Month: August 2020

🛡⚔️⚖️🗽😎GOOD NEWS, AS ROUND TABLE BESTS BIA AGAIN: 9th Cir. Zaps BIA’s Denial Of Guatemalan Woman’s Asylum & CAT Cases Involving Matter of A-B-! — Diaz-Reynoso v. Barr

Sontos, 9th 18-72833_Documents

Diaz-Reynoso v. Barr, 9th Cir., 08-07-20, published

 

SYNOPSIS BY COURT STAFF:

 

Immigration

Granting Sontos Diaz-Reynoso’s petition for review of the Board of Immigration Appeals’ decision affirming the denial of her application for withholding of removal and protection under the Convention Against Torture, and remanding, the panel held that the Board misapplied Matter of A-B-, 27 I. & N. Dec. 316 (A.G. 2018), as well as Board and circuit precedent, in concluding that Diaz-Reynoso’s proposed social group comprised of “indigenous women in Guatemala who are unable to leave their relationship” was not cognizable, and that she failed to establish that the government of Guatemala would acquiesce in any possible torture.

The panel rejected Diaz-Reynoso’s contention that Matter of A-B- was arbitrary and capricious and therefore not entitled to Chevron deference. The panel concluded that, despite the general and descriptive observations set forth in the opinion, Matter of A-B- did not announce a new categorical exception to withholding of removal for victims of domestic violence or other private criminal activity, but rather it reaffirmed the Board’s existing framework for analyzing the cognizability of particular social groups, requiring that such determinations be individualized and conducted on a case-by-case basis.

The panel observed that the Board rejected Diaz- Reynoso’s proposed social group, with almost no analysis,

** This summary constitutes no part of the opinion of the court. It has been prepared by court staff for the convenience of the reader.

 

Case: 18-72833, 08/07/2020, ID: 11780830, DktEntry: 100-1, Page 3 of 76

DIAZ-REYNOSO V. BARR 3

because it “suffered from the same circularity problem articulated by the Attorney General in Matter of A-B-.” The panel explained that in doing so, the Board appeared to misapprehend the scope of Matter of A-B- as forbidding any mention of feared harm within the delineation of a proposed social group. The panel concluded that this was error, explaining that Matter of A-B- did not announce a new rule concerning circularity, but instead merely reiterated the well- established principle that a particular social group must exist independently of the harm asserted. The panel recognized that a proposed social group may be deemed impermissibly circular if, after conducting the proper case-by-case analysis, the Board determines that the group is defined exclusively by the fact that its members have been subjected to harm. The panel explained, however, that a proposed social group is not impermissibly circular merely because the proposed group mentions harm.

The panel concluded that the Board also erred in assuming that domestic violence was the only reason Diaz- Reynoso was unable to leave her relationship, and in failing to conduct the rigorous case-by-case analysis required by Matter of A-B-. The panel therefore remanded Diaz- Reynoso’s withholding of removal claim for the Board to undertake the required analysis applying the correct framework.

Because the Board failed to discuss evidence that Diaz- Reynoso reported her husband’s abuse to authority figures in her village community, and the government conceded remand was warranted, the panel also remanded Diaz-Reynoso’s CAT claim for further consideration.

4 DIAZ-REYNOSO V. BARR

Concurring in the judgment in part and dissenting in part, Judge Bress agreed with remand of the CAT claim in light of the government’s concession, but disagreed with the majority’s conclusion that the Board misread Matter of A-B- in rejecting Diaz-Reynoso’s proposed social group. In Judge Bress’s view, Matter of A-B- held that a proposed group that incorporates harm within its definition is not a group that exists independently of the harm asserted in an application for asylum or statutory withholding of removal. Judge Bress wrote that substantial evidence supported the Board’s assessment that Diaz-Reynoso’s social group was defined exclusively by the harm suffered, and that the Board correctly applied Matter of A-B-, and the circularity rule, in rejecting Diaz-Reynoso’s proposed social group.

