"The Voice of the New Due Process Army" ————– Musings on Events in U.S. Immigration Court, Immigration Law, Sports, and Other Random Topics by Retired United States Immigration Judge (Arlington, Virginia) and former Chairman of the Board of Immigration Appeals Paul Wickham Schmidt. To see my complete professional bio, just click on the link below.
PLAYING CATCH-UP: Here Are Two “Courtside Regulars” From Earlier This Week: 1) The Gibson Report 01-21-19; and 2) Nolan On Trump & The Wall From The Hill!
WaPo: In addition to its immigration provisions, the package — which McConnell could move to advance as early as Tuesday, although a Thursday vote appears more likely — would reopen all parts of the government that are closed. It also would provide emergency funding for U.S. areas hit by hurricanes, floods and other natural disasters.
TRAC: Since the beginning of the federal government shutdown, most Immigration Court hearings have been cancelled. As of January 11, the estimated number of cancellations reached 42,726. Each week the shutdown continues, cancelled hearings will likely grow by another 20,000. As many as 100,000 individuals awaiting their day in court may be impacted if the shutdown continues through the end of January. See also: These states’ immigration courts are most impacted by the government shutdown.
USAToday: Of the 60,000 employees at Customs and Border Patrol, nine of 10 must report to work, checking passports and manning pieces of the border wall that have already been built. But they’re not being paid.
Vox: Refugee admissions have plummeted, while rejections of asylum applications have increased. Arrests of immigrants without criminal records have returned to the levels of the first term of the Obama administration, while Trump works to make hundreds of thousands more immigrants vulnerable to deportation, by stripping them of protections under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program or Temporary Protected Status. And the travel ban quietly churns on.
CMS: The US undocumented population from Mexico fell by almost 400,000 in 2017. In 2017, for the first time, the population from Mexico constituted less than one half of the total undocumented population.
WaPo: Speaking Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” the vice president quoted from King’s “I Have a Dream” speech as he defended Trump’s latest pitch to secure funding for a barrier along the United States’ southern border.
WaPo: Richard Kessler, an immigration lawyer in Grand Rapids, Mich., said he was surprised when a woman he had worked with called to tell him that her son, a 27-year-old Marine veteran with mental-health issues, was being held in an immigration facility, apparently awaiting a possible deportation.
CNN: With Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand entering the 2020 presidential race on Tuesday, her dramatic shift on the issue of immigration over the past decade will likely be one of the central questions about her candidacy as she seeks to take on President Donald Trump.
DailyNews: In what could be its biggest campaign, the New York Immigration Coalition, the state’s largest immigration advocacy group, plans to spend at least $1 million on TV, radio and targeted social and digital media ads as well as billboards.
CBS: When U.S. consumers are calling about a hotel reservation or an airline flight, there’s a good chance a deportee in El Salvador is on the other end of the line.
NBC: Trump administration officials weighed speeding up the deportation of migrant children by denying them their legal right to asylum hearings after separating them from their parents, according to comments on a late 2017 draft of what became the administration’s family separation policy obtained by NBC News. The draft also shows officials wanted to specifically target parents in migrant families for increased prosecutions, contradicting the administration’s previous statements.
WaPo: The report issued by the inspector general for the Department of Health and Human Services says no one systematically kept count of separated children until a lawsuit last spring triggered by the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy, under which the government tried to criminally prosecute all parents who crossed the border illegally, taking their children from them in the process. See also As One ‘Tent City’ for Immigrant Children Closes in Texas, Another Opens in Florida.
Al Jazeera: Last year, around 2,297 migrants died or went missing in the Mediterranean while 116,959 people reached Europe by sea. According to the IOM, sea arrivals to Europe in the first 16 days of 2019 totalled 4,216, compared with 2,365 in the same period of 2018.
NPR: U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman ordered the administration to stop its plans to include the controversial question on forms for the upcoming national head count “without curing the legal defects” the judge identified in his 277-page opinion released on Tuesday.
