the “base.”

But what about the career civil servants who are knowingly participating in this sham, and in too many cases furthering and repeating knowingly false narratives? What about the government lawyers who are defending “bad faith positions” in court? What happened to their ethical responsibilities? What about their oaths of office?

PWS

11-12-18

 

SNL “DOES” BKAVS! — “Now I am usually an optimist, a keg is half full kind of guy, but what I’ve seen from the monsters on this committee makes me want to puke—and not from beer!”

https://www.thedailybeast.com/snl-matt-damon-absolutely-nails-brett-kavanaugh-in-season-premiere

Matt Damon absolutely “nails” it!

PWS

09-30-18

 

 

GOOD NEWS: Ambitious White Nationalist Trump Sycophant Tom Cotton Won’t Be Replacing Pompeo! – BAD NEWS: Trump Taps Notorious “Torture Queen” Gina Haspel As Top CIA Spook! — GOP Senate Likely To Whitewash Human Rights Abuses!

https://www.thedailybeast.com/trumps-cia-pick-gina-haspel-ran-a-laboratory-for-torture

Spencer Ackerman reports for The DailyBeast:

“Donald Trump’s choice for his next CIA director was involved in its infamous torture program, a history that is already beginning to complicate her confirmation before the only panel to thoroughly investigate torture: the Senate intelligence committee.

The intended elevation of Gina Haspel, who would become the first woman to lead the CIA, comes as part of a broader reshuffling of Trump’s foreign-policy team that one diplomat told The Daily Beast was likely to enable Trump’s “worst foreign-policy instincts.”

Mike Pompeo, the current CIA director, will succeed Rex Tillerson at the State Department, in the Cabinet reshuffle, elevating Haspel.

Haspel, whom under Pompeo became the agency’s deputy director, briefly ran the off-the-books prison in Thailand used as a torture laboratory for the earliest detained terrorism suspects. There, in 2002—including while Haspel ran the so-called black site—the man known as Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times; stuffed into a wooden box barely bigger than a coffin; had his body shackled in painful contorted positions; and had his head slammed into walls.

“If Ms. Haspel seeks to serve at the highest levels of U.S. intelligence, the government can no longer cover up disturbing facts from the past,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), a member of the intelligence committee who opposes her nomination, told The Daily Beast in a statement Tuesday.

“Ms. Haspel’s background makes her unsuitable to serve as CIA director. Her nomination must include total transparency about this background,” Wyden added.

“While Haspel ran the so-called black site, one man was waterboarded 83 times; stuffed into a wooden box barely bigger than a coffin; and had his head slammed into walls.”

Subsequently declassified CIA medical files assessed that Abu Zubaydah was likely willing to cooperate with his interrogators before his waterboarding, as he had with his FBI interrogators, who did not torture him.

Years later, Haspel drafted an instruction to CIA officers in the field to destroy videotapes of torturous interrogations at the site. Though the Justice Department later declined to bring charges, the destruction of the tapes was widely considered in human-rights circles to be a key moment in covering up the torture—and it prompted the Senate intelligence committee’s landmark 2014 investigation, which occurred amid the backdrop of the agency spying on the work product of the Senate investigators.

A former deputy CIA director and harsh critic of the inquiry, Michael Morell, later wrote that she did so “at the request of her direct supervisor and believing that it was lawful to do so. I personally led an accountability exercise that cleared Haspel of any wrongdoing in the case.”

Wyden and his Senate intelligence committee colleague, Martin Heinrich, a New Mexico Democrat, wrote to Trump last year, during Haspel’s elevation to deputy director, to say her “background” in the torture program “makes her unsuitable for the position.”

They requested that information on Haspel’s specific role in the torture program, included in a classified letter they sent, be released. It never was.

“We have really serious concerns about her heading the CIA. It was already troubling that she was appointed to be deputy,” said Laura Pitter of Human Rights Watch. “Someone with that kind of history should not be made to head an organization with as much power and responsibility, often carried out in secret, like the CIA has.”

It appeared early Tuesday that human-rights groups considered fighting Haspel’s nomination to be a key priority.

“Gina Haspel was a central figure in one of the most illegal and shameful chapters in modern American history.  She was up to her eyeballs in torture: both in running a secret torture prison in Thailand, and carrying out an order to cover up torture crimes by destroying videotapes,” said Christopher Andrews, the deputy director of the ACLU’s Washington office.

“An additional concern that the Senate must address is whether Haspel has the independence needed for a CIA director, since she has never left the agency. This question is even more pressing as the House intelligence committee has made clear that it no longer takes its oversight responsibility seriously.”

Haspel’s involvement in the black site became an issue in a court case brought by CIA torture survivors (and the family of a man who froze to death in CIA custody). The defendants in that case were Bruce Jessen and James Mitchell, the contractor psychologists who designed the torture program, who sought to compel Haspel’s deposition as part of their argument that the CIA, and not them, was the primary architect of Langley’s post-9/11 torture regime.

But Haspel, referred to in initial court filings as “Gina Doe,” was never deposed. The Justice Department fought Mitchell and Jessen on her court appearance. The two contractors settled the case in August.

