LEADING IMMIGRATION EXPERTS CALL FOR CLOSING COURTS, RELEASING KIDS! – Professors Stephen Yale-Loehr, Jaclyn Kelly-Widmer, and Laila Hlass Speak Out!

Professor Stephen Yale-Loehr
Professor Stephen Yale-Loehr
Cornell Law
Jaclyn Kelley-Widmer
Jaclyn Kelley-Widmer
Assistant Clinical Professor
Cornell Law

Here are Steve, my long-time friend, and his amazing colleague Jakki,, both now at Cornell Law, on court closings from the NY Post:

 

https://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/ny-oped-close-immigration-courts-now-20200331-sgriwv4yqzaadd6xoyjgpvbjja-story.html

 

CORONAVIRUS UPDATES: THE LATEST IMPORTANT DEVELOPMENTS

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Close immigration courts now: A coronavirus necessity to protect public health

By STEPHEN YALE-LOEHR and JACLYN KELLEY-WIDMER

NEW YORK DAILY NEWS 

MAR 31, 2020  1:36 PM

In this Nov. 15, 2019, file photo, a detainee talks on the phone in his pod at the Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, Ga. While much of daily life has ground to a halt to reduce the spread of the coronavirus, the Trump administration is resisting calls from immigration judges and attorneys to stop in-person hearings and shutter all immigration courts. They say the most pressing hearings can still be done by phone so immigrants aren’t stuck in detention indefinitely.(David Goldman/AP)Imagine you’re an immigration lawyer. You have a case scheduled for trial in immigration court, but you’ve got a cough, a sore throat and shortness of breath. In normal times, you probably would have gone to court for the trial. In current times, you’re worried. We all know what those symptoms mean.

You call your doctor, who tells you that you’re displaying symptoms consistent with COVID-19. The doctor recommends that you self-quarantine.

Your immigrant client is detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and counting on you to present their asylum case. You’ve been preparing for months. Your client’s ability to avoid being deported to a country where they face torture or death depends on your performance.

Even though most courts around the country are closed in response to the pandemic, your court date is still on. The Justice Department is keeping its detained immigration courts open, ignoring joint letters from the National Association of Immigration Judges, the American Immigration Lawyers Association and the union representing ICE attorneys calling for a shutdown during the pandemic.

As of your trial date, you haven’t been able to meet with your client in person to prepare for at least two weeks. At the time, ICE wouldn’t let you use your regular attorney visit rooms due to disease risk, so you were stuck waiting in line for the one glass-partitioned attorney room at the detention center. You never got to the front of the line for the room, so you were only able to talk to your client through glass and on the telephone.

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Then ICE issued a new directive on March 21 requiring all attorneys to bring their own gloves, mask and eye protection for contact visits with clients. Your office doesn’t have any of this gear. Even if you could get protective gear, you wouldn’t take it away from the medical professionals who truly need it.

Despite all of this, you hope the immigration judge will sympathize with your predicament. You file a motion asking for more time to better represent your client after all of this is over. You cite your own illness, your inability to meet with your client to prepare, and local and national public health warnings.

Despite your objections, the immigration judge proceeds with your client’s asylum trial. The judge gives you the choice of abandoning your client to face the fight of his life by himself or proceeding as his attorney via telephone. Reluctantly, you find a folding table to put your file on and try the case from your couch, unable to see or communicate privately with your client. You cannot see anything that is happening in court.

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All you know is that the immigration judge, ICE prosecutor and interpreter are there.

 

. . . .

 

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Read the rest of the article at the above link.

 

And here’s my good friend and former Georgetown Law colleague Leila, now at Tulane Law, with her plea in Slate for some sanity and humanity on unnecessary and demonstrably harmful and dangerous continued incarceration of children in DHS’s “New American Gulag.”

