AMERICAN INJUSTICE: ADVOCATES COMPLAIN ABOUT US IMMIGRATION JUDGE V. STUART COUCH’S BIAS AGAINST CENTRAL AMERICAN WOMEN SEEKING ASYLUM – APPEALS BOARD AGREES, FINDING COUCH’S RULINGS “CLEARLY ERRONEOUS” IN MANY CASES – Now They Fear That Judge Couch Has A “Kindred Spirit” In The Overtly Xenophobic Jeff Sessions!

Judge in case Sessions picked for immigrant domestic violence asylum review issued ‘clearly erroneous’ decisions, says appellate court

By: Tal Kopan, CNN

Jeff Sessions recently used his special authority as attorney general to review an asylum case that could have sweeping implications for how the US treats immigrants fleeing domestic violence.

Newly released records now show that the case he handpicked, which involves a Central American woman fleeing domestic abuse from her ex-husband, comes from a judge who has been repeatedly rebuked by appellate judges for his multiple rejections of asylum claims from victims of domestic abuse.

Advocates and immigration attorneys fear that Sessions could be using the case as an opportunity to reverse case law that has protected Central American women fleeing violence and sexual assault from husbands by granting them asylum in the US.Stuart

Couch, an immigration judge in Charlotte, North Carolina, has sought to justify denying such women the right to stay in the US in multiple cases, even with the appellate body repeatedly ruling that his findings were “clearly erroneous,” according to records released after a Freedom of Information Act request.

Couch’s decision in the case Matter of A-B-, a convention of naming cases in immigration court that protects the individual’s identity, is a rare opinion that Sessions has referred to himself for review. Sessions has been using a little-known authority to refer immigration cases to himself for review, allowing him to almost single-handedly direct how immigration law is interpreted in this country.

In reviewing Couch’s decision, Sessions invited interested parties to comment on the notion of whether being the victim of a crime can count for asylum, a complicated aspect of asylum law.

The case was initially kept secret by the Justice Department and immigration courts on privacy grounds, but was made public by immigration attorneys as a domestic violence case. Input on the case was due to Sessions on Friday.

It was also later revealed that Sessions decided to consider the case over the objections of the Department of Homeland Security, which had asked him to hold off on diving into the case until the Board of Immigration Appeals, the immigration courts’ appellate body, decided on a request from Couch to take the case back up themselves. Sessions denied DHS’s request.

The Department of Justice declined to comment on why or how Sessions chose the case, and it’s not known how he will rule. When Sessions initially referred himself the case, a department official said he was considering it “because of a lack of clarity in the court system on the issue.”

More on Couch’s decisions: http://www.cnn.com/2018/04/28/politics/jeff-sessions-immigration-courts-domestic-violence-asylum/index.html

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You should read Tal’s entire article for a profile of just how biased Judge Couch — the second most reversed Judge among hundreds in the Immigration Courts — is in asylum cases.  He had 58 cases reversed by the BIA just in 2017, while piling up an “asylum denial rate” 26% above the national average!

And, remember that this “isn’t the Ninth Circuit” by any stretch of the imagination. The BIA is a considered a conservative tribunal with a strong predilection to rule for the DHS to begin with!

I’m glad that the anti-asylum bias that runs through too much of today’s Immigration Court system, and is actually fanned and encouraged by Sessions, is finally being exposed. Even if Congress won’t solve this glaring problem by removing these Courts from the DOJ and creating an independent Immigration Court, with a merit-based hiring system, I hope that the Article III reviewing courts are getting the picture that much of what they are getting from EOIR in the area of asylum denials is the product of an intentionally unfair and biased system.

In this outrageous example, Matter of A-B-, the BIA was actually quite properly trying to “rein in” Judge Couch. Rather than encouraging justice, Sessions actually interfered with the BIA’s actions, even though neither the BIA nor any party had requested his review. What kind of “court system” allows a law enforcement official to control the results? Sounds like something directly out of the DOS Country Report on a Third World Dictatorship!

Judge Couch actually was appointed during the Obama Administration, illustrating the widespread and chronic nature of the problem of anti-asylum biased judging at EOIR. The Obama Administration was not accused of the overtly politicized hiring engaged in by the Bush Justice Department.

Nevertheless, from a statistical standpoint, the opaque, closed, and glacial (two-year average) Obama DOJ selection system was biased in favor of attorneys from government backgrounds and against those with experience representing asylum applicants by an astounding 9 to  1 ratio! Many believe this intentionally produced a BIA and an Immigration Court that would more or less “go along to get along” with construing the law and the facts against asylum applicants from countries considered to be “enforcement priorities” by the Obama Administration.

It’s time to put an end to this charade of justice and Due Process in our Immigration Courts. We need an independent Article I U.S. Immigration Court with a merit-based selection system.  If not, we need a “helpful intervention” by the Article III Courts to end this chronically unfair and dysfunctional administration of justice by the Department of Justice! 

PWS

04-28-18