Like every sub-leadership CIA official in the Senate intelligence committee’s torture report, references to Haspel are pseudonymous and, even then, heavily redacted. But the committee chairman, Richard Burr of North Carolina, has been an opponent of the torture report, seeking to recover it during the Obama administration to prevent its ultimate release. Accordingly, and with the current GOP majority on the committee, Haspel’s confirmation as CIA director is more likely than not.

 “Before and after his confirmation as CIA director, Mike Pompeo has demonstrated a casual relationship to truth and principle.”
— Sen. Ron Wyden

Haspel’s elevation is a blow to a different member of the intelligence committee: Tom Cotton, an Arkansas Republican and Trump ally, whom a round of leaks last year suggested was Trump’s choice to run CIA after Pompeo switched to State.

Pompeo has long been a Trump favorite to take over for Tillerson: Pompeo has been the Iran hawk as close to Trump as Tillerson was distant—a relative Iran dove and, unlikely for a recipient of a medal of friendship from Vladimir Putin, willing to call out Russia for election interference that Trump denies ever happened.

Wyden said he opposed Pompeo’s appointment to the State Department as well.

“Before and after his confirmation as CIA director, Mike Pompeo has demonstrated a casual relationship to truth and principle. He has downplayed Russia’s attack on our democracy, at times contradicting the intelligence community he is supposed to represent. He has also made inconsistent and deeply concerning statements about torture and mass spying on Americans,” Wyden said.”

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

Yup, “Gina the Torture Queen” and “Mikey P” sound like exactly the kind of unethical lawless sycophants who will fit nicely into Trump’s “Band of Misfits” (a/k/a the “White House Sycophants Society,” a/k/a “Trump Cabinet”).

And, the GOP as a party long ago abandoned human rights, civil rights, Constitutional rights, honesty, ethics, or even basic qualifications as criteria for confirming Cabinet picks in the Age of Trump. The “Party of Putin” simply doesn’t care any more unless there is some personal gain involved for them or their bankrollers.

PWS

03-14-18

Betsy Woodruff In “The Daily Beast” — Mueller Likely To Question Trump!

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2017/05/17/the-very-intense-man-probing-the-president

Betsy writes:

“Robert Mueller, the newly named special counsel investigating potential collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian officials, may find himself in the extraordinary position of questioning President Donald Trump.
There is precedent for this. John Danforth, the only other person to be named a special counsel under the same statute as Mueller, told The Daily Beast on Wednesday that he conducted a phone interview with Bill Clinton as part of his investigation into the Waco siege. He said it was the only contact he had with anyone in the White House during the investigation, and he did it “in the name of thoroughness.”
Mueller may need to be similarly thorough.

“That’s investigative procedure 101,” said Julian Sanchez, an expert in national security law for the libertarian Cato Institute. “Unless it’s a secret investigation, if you’re conducting an investigation, you interview its subject.”
“He would need to interview anyone who’s a subject of the investigation,” Sanchez added. “That’s Trump, and, at minimum, personnel associated with the campaign.”
“I can’t imagine he would not be interviewed,” said Mark Zaid, a national security lawyer.
Mueller has been charged to investigate “any matters that arose or may arise directly from the investigation” that the FBI has been conducting into alleged collusion between Trump’s campaign and Russian government officials. That would likely include the allegations from James Comey, who reportedly wrote in a memo that Trump asked him to curtail part of that investigation before firing him.
Like Comey, Mueller knows a thing or two about memos.

Mueller, who became FBI director a week before 9/11, was a colleague of James Comey during the Bush administration. And one of the most consequential moments in that relationship involves note-taking––a skill Comey has clearly adopted.
As Comey revealed in Congressional testimony in 2007, he and Mueller clashed with top Bush White House officials in March 2004 over an effort to reauthorize NSA surveillance. Comey was Deputy Attorney General at the time––second in command at the Justice Department. Alberto Gonzales, then the White House counsel, and Andy Card, then Bush’s chief of staff, tried to get then-Attorney General John Ashcroft to sign off on the continuation of a warrantless wiretapping program when he was gravely ill in the hospital.
When Comey learned what Gonzales and Card were trying to do, he let Mueller know and then raced to the hospital. He got to the attorney general’s hospital bed while Gonzales and Card were there, and managed to keep him from signing anything. Mueller got to the hospital room after the drama unfolded.
And, like any good FBI hand, Mueller took notes.
In 2007, when Alberto Gonzales was attorney general, he testified before Congress that Ashcroft was lucid and talkative on the night of the hospital visit. Comey later gave testimony countering what Gonzales said, saying Ashcroft was clearly sick and distressed. And Mueller’s notes became a pivotal piece of evidence to clear up the disparity, as the Washington Post reported at the time. He turned over a heavily redacted version of those notes to the House Judiciary Committee, showing Gonzales had misinformed the committee.

The news of Mueller’s notes broke on Aug. 17, 2007. Ten days later, Gonzales announced he would resign.”

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Can’t imagine that Trump is too happy about the Mueller appointment. But, he has nobody but himself to blame (something he never does, preferring to cast blame on others).

PWS

05-17-17