Professor Laila L. Hlass
Professor Laila L. Hlass
Tulane Law

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/03/coronavirus-immigrant-children-detention.html

 

With nearly 3,000 deaths and more than 160,000 infected by COVID-19 in the United States, it’s clear no one will be spared from impacts of the pandemic. In the past week, four children in immigration detention and seven employees of the Office of Refugee Resettlement who work in children’s detention facilities in New Jersey and Texas tested positive for the virus. Doctors working with detained immigrants have warned members of Congress that immigrant detention centers pose a “tinderbox scenario,” where social distancing precautions are impossible.

Two separate lawsuits are asking federal courts to force the release of unaccompanied children as well as families in immigrant detention, citing the grave health risks of contracting the coronavirus and spreading the disease. These risks are particularly serious because of the confluence of factors in family detention centers: crowded quarters, limited cleaning supplies, and the influx of new families into the detention centers. While it is understood children are usually less at risk of serious complications from COVID-19, a handful of children in the U.S. with COVID-19 have died in the past few days, and children may be more likely to more rapidly spread the disease.

Instead of a public health–oriented response to COVID-19 in the immigration legal system, we are seeing political opportunism. The Trump administration is using the virus as an excuse to swiftly deport unaccompanied minors at the border, despite laws that require that children be allowed to have their cases heard first by an immigration judge. Similarly, the Department of Justice is defying public health guidelines by forcing judges, attorneys, and immigrants to appear in select immigration courts across the country, despite positive COVID-19 tests from court personnel and risks inherent to crowded courtrooms, in order to continue deportation proceedings.

This mistreatment of children is not new. Before the outbreak, children were finding themselves in an increasingly punishing immigration legal system—where they had been separated from their parents, detained in record-breaking numbers for longer periods of time, and held in shocking and abusive detention conditions, including “dog cage” holding cells without mattresses, overflowing toilets, and frigid temperatures. Children do not have to be held in these conditions; unaccompanied children can and should be released more expeditiously to live with family in the U.S., and children detained with parents could be released as a family unit to pursue their legal case outside of detention.

Detained children have experienced forced hunger, dehydration, and sleeplessness. Holly Cooper, an attorney representing detained children, stated: “In my 22 years of doing visits with children in detention I have never heard of this level of inhumanity.” One 15-year-old boy, detained at the jail-like Shenandoah Valley facility, wrote “I want us to be treated as human beings.”

As a law professor and immigration attorney for more than a decade, I have seen firsthand how the immigration system mistreats children. In a recent law journal article, I argue adultification bias can help explain the mistreatment of immigrant children, who are largely teenagers of color. Adultification is the phenomenon whereby children of color are perceived as more adultlike and therefore less innocent than white peers. Adultification has created systemic harm for children of color within public systems like educationjuvenile justice, and child welfare. In particular, the disproportionate rates of arrests, adjudications, and sentencing for children of color within the juvenile justice system has been studied closely.

Immigration laws were not designed to protect children. In fact, only a few areas of the law consider the special circumstances of children. The Flores settlement sets minimum standards for detaining minors, limited to children under 18. Under Flores, children should be released as soon as possible to family, when feasible. Furthermore, the Office of Refugee Resettlement, not U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, is tasked with the custody of detained unaccompanied minors. According to legislative history, this is because ORR, under the Department of Health and Human Services, has more expertise in child care. Another child-focused measure is the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008, or TVPRA, which expands legal protections for children including in the areas of asylum law and special immigrant juvenile status, a pathway to legal permanent residence and citizenship available for some children. Lastly, the government has issued guidelines for children’s cases to improve immigration court procedures.

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Read the rest of Leila’s article at the link.

“Adultifiation,” “Adjudication Bias,” “Dred Scottification,” “dehumanization,” it’s all pretty much the same thing. As human beings, we must ask ourselves every day why have we empowered the cowardly bullies of the Trump regime to commit what are essentially “crimes against humanity” against the most vulnerable among us, their courageous representatives (about the only folks in the country brave enough to stand up for all of our Constitutional and human rights), and even their own employees? Compare their brave performance with the complicity of many Federal Judges, all the way up to the Supremes, and many legislators who stand by and watch these preventable and outrageous human and legal disasters occur, yet do nothing to stop them!