USCIS: Generally, conditional permanent residents who file a Form I-751 must appear for an interview. However, USCIS officers may consider waiving an interview.
EOIR released guidance on Grace v. Whitaker, stating that for all credible fear review hearings conducted on or after 12/19/18, IJs may not rely on several aspects of Matter of A-B- as a basis for affirming a negative credible fear determination. Guidance obtained from CGRS and ACLU.
USCIS issued policy guidance in the USCIS Policy Manual to address the policies and procedures related to secure documents, including how USCIS delivers and tracks these documents and how requestors should request a replacement or reissuance. Comments are due by 1/30/19. Policy is effective 1/16/19.
CBP Liaison Minutes: If a permanent resident, who has a pending application for naturalization in which a Notice of Intent to Deny was issued challenging whether the individual had been eligible for adjustment of status at the time that application was filed, travels abroad and presents his green card upon his return, will he be admitted as a permanent resident? Are such cases flagged in some way? If there has only been a NOID and no action has been taken on the N-400, the individual will be admitted as an LPR. If the N-400 was denied and the individual was issued an NTA under Section 237 (but has not been served), CBP will re-issue the NTA under Section 212. If an NTA was issued and served under Section 237, the individual will be admitted as an LPR in proceedings.
2019 National Day of Action: On Thursday, April 11, 2019, AILA members and their clients are invited to meet with their legislators on Capitol Hill to discuss immigration policy changes and the impact it has on their state and district.
Upwardly Global’s mission is to eliminate employment barriers for skilled immigrants and refugees, and integrate this population into the professional U.S. workforce.
Trump offers to limit his border wall to strategic locations
BY NOLAN RAPPAPORT, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR — 01/20/19 07:00 AM EST 945
THE VIEWS EXPRESSED BY CONTRIBUTORS ARE THEIR OWN AND NOT THE VIEW OF THE HILL
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) should give serious consideration to the settlement proposal that President Donald Trump made in his televised address from the White House.
Her objection all along has been to building a wall across the entire length of the Mexican border, and Trump no longer intends to erect “a concrete structure from sea to sea.”
He has acknowledged that much of the border is already protected by natural barriers, such as mountains and water. He wants the $5.7 billion he has requested for a strategic deployment of steel barriers at high priority locations.
The border already has many miles of barriers, including 115 miles that are being built or are under contract. He just plans to add another 230 miles this year at locations where they are most urgently needed.
These barriers would not make illegal crossings impossible, but they would make illegal crossings more difficult and make it easier for the Border Patrol to apprehend crossers.
His request includes $800 million for humanitarian assistance; $805 million for drug detection technology; 2,750 more border agents and law enforcement officers; and 75 more immigration judges.
In what he describes as an effort to build trust and goodwill, the legislation he is offering to implement his proposal also would extend the status of 700,000 DACA participants for three years.
This is just a temporary measure, but the outcome of the litigation over the DACA program is uncertain, and the participants will be extremely vulnerable if the program is terminated. DACA participation is sufficient in itself to establish deportability, and they can’t apply for asylum. There is a one-year time limit on filing asylum applications and they all have been here for more than a year.
The legislation also would extend the status of 300,000 current Temporary Protected Status recipients for three years.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has promised Trump that his bill will be brought to the floor of the Senate this week.
Trump also mentions the immigration court backlog crisis in his address. He says that it is not possible to provide an asylum hearing for every illegal crosser who sets one foot on American soil.
The asylum provisions state that aliens who are physically present in the United States may apply for asylum irrespective of their immigration status, unless one of the stated exceptions applies.
In my opinion, the sheer number of illegal crossers is the real border crisis. It has overwhelmed our immigration courts, making it virtually impossible to enforce immigration laws..
. . . .
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Read Nolan’s complete article over on TheHill at the link.
At the time Nolan released this, he didn’t have the complete Trump proposal. I initially thought like Nolan that there might be the seeds for agreement in there.
