“Injustice Anywhere is a Threat to Justice Everywhere. . . . Whatever Affects One Directly, Affects All Indirectly.”

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Letters From the Birmingham Jail

New Orleans– Appearing before the Federal Bar Association’s 2019 Civil Rights Entouffee, Attorney Jeffrey Feinbloom of the FBA Civil Rights Section, FBA Immigration Section Chair Elizabeth “Betty” Stevens, and I made a powerful pitch to assembled Civil Rights Attorneys for their support for an Article I United States Immigration Court.

Our panel emphasized that the current Immigration Courts under the Executive Office for Immigration Review (“EOIR”), U.S. Department of Justice are a “failed system” threatening everyone’s civil rights. Notwithstanding more Immigration Judges, these “courts” have continued to build backlog at an astonishing and accelerating rate, now topping 1.1 million pending cases following the Government shutdown.

Worse yet, they have essentially become a “hostile environment” for migrants, their attorneys, and sometimes the Immigration Judges and court staff themselves. They also are an impediment to realistic, professional immigration enforcement by DHS. Perhaps worst of all, due process of law has become the apparent enemy of DOJ and EOIR, rather than the objective.

The only way out of this mess is the establishment of an independent Article I Immigration Court, administered in a professional and apolitical manner by sitting judges, not politicized bureaucrats in Washington. Section Chair Betty Stevens and other Section members have helped develop a non-partisan bill to create an Article I Court.  We urge everyone to ask their Congressional representatives to make Immigration Court reform an urgent national priority.

Schmidt’s Five Points On Why U.S. immigration Courts Are Unlike Any Other Court System in America

• Judges are selected, directed, and “supervised” by the Attorney General, the chief prosecutor;
• There is no right to appointed counsel, so young children and others without any understanding of the U.S. legal system, often in detention, are forced to “represent themselves” in life or death cases against experienced ICE Counsel;
• The chief prosecutor, the Attorney General, can change any individual case result that he doesn’t like, and rewrite immigration law in the DHS’s favor through “certified precedents;”
• There is a 1.1 million case backlog, resulting largely from “Aimless Docket Reshuffling” by the DOJ that continues to grow, despite an increase in judges, without any realistic plan for reducing it;
• So-called “civil immigration detention” can be used by the Government to limit representation, and for coercion and deterrence of migrants with little or no effective judicial recourse in many cases.

PWS

02-21-19