Why do we have the best and brightest legal and public health minds in the country pleading with the regime to take straightforward, common sense, prudent steps that even a minimally competent government would have taken long before now? How have we allowed the kakistocracy and the wanton cruelty and “malicious incompetence” they inflict on almost everything they touch become the “face of America?”

Due Process Forever! Vote Like YOUR Life Depends On It This November; Because It Does!

PWS

04-01-20

 

QUEST FOR DUE PROCESS CONTINUES IN THE TIME OF PLAGUE: Round Table Files Amicus For Court Closings, Comment Blasting EOIR’s Proposed Fee Rip-Off!

Hon. Ilyce Shugall
Hon. Ilyce Shugall
U.S. Immigraton Judge (Retired)
Director, Immigrant Legal Defense Program, Justice & Diversity Center of the Bar Assn. of San Francisco.
Knjightess
Knightess of the Round Table

Round Table leader Judge Ilyce Shugall led the charge on both of these efforts!

Here’s the Amicus Brief on court closings we filed in LAS AMERICAS IMMIGRANT ADVOCACY CENTER v. TRUMP in the U.S. District Court for the District of Oregon in Portland:

0041-Brief of Amici

And here’s the official comment we filed opposing the EOIR’s outrageous proposal to raise fees  for intentionally diminished services — a transparent attempt to limit access to justice for the most vulnerable and to discourage appeals in a system rife with largely available, often life-threatening mistakes and errors!

EOIR fee schedule reg comments_Round Table_FINAL

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My “Inbox” here at Courtside has been pulsating with palpable outrage, anger, and unrestrained grief from my Round Table colleagues about the callous disregard by EOIR for the health, safety, and humanity of both the public and its own employees, many of them our friends and former colleagues. What better evidence could there be of the need for an independent Immigration Court, run by competent professionals, committed to due process, best practices, and service to the public than the awful mess happening at EOIR right now?

During this time of true national emergency, the Round Table remains committed to lending our collective voices and group expertise to as many organizations out there courageously fighting on the “front lines” as we can. Together, we represent literally centuries of experience on the immigration benches, the “retail level” of our justice system. We are sharing widely with judges, journalists, public officials, and others our insights into what’s wrong with today’s Immigration Courts and how to restore and enhance due process, the rule of law, common sense, and basic human values to a system that actively scorns and undermines all of the foregoing.

I am honored to be a member of the Round Table and deeply appreciative of the fearless leadership and endless energy of folks like Ilyce, Judge Jeffrey Chase, Judge Sue Roy, Judge Charles Honeyman, Judge Carol King, Judge John Gossart, Judge Lory Rosenberg, and many others for our daily efforts to literally save our nation and our justice system from the disastrous policies, legal ignorance, “malicious incompetence,” and disregard for human lives being inflicted by DOJ, EOIR, and DHS on our nation every day.

Due Process Forever! Malicious Incompetence Never!

PWS

04-01-20

UPDATE:

U.S. District Judge Karin J. Immergut on Wednesday denied a motion for an emergency 28-day restraining order that would have barred the nation’s immigration courts from requiring any participant or lawyer to appear in person for a hearing during the coronavirus pandemic.”  https://www.oregonlive.com/coronavirus/2020/04/federal-judge-declines-to-direct-us-immigration-courts-how-to-operate-during-coronavirus.html

Our “Round Table Brief” is mentioned in the article. Unfortunately, in this case it didn’t get the plaintiffs “over the top.”

The Judge seems to have applied the old “good enough for government work” standard to EOIR’s efforts. In other words “show me the dead bodies.” Assuming that the the Surgeon General and other health exports are right, the worst is yet to come. That doesn’t bode well for anyone caught up in the EOIR system. Also seems inconsistent with the “radical mitigation strategy” that government has been preaching.

PWS

04-01-20