COUNSEL:

Gary A. Watt, Stephen Tollafield, and Tiffany J. Gates, Supervising Counsel; Shandyn H. Pierce and Hilda Kajbaf, Certified Law Students; Hastings Appellate Project, San Francisco, California; for Petitioner.

Joseph H. Hunt, Assistant Attorney General; John S. Hogan and Linda S. Wernery, Assistant Directors; Susan Bennett Green, Senior Litigation Counsel; Ashley Martin, Trial Attorney; Office of Immigration Litigation, Civil Division, United States Department of Justice, Washington, D.C.; for Respondent.

Blaine Bookey, Karen Musalo, Neela Chakravartula, and Anne Peterson, Center for Gender & Refugee Studies, U.S. Hastings College of Law, San Francisco, California, for Amicus Curiae Center for Gender & Refugee Studies.

Richard W. Mark, Amer S. Ahmed, Grace E. Hart, and Cassarah M. Chu, Gibson Dunn & Crutcher LLP, New York New York, for Amici Curiae Thirty-Nine Former Immigration Judges and Members of the Board of Immigration Appeals.

Sabrineh Ardalan, Nancy Kelly, John Willshire Carrera, Deborah Anker, and Zachary A. Albun, Attorneys; Rosa Baum, Caya Simonsen, and Ana Sewell, Supervised Law Students; Harvard Immigration and Refugee Clinical Program, Cambridge, Massachusetts; for Amicus Curiae Harvard Immigration and Refugee Clinical Program.

Ana C. Reyes and Alexander J. Kasner, Williams & Connolly LLP, Washington, D.C.; Alice Farmer, United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Washington, D.C.; for Amicus Curiae United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

PANEL: Ronald M. Gould, Morgan Christen, and Daniel A. Bress, Circuit Judges.

OPINION BY: Judge Cristen

CONCURRING/DISSENTING OPINION: Judge Bress

************************************

Just another example of how under this regime, EOIR’s perverted efforts to deny and deport, especially targeting female asylum seekers from the Northern Triangle for mistreatment and potential deportation to death, waste time and effort that could, in a wiser more just Administration, be used to reduce dockets and waiting times by ensuring that well-documented, deserving cases like this one are rapidly granted. EOIR’s biased performance also reeks of both anti-Latino racism and misogyny. Here we are, two decades into the 21st Century with our immigration “justice” system still being driven by invidious factors.

The Supremes’ majority may feign ignorance and or indifference to Trump’s and Miller’s overtly racist immigration agenda. But, those of us working in the field of immigration had it figured out long ago. It’s not rocket science! The Trumpsters make little or no real attempt to hide their scofflaw intent and invidious motives. It has, disgustingly, taken a concerted and disingenuous effort by the Supremes’ majority to sweep these unconstitutional attacks on humanity under the carpet.

That’s why we need “regime change” in both the Executive and the Senate which will lead to the appointment of better judges for a better America. Justices and judges who will ditch the institutionalized racism and misogyny and who will make equal justice for all under our Constitution a reality rather than the cruel hoax and “throwaway line” that it is today under GOP mis-governance.

Many thanks to our good friends and pro bono counsel at Gibson Dunn for the help in drafting our Amicus Brief!

Knightess
Knightess of the Round Table

 

Due Process Forever!

 

PWS

 

08-07-20

 

 

 

 

Related posts:

  1. HOW “AMERICA’S KILLER COURTS” PROMOTE “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” — HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH: TRUMP & HIS WHITE NATIONALIST SYCOPHANTS & TOADIES TOUT LAWLESS POLICIES THAT VIOLATE LEGAL OBLIGATIONS & HELP KILL, RAPE, TORTURE THOSE RETURNED TO EL SALVADOR — Supremes & Article III Judiciary Complicit In Gross Human Rights Violations! 
  2. GROSS NATIONAL DISGRACE: “A Fucking Disaster That Is Designed to Fail”: How Trump Wrecked America’s Immigration Courts — Fernanda Echavarri Reports For Mother Jones On How Our Failed Justice System Daily Abuses The Most Vulnerable While Feckless Legislators &   Smugly Complicit Article III Judges Look On & Ignore The Human Carnage They Are Enabling — “ Two days after US immigration officials sent her to Tijuana, she was raped.”
  3. WHEN ARTICLE III COURTS FAIL: U.S. “Orbits” Refugee Families To Dangerous Chaos In Guatemala Under Clearly Fraudulent “Safe Third Country” Arrangements As Feckless U.S. Courts Fail To Enforce Constitutional Due Process & U.S. Asylum Laws In Face Of Trump Regime’s Contemptuous Scofflaw Conduct!
  4. COMPLICITY HAS COSTS:  Article III Judges’ Association Apparently Worries That Trump, Barr, GOP Toadies Starting To “Treat Them Like Immigration Judges” — Do They Fear Descent To Status Of Mere Refugees, Immigrants, “Dreamers,” Unaccompanied Children, Or Others Treated As “Less Than Persons” By Trump, 5th Cir., 11th Cir., 9th Cir., & The Supremes’ “J.R. Five?” 

THREE STRIKES & YOU’RE OUT — Faced With BIA’s Third Wrong Deportation Order In Same Case, 9TH Cir. Finally Ends EOIR’s Decade-Long Effort To Misconstrue Law To Deport —  Valenzuela Gallardo v. Barr (Valenzuela Gallardo III), Vacating Matter of Valenzuela Gallardo, 27 I&N Dec. 449 (BIA 2018)

https://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2020/08/06/18-72593.pdf

Valenzuela Gallardo v. Barr, 9th Cir., 08-06-20, published

SYNOPSIS BY COURT STAFF:

Immigration

The panel granted Agustin Valenzuela Gallardo’s petition for review of a decision of the Board of Immigration Appeals and vacated his order of removal, holding that 8 U.S.C. §1101(a)(43)(S), which describes an aggravated felony “offense relating to obstruction of justice,” requires a nexus to an ongoing or pending proceeding or investigation and that, therefore, the BIA’s contrary construction of the statute was inconsistent with the statute’s unambiguous meaning.

In a prior published opinion, the BIA found Valenzuela Gallardo removable on the ground that his conviction for being an accessory to a felony, in violation of California Penal Code § 32, was an obstruction of justice aggravated felony under 8 U.S.C. §1101(a)(43)(S). Switching directions from its precedent, the BIA concluded that the existence of an ongoing proceeding was not an essential element of an offense relating to obstruction of justice. However, a prior panel of this court vacated the BIA’s redefinition because it raised serious questions about whether the statute is unconstitutionally vague. On remand, the BIA issued a published decision concluding that obstruction of justice offenses included not only offenses that interfered with ongoing or pending investigations or proceedings, but also those that interfered with investigations or proceedings that were reasonably

** This summary constitutes no part of the opinion of the court. It has been prepared by court staff for the convenience of the reader.

VALENZUELA GALLARDO V. BARR 3

foreseeable by the defendant. Valenzuela Gallardo again petitioned for review.

The panel began at Chevron Step Zero, where the court determines whether the Chevron framework applies at all. The panel noted amici’s argument that the BIA’s interpretation of the term “aggravated felony,” which includes offenses related to obstruction of justice, is ineligible for Chevron deference because the term has dual application in both civil proceedings, including removal proceedings, and criminal proceedings, including increased maximum prison terms for illegal reentry. The panel explained that deferring to the BIA’s construction of statutes with criminal applications raises serious constitutional concerns because only Congress has the power to write new federal criminal laws. However, the panel concluded that it was bound by the law of the case doctrine because the panel that decided Valenzuela Gallardo’s prior petition for review had applied the Chevron framework, and no exceptions to the doctrine applied.

