WELCOME A “NEW FACE ON THE STREET” — Louise Radnofsky Takes Over WSJ’s “Immigration Beat” — Trump’s War On America Mindlessly Trashes An Already Crippled Immigration System!

https://www.wsj.com/articles/shutdown-compounds-woes-for-immigration-system-11548702443?mod=mhp

Louise writes:

U.S. Shutdown Compounds Woes for Immigration System
The partial government shutdown that centered on border security appears to have left the nation’s strained immigration system in an even deeper hole than before.
By Louise Radnofsky
WASHINGTON—The partial government shutdown that centered on border security appears to have left the nation’s strained immigration system in an even deeper hole than before the five-week standoff.
A backlog at immigration courts, at more than 800,000 cases the day before the funding gap that

A backlog at immigration courts, at more than
800,000 cases the day before the funding gap that started Dec. 21, likely grew by around 20,000 for each
of the weeks the courts stopped hearing most cases. Litigation over immigrant-family separations and asylum claims by people crossing the border between official entry points stalled because Justice Department lawyers were furloughed.
E-Verify, the program that hard-liners favor because it bars hiring of illegal immigrant workers, was closed. Around 20,000 U.S. Border Patrol agents worked without pay for an agency already short of about 2,000 officers because of hiring issues and attrition.
“It’s chaos on top of disaster,” said Paul Wickham Schmidt, a retired immigration judge and former chairman of the Board of Immigration Appeals. “It’s already a system bursting at the seams….We have a shutdown over border security and immigration, but they shut the mechanism that issues final deportations. How does that make sense?”
The Trump administration says the court delays allow illegal immigrants to stay in the U.S. even if they don’t have strong claims to do so. Immigrant advocates say the delays weaken the cases of immigrants who do have claims to stay, and leave them in limbo.
Before the shutdown, the administration tried to accelerate the court’s docket by imposing case- completion quotas on its 400 judges. The president also proposed adding 75 judges as part of an ultimately unsuccessful deal to end the shutdown. The shutdown effectively denied the government one year’s worth of work by 40 judges—with no new judges to show for it.
The active-case backlog was 809,041 at the end of November, said the Transactional Records Access

Clearinghouse at Syracuse University, which tracks court activity. Between Dec. 21 and Jan. 11, a period that included some days where the courts would have been closed for holidays anyway, 42,726 scheduled hearings had been canceled, TRAC said.
TRAC estimated that each subsequent week the courts were closed would result in approximately 20,000 canceled hearings. Susan Long, TRAC’s co-director, said it couldn’t calculate a total for the backlog now because current Freedom-of-Information requests about the number of cases in the system, including new ones added, went unanswered as the people handling them were furloughed.

RelatedTrump Skeptical He Would Accept Any Border Deal
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E-Verify, the voluntary online system employers use to verify workers’ immigration status, was suspended through the shutdown. Employers couldn’t enroll, create new cases or view existing ones. The 300 E- Verify workers at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services were the only of the agency’s 17,973 employees to be furloughed because the program is funded through congressional appropriations; others, such as naturalizations, are funded through user fees.
Some supporters of tighter immigration restrictions say E-Verify is the federal government’s most important tool to curb illegal immigration because it makes it harder for illegal immigrants to work in the U.S.
Eric Ruark, director of research at NumbersUSA, a group advocating reduction of immigration both legal and illegal, said E-Verify is much more effective than border barriers, and his group has supported mandating its use for employers. “A wall is not at the top of our list,” he said.
E-Verify reported more than 40 million people were checked during the year ended Sept. 30, on requests from more than 266,000 employers, for an average of more than 750,000 cases a week. Citizenship and Immigration Services said employers were still required during the shutdown to obtain and submit information from new hires about their immigration status, even if they couldn’t immediately obtain a verification determination.
Customs and Border Protection required around 55,000 of its roughly 60,000 employees to work without pay through the shutdown, according to contingency planning documents drawn up by the Department of Homeland Security.
Meanwhile, Justice Department lawyers working on important litigation were furloughed, applied for stays, and courts agreed to postpone deadlines.

Lee Gelernt, an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer who is suing the administration in several cases, said he planned to use the government’s request for a pause against it in the case over asylum-seeking outside of ports of entry. “The administration told the Supreme Court—and the country—that the asylum ban was critical for our national security yet then asked that the case be stayed during the shutdown, leaving no doubt that the administration itself does not actually believe the asylum ban is a matter of national security,” he said.
A Justice Department spokeswoman, one of a handful working through the shutdown, said the government had been granted stays in some cases and denied in others. She said she couldn’t comment in detail because the majority of her co-workers were still furloughed.
Alicia A. Caldwell contributed to this article. Write to Louise Radnofsky at
louise.radnofsky@wsj.com

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Welcome Louise, to “where the action is!”  Glad to have you “on the beat.” We all look forward to reading much more of your timely reporting and incisive analysis.

This article shows what a complete hoax Trump’s $5.7 billion border wall “demand” is. Trump’s disrespect for the workers who are the only thing propping up his corrupt and incompetent Administration of grifters is breathtaking as is his contempt for rational immigration enforcement.

Trump’s “malicious incompetence” just cost our country $3 billion in unrecoverable losses! And, he’s certainly vindictive enough to do it again in less than three weeks. So, those who still care about our nation had better have a “Plan B” to thwart his renewed attack on democracy.

The Trump Administration is Kakistocracy in action.

PWS

01-26-19

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