Judge Einhorn writes:
As a young Justice Department lawyer, I was present at the creation of the Refugee Act of 1980, which together with its amendments and implementing regulations constitute the regime of asylum and refugee protection in the United States. During the Carter administration, I had a hand in the final drafting of the 1980 asylum law. As a U.S. immigration judge in Los Angeles from 1990 through 2007, I heard and decided thousands of cases in which citizens and stateless persons from foreign countries sought asylum in our nation. As a law professor both in California and in England, I have lectured on asylum and refugee law.
The asylum law was intended as a humanitarian measure to defend the defenseless by offering them the possibility of a new and secure life in the United States. But that will no longer be the case if Attorney General Jeff Sessions has his way. The Refugee Act of 1980 grants asylum status in the United States for any foreign-born individual who demonstrates past persecution or a well-founded fear of future persecution for reasons of “race, religion, nationality” as well as “membership in a particular social group” and “political opinion.”
Additionally, under precedent set over the course of decades by federal courts across the country, the persecution that triggers asylum protection must be committed or attempted by a foreign government, or by forces that the government is unable or unwilling to control. That the persecution may be official or private recognizes the fact that in many countries, civil society and the rule of law are nowhere to be found. In their place, governments often unofficially depend on ad hoc private parties and organizations to aid in the torture, persecution and murder of those deemed “enemies of the state.” The use of nongovernmental persecutors provides plausible deniability to regimes that deny complicity in the mistreatment of those they seek to eliminate.
Now the attorney general is attempting to undermine if not eliminate the “unable or unwilling” standard applied in asylum cases for decades. In 2016, in a case entitled “Matter of A-B-,” the Board of Immigration Appeals, the administrative court that reviews decisions of immigration judges, ruled that based on prevailing precedent, an asylum applicant seeking refugee status based on her membership in a particular social group” that led to her gross domestic abuse, had demonstrated that the government of her native El Salvador was unwilling or unable to protect her from her abusive ex-husband. The board remanded the case to the trial judge so that he might apply the correct “unwilling or unable” standard.
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Go on over to The Hill to read Judge Einhorn’s complete article!
Judge Bruce J. Einhorn has spent his career advancing the true rule of law and seeking to rectify the wrongs of the past: first as a prosecutor in the Office of Special Investigations at the U.S. DOJ bringing Nazi war criminals to justice (where I first came in contact with him); then as a U.S. Immigration Judge; and finally as a law professor. (Yes, folks, there was a time long ago when the USDOJ actually was on the side of seeking and guaranteeing justice for the persecuted, rather than engaging in child abuse, spreading false scenarios about immigrants and crime, promoting xenophobic myths about refugees, building the “New American Gulag,” and mis-using the US Immigration Court system as a tool of DHS enforcement to discourage refugees from seeking protection under our laws and international treaties to which we are party.)
By contrast, Jeff Sessions has spent his entire legal & “public service” career on the wrong side of history: trying to “turn back the clock” to the era of Jim Crow; promoting intolerance, unequal treatment, and hate directed at African-Americans, Hispanics, immigrants, and the LGBTQ community; perverting the rule of law and the Constitutional guarantee of individual rights and fairness for everyone in America; and denying the massive contributions to the success of the United States made by non-White, non-Christian, and non-U.S. citizen individuals.
Jeff Sessions is a much bigger threat to the security, welfare, and future of the United States than are desperate women and children from the Northern Triangle seeking to save their lives by exercising their lawful rights under U.S. and international law to apply for asylum.
PWS
05-10-18