At Chevron Step One, the panel concluded that 8 U.S.C. § 1101(a)(43)(S) is unambiguous in requiring a nexus to an ongoing or pending proceeding or investigation. The panel rejected the Government’s assertion that the court had already held that the statute is ambiguous in this regard. Next, the panel explained that the ordinary meaning of the term “obstruction of justice” when the statute was enacted in 1996 required a nexus to an extant investigation or proceeding. Looking to the term’s relevant statutory context – which the panel concluded to be Chapter 73 of Title 18, entitled “Obstruction of Justice” – the panel further explained that almost all of the substantive provisions in Chapter 73 that existed in 1996 required a nexus to an ongoing or pending proceeding or investigation.

4 VALENZUELA GALLARDO V. BARR

Because the panel concluded that § 1101(a)(43)(S) was unambiguous, it did not proceed to Chevron Step Two. The panel also noted that it would reach the same conclusion even if it were not to apply the Chevron framework.

Finally, the panel concluded that the statute under which Valenzuela Gallardo was convicted, California Penal Code § 32, is not a categorical match with obstruction of justice under § 1101(a)(43)(S) because the text of § 32 and its practical application demonstrate that it encompasses interference with proceedings or investigations that are not pending or ongoing. Accordingly, the panel vacated Valenzuela Gallardo’s removal order.

COUNSEL:

Frank Sprouls (argued) and John E. Ricci, Law Office of Ricci & Sprouls, San Francisco, California, for Petitioner.

Rebecca Hoffberg Phillips (argued), Trial Attorney; John S. Hogan, Assistant Director; Joseph H. Hunt, Assistant Attorney General; Office of Immigration Litigation, Civil Division, United States Department of Justice, Washington, D.C.; for Respondent.

Amalia Wille and Judah Lakin, Van Der Hout Brigagliano & Nightingale LLP, San Francisco, California, for Amici Curiae American Immigration Lawyers Association, U.C. Davis School of Law Immigration Law Clinic, and Asian Americans Advancing Justice—Asian Law Caucus.

PANEL: Eugene E. Siler,* Kim McLane Wardlaw, and Milan D. Smith, Jr., Circuit Judges.

  • The Honorable Eugene E. Siler, United States Circuit Judge for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, sitting by designation.

OPINION BY:  Judge Wardlaw

KEY QUOTE:

Nonetheless, both a de novo interpretation of the obstruction of justice provision utilizing traditional tools of statutory interpretation and a Chevron Step One analysis of the precise question before us—whether the BIA’s new “reasonably foreseeable” definition is at odds with the plain meaning of the statute, which was not before the prior panel—lead us to the same conclusion: the statute is unambiguous in requiring an ongoing or pending criminal proceeding, and the Board’s most recent interpretation is at odds with that unambiguous meaning.

***********************

So, let’s put this in perspective. Today’s EOIR has been “weaponized” by the Trump regime as a deportation assembly line. Immigration Judges and the BIA are pushed to cut corners and avoid careful legal analysis in a rush to deport. 

Beyond that, the regime has, with the connivance of the Supremes, found ways to deport asylum seekers and others without any meaningful hearing whatsoever. Notwithstanding all these gimmicks, moronic “production quotas,” coercive detention, biased anti-immigrant “precedents,” and the appointment of mostly prosecutors to function as “judges,” the EOIR backlog continues to mushroom out of control because of the regime’s gross mismanagement.

Yet, in the middle of all this mess, the BIA finds time to spend a decade, including three trips to the Court of Appeals, trying to manipulate the law and disregard and misinterpret prior precedent in a misguided effort to wrongfully deport this particular individual. What if we had judges who just got it correct in the first place? No wonder this system is totally out of control.

Do we need a maliciously incompetent and misdirected system like this? Of course not!