But, Trump misrepresented what he was offering. In reality, it was yet another bogus 1000 page anti-asylum travesty drafted by White Nationalist in Residence Stephen Miller. Clearly intended to be a non-starter. Actually, it’s much like the dishonest tactics Trump used during the “Dreamer Debacle” that he engineered for no particular reason I can think of. And, that was when the GOP actually was in control.
Also, Nolan didn’t have the benefit of the Supreme Court action leaving DACA in effect for the indefinite future.
I’ve posted lots recently on what real border security and humanitarian assistance might look like. And, the Dems appear to be at work on something along those lines; a robust $5.7 billion but more constructive border security package that provides more resources for the Asylum Office, EOIR, technology, and inspections, but doesn’t undermine fundamental asylum law, negate Wilberforce protections for unaccompanied minors, or trash our international protection obligations.
Ultimately, once the Government reopens, that approach, plus permanent status for the Dreamers, with some wall or other physical barriers for Trump still seems to be the most likely way of ”getting to yes.” Then again, there might be no way of getting to yes with Trump.
Paul is right that I didn’t have that information. But I am not as concerned about it as he is. I know from my experience as an immigration counsel on the House Judiciary Committee that you can’t get a bill to the floor without additions from special interests groups…and members trying to please their constituents. That’s how bills end up being 1000 pages long, or much longer sometimes.
The important thing is that Trump has backed off from his “sea to sea concrete structure” demand and is now planning to build iron fences at high priority sections that are identified by the border patrol. In fact, he only wants to erect 230 miles this year.
If any other president but Trump had requested funding for that plan, the only argument would have been over the details, i.e., how much it will cost.
And perhaps most importantly, it’s as flexible as any wall proposal can possibly be. Lots of room for negotiations.
The DACA offer isn’t impressive, but that is subject to negotiations too, as is the TPS proposal.
The other border security demands that I mention in my article are things that Pelosi has been offering anyway.
If Trump’s bill had passed in the Senate, there would have been a conference between the Senate and the House at which staffers would have gone through the bill and probably would have cut it back to something very similar to the skeleton proposal I discuss in my article — with more detail of course.
I represented the Democrats at conferences. Long hours, lots of discussions, and compromises on both sides; but it would have produced a bill acceptable to both sides…perhaps not liked by either though. And the government would have been reopened.
But it didn’t pass. I don’t know what to expect next, but I predict that Trump will get funding for his high priority iron fences, the DACA deal will be sweetened considerably, and most of the obnoxious add on provisions will be dropped. But I have no idea when it will happen.
Paul is right that I didn’t have that information. But I am not as concerned about it as he is. I know from my experience as an immigration counsel on the House Judiciary Committee that you can’t get a bill to the floor without additions from special interests groups…and members trying to please their constituents. That’s how bills end up being 1000 pages long, or much longer sometimes.
The important thing is that Trump has backed off from his “sea to sea concrete structure” demand and is now planning to build iron fences at high priority sections that are identified by the border patrol. In fact, he only wants to erect 230 miles this year.
If any other president but Trump had requested funding for that plan, the only argument would have been over the details, i.e., how much it will cost.
And perhaps most importantly, it’s as flexible as any wall proposal can possibly be. Lots of room for negotiations.
The DACA offer isn’t impressive, but that is subject to negotiations too, as is the TPS proposal.
The other border security demands that I mention in my article are things that Pelosi has been offering anyway.
If Trump’s bill had passed in the Senate, there would have been a conference between the Senate and the House at which staffers would have gone through the bill and probably would have cut it back to something very similar to the skeleton proposal I discuss in my article — with more detail of course.
I represented the Democrats at conferences. Long hours, lots of discussions, and compromises on both sides; but it would have produced a bill acceptable to both sides…perhaps not liked by either though. And the government would have been reopened.
But it didn’t pass. I don’t know what to expect next, but I predict that Trump will get funding for his high priority iron fences, the DACA deal will be sweetened considerably, and most of the obnoxious add on provisions will be dropped. But I have no idea when it will happen.