Federal Courts
Reporter
Law360
Jeffrey S. Chase Blog
Coordinator & Chief Spokesperson, Round Table of Retired Immigration Judges
Ex-FAIR Research Director Among 46 New Immigration Judges
. . . .
“It would be impossible for one to receive a fair hearing before Matthew O’Brien,” Jeffrey Chase, a New York City immigration lawyer and former immigration judge, told Law360. Chase said O’Brien has expressed a view of asylum law that is at odds with the controlling circuit case law that he would be tasked with applying from the bench.
Chase said O’Brien has “basically spouted propaganda for an organization openly hostile to immigration.”
His appointment, Chase said, shows that the Trump administration doesn’t want a fair and independent immigration court and is proof that the Executive Office for Immigration Review needs to be taken out of the control of the Department of Justice, an enforcement agency.
The administration “has repeatedly emphasized to classes of new immigration judges that they are above all employees of the attorney general, who does not believe most asylum seekers are deserving of protection,” Chase said.
These appointments could negatively impact the immigration courts for decades, Chase said.
Paul Wickham Schmidt, a retired U.S. immigration judge who chaired the Board of Immigration Appeals in the Clinton administration, also slammed the recent wave of appointments.
“The idea that these are the 46 best qualified individuals in America to discharge these awesome responsibilities in a fair, impartial and expert manner, in furtherance of due process of law and with recognition of the human rights and human dignity of the individuals whose lives are at stake, is beyond preposterous. It’s a fraud on American justice,” Schmidt told Law360.
Schmidt didn’t mince his words about O’Brien’s appointment either.
“As someone who has helped FAIR spread its racially biased, anti-immigrant, and anti-asylum propaganda and false narratives, O’Brien is not qualified to be a fair and impartial quasi-judicial decision maker as required by the due process clause of our Constitution,” Schmidt said.
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Those with Law360 access can read Hannah’s complete article at the link.
The U.S. Justice system, once the envy of free nations throughout the world, is disintegrating before our eyes. If there is no justice for those whose lives are at stake, there will be no justice for any of us in the Trump/Barr Third World kakistocracy.
Due Process Forever! Corrupt & Feckless Institutions Parodying Justice, Never!
PWS
07-21-20
Using fire to put out a fire.
If O’Brien is assigned to any of my cases, I would file recusal requests accompanied by a package of every published matter he has ever uttered. While he may still not recuse himself it would provide probative evidence of his inherent biases at EOIR level and will be difficult to ignore or overcome in “nearly” all circuits.
If you go on the internet, you’ll find lots of material.
Here’s a video from Professor Benítez and Paulina Vera @ GW Clinic:
And, here are some quotes collected by my friend, well-known immigration expert and attorney Margaret Stock:
He makes a number of startling assertions in the video:
“I’m not sure that there is a moral issue in this” [children being locked up, separated from their parents]
“they don’t actually qualify under the five protected grounds that were mentioned earlier” [apparently he has prejudged all asylum seekers from Central America]
“generally speaking the people who flee in these situations are men between the ages of 18 and 45[,] they’re the individuals who would drive social change in their countries and when they come here what happens is they wind up earning money they send back home to support their families and very frequently that money is taxed by the regimes that are causing problems and it allows those regimes to extend their life over time when they would not necessarily have been able to do that if you didn’t have this cycle of migration of remittance” [he thinks deportations will stabilize these countries, when the opposite appears to be true]
“the homicide rates in a lot of these countries now are lower than they are in Baltimore”
Here’s a compendium of his writings for FAIR:
https://www.immigrationreform.com/author/mattobrien/
Among them is one advancing the false narrative that “Antifa” is behind the demonstrations in Portland and other cities. This claim has been thoroughly debunked by the NY Times and other sources.
Indeed, legitimate studies suggest the real threat to the safety and security of the US is the far right, where guys like O’Brien feel right at home. Violence by far right is among US’s most dangerous terrorist threats, study finds
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/27/us-far-right-violence-terrorist-threat-analysis?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
If nothing else, the continuous spreading of false narratives about immigrants and crime rates and immigrants and refugees of “stealing” our jobs sows division and racial unrest. Obviously, in a country comprised nearly 100% of immigrants and their descendants, immigration, regardless of source, skin color, ethnicity, or “selectivity” has overall been the source of all that has made America great and will continue to do so in the future.
Good luck.
Sorry the system has sunk to this level. But, it has. And, it’s not like members of the New Due Process Army and the Round Table haven’t been spreading the alarm over the last three years. It’s just that now the racism and “malicious incompetence” of the Administration is demonstrably killing folks in large areas of the country every day, rather than keeping the “crimes against humanity” out of sight out of mind in the Gulag and the foreign countries to which individuals are illegally returned by our government without any semblance of due process or fundamental fairness!
PWS