With the same amount of resources, a group of independent, qualified expert judges committed to the rule of law and due process could drastically improve the functioning of the Immigration Courts by rendering fair decisions, granting more relief where possible, and working with all “stakeholders” to  prioritize cases, find alternate dispositions for “non-priority cases,” and to move the cases that actually need to be tried through the system in a fair, reasonable, professional, and predictable manner. Such a system would produce more consistency and would avoid much of the wasteful litigation and constant intervention of the Courts of Appeals to correct mistakes that is now a staple of this system. It would be a “win” for everyone involved, including the DHS’s legitimate enforcement functions.

Of course, the particular problem with this case began when the “Post-Ashcroft-Purge” BIA started fabricating ways to deviate from one of the old “Schmidt Board” precedents, Matter of Espinoza-Gonzalez, 22 I. & N. Dec. 889, 892–94 (BIA 1999) (en banc). That case had actually found in favor of the (unrepresented) respondent, an unheard of result in today’s “bend and distort the law to deport” climate fostered by “Billy the Bigot” Barr and his predecessor “Gonzo Apocalypto” Sessions! You basically can trace EOIR’s continuous downward “death spiral” from “The Purge.”

Due Process Forever!

PWS

08-07-20

Related posts:

  1. REGIME’S NEWEST SCHEME TO SCREW ASYLUM SEEKERS: BOGUS REGS THAT WOULD ILLEGALLY & UNNECESSARILY EXTEND THE GROUNDS OF “MANDATORY DENIAL,” DECREASE ADJUDICATOR DISCRETION, & SHAFT REFUGEE FAMILIES — Regime’s Outlandish “Efficiency Rationale” Fails to Mask Their Cruelty, Racism, Fraud, Waste, & Abuse – Julia Edwards Ainsley (NBC News) & Dean Kevin R. Johnson (ImmigrationProf Blog) Report
  2. HOW “AMERICA’S KILLER COURTS” PROMOTE “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” — HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH: TRUMP & HIS WHITE NATIONALIST SYCOPHANTS & TOADIES TOUT LAWLESS POLICIES THAT VIOLATE LEGAL OBLIGATIONS & HELP KILL, RAPE, TORTURE THOSE RETURNED TO EL SALVADOR — Supremes & Article III Judiciary Complicit In Gross Human Rights Violations! 
  3. COMPLICITY HAS COSTS:  Article III Judges’ Association Apparently Worries That Trump, Barr, GOP Toadies Starting To “Treat Them Like Immigration Judges” — Do They Fear Descent To Status Of Mere Refugees, Immigrants, “Dreamers,” Unaccompanied Children, Or Others Treated As “Less Than Persons” By Trump, 5th Cir., 11th Cir., 9th Cir., & The Supremes’ “J.R. Five?” 
  4. PURE BS 💩 — TRUMP’S “BIG LIE” ABOUT MIGRANT APPEARANCES FOR HEARINGS BOGUS AS $3 BILL 🤮👎🏻— Replacing DHS/EOIR With Rational, Qualified, Fact-Based Governance & Real Judiciary Could Bring Appearance Rate Close To 100%!  — Two Items From ImmigrationProf Blog!

🤡☠️🤮CLOWN COURTS’ DEADLY REOPENING SCHEME ISN’T A “PLAN AT ALL” —It’s A Recipe For Dysfunction, Disaster, & Potential Death By “Malicious Incompetence” — Are There No “Grown Ups” Left in Congress or The Article IIIs With The Guts To End This Stain Our Nation?

 

https://immigrationimpact.com/2020/08/04/coronavirus-immigration-court/

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick on Immigration Impact:

COVID-19 Wreaks Havoc on Immigration Courts With No Clear Plan to Stop Spread

Posted by Aaron Reichlin-Melnick | Aug 4, 2020 | Due Process & the Courts, Immigration Courts

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to spread throughout the United States, immigration courts around the country remain in turmoil.

The Executive Office for Immigration Review (“EOIR”) initially postponed all non-detained hearings when lockdowns began in March. However, EOIR refused to close all courts. Hearings for detained immigrants and unaccompanied children continued, despite the risks. Now, nearly five months later, EOIR still has no public plan to limit the spread of COVID-19 as it slowly begins to reopen courts around the country.

Immigration Courts Reopen Across the U.S.

Beginning in mid-June, EOIR began reopening some immigration courts, starting with the Honolulu immigration court.

Since then, courts have reopened for hearings in Boston, Dallas, Las Vegas, Hartford, New Orleans, Cleveland, Philadelphia, Newark, Baltimore, Detroit, and Arlington. However, following the rise in COVID-19 cases in Texas, the Dallas immigration court was open for less than a week before shutting again. It remains closed.

After the court reopened in Newark, immigration lawyers filed a lawsuit seeking to halt the court reopening. They explained that the court has not provided enough safety protocols. According to the lawsuit, they believe at least two deaths, including an immigration lawyer and a clerk for ICE in Newark, can already be traced to court hearings that occurred before the initial shutdown.

At a town hall, the National Association of Immigration Judges discussed the reopening. The union stated that EOIR doesn’t determine which courts reopen. Those decisions come from the local U.S. Attorney, who are political appointees working for the Department of Justice.

No Concrete Plan for Stopping COVID-19 Spread in Courts

Making matters worse, EOIR has still not explained what the criteria are for opening courts. The only safety guidelines the agency has published are simply those generally applicable to the public, such as asking people to socially distance, wear masks, and not appear in court if they have tested positive for COVID-19.

These limited guidelines do not provide anywhere near enough information to ensure safety for people appearing in court.

For example, EOIR fails to explain how translation services will work, which is but one of many unresolved questions about safety. In many courts, interpreters sit directly next to the person for whom they are interpreting so they can hear every word. But social distancing would be impossible in that scenario.

If EOIR wanted to replace all in-person interpretation with telephonic interpretation, that may not be a viable solution. Some people’s cases could be hurt by lower quality interpretation over what are often noisy phone lines.

Courts that have reopened have mostly been hearing only “individual” merits hearings, the equivalent of a trial in the immigration court system. Master calendar hearings, at which dozens of people wait in a courtroom together to review their immigration charges, are not currently happening in most reopened courts.

The agency has indicated that some master calendar hearings with reduced numbers of participants will move forward. But even with a limited caseload, practitioners report chaos and confusion as court hearings begin again.

Lawyers report having cases advanced or postponed with little notice and almost no input. This can be particularly hard for individuals without attorneys. They may be unable to keep track of rapid changes at the courts.

This chaos underscores the need for a public safety plan. EOIR must ensure the public that it can run the courts safely.

Without that plan, the agency’s actions so far reinforce the White House’s goal of keeping the deportation machine running without taking public health into consideration. Before any further courts reopen, EOIR must make its plans clear, or else public health and the right to a fair day in court will continue to suffer.

FILED UNDER: covid-19, EOIR

***********************

Wow! Talk about a democracy in meltdown! 

Some of those caught up by these “crimes against humanity” won’t survive to tell their stories. So, it’s important that those of us who recognize this unending tragedy both document it and insure that history will not let those responsible escape accountability, be they Supreme Court Justices, political leaders, or lower level bureaucrats repeating the hollow “just doing my job” mantra as they enable or carry out these grotesque acts. 

For those who watched “Immigration Nation,” how many times did you hear variations of the latter excuse from Federal bureaucrats as they heaped unnecessary, and in many cases illegal and immoral,  carnage on their fellow human beings? How many times did you hear folks who are supposed to understand the system falsely use the “get in line” or “do it the right way” lies? 

The ugly stain of the Trump regime’s illegal conduct, cowardice, cruelty, dishonesty, and inhumanity, and that of those who aided and abetted it, will not be wiped away!

Due Process Forever!

PWS

08-06-20

Related posts:

  1. 🏴‍☠️☠️⚰️KAKISTOCRACY WATCH: AILA Blasts Appointment Of Prosecutors Without Judicial Qualifications To Top Judicial Positions in Billy the Bigot’s Weaponized Anti-Due-Process “Court” System — Dysfunction, Bias, Illegitimate Decisions Run Rampant As Congress, Article IIIs Fail to Enforce U.S. Constitution!
  2. FELIPE DE LA HOZ @ THE NATION: “The Shadow Court Cementing Trump’s Immigration Policy” — “It’s not a court anymore, it’s an enforcement mechanism,” said Paul Wickham Schmidt, who was himself chair of the BIA between 1995 and 2001 and now writes a popular immigration blog called Immigration Courtside. “They’re taking predetermined policy and just disguising it as judicial opinions, when the results have all been predetermined and it has nothing to do or little to do with the merits of the cases.”
  3. SENATORS DEMAND IG INVESTIGATE BIAS, CORRUPTION, GROSS MISMANAGEMENT @ EOIR!
  4. PURE BS 💩 — TRUMP’S “BIG LIE” ABOUT MIGRANT APPEARANCES FOR HEARINGS BOGUS AS $3 BILL 🤮👎🏻— Replacing DHS/EOIR With Rational, Qualified, Fact-Based Governance & Real Judiciary Could Bring Appearance Rate Close To 100%!  — Two Items From ImmigrationProf Blog!

🏴‍☠️🤮👎🏻RACISM IN AMERICA: With Racially Tone-Deaf Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson & His Righty Buddy Judge Paul Niemeyer Leading the Way, Split 4th Circuit Panel, Says “Yes” To Trump/Miller White Nationalist Attack On Public Benefits For Immigrants of Color! 

Kevin R. Johnson
Kevin R. Johnson
Dean
U.C. Davis Law

Dean Kevin Johnson @ ImmigrationProf Blog reports:

https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/immigration/2020/08/fourth-circuit-vacates-injunction-against-public-charge-immigration-rule.html

Thursday, August 6, 2020

Fourth Circuit Vacates Injunction Against Public Charge Immigration Rule

By Immigration Prof

Share

pastedGraphic.png

Courthouse News Service reports that the Fourth Circuit yesterday ruled 2-1 (opinion by Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson, with Judge Robert B. King dissenting)  in favor of a Trump administration policy that makes it more difficult for noncitizens to become lawful permanent residents if they have received public benefits.

The ruling does not, however, change an injunction issued last week by a federal judge in New York barring enforcement of the so-called public charge rule.

The Second Circuit affirmed the injunction but limited its scope to New York, Connecticut and Vermont. The appeals court found the government’s justification for the rule is “unmoored from the nuanced views of Congress.”

KJ

 

****************

Judge Wilkinson’s racially insensitive judging recently was publicly “called out” by Fourth Circuit Chief Judge Roger Gregory in a remarkably honest and incisive opinion. https://immigrationcourtside.com/2020/07/16/%e2%9a%96%ef%b8%8fcalling-out-white-nationalist-judging-in-a-remarkable-opinion-4th-cir-chief-judge-roger-gregory-blasts-colleagues-retrograde-views-on-race-judging-policing-communiti/

Perhaps, dissenting Judge Robert B. King best sums up his colleagues’ willingness to distort the law and pervert rationality in support of the regime’s racist-driven, White Nationalist Immigration agenda:

In the face of the extensive history accompanying the term “public charge,” to conclude that the DHS Rule’s definition of “public charge” is reasonable makes a mockery of the term “public charge,” “does violence to the English language and the statutory context,” and disrespects the choice — made consistently by Congress over the last century and a quarter — to retain the term in our immigration laws. See Cook Cty., 962 F.3d at 229. For those reasons, the Rule’s “public charge” definition ventures far beyond any ambiguity inherent in the meaning of the term “public charge,” as used in the Public Charge Statute, and thus fails at Chevron’s second step. In light of the foregoing, the plaintiffs are likely to succeed on the merits of their claim that the Rule is unlawful, and the majority is wrong to conclude otherwise.

Equal justice for all, due process, reasonableness, and non-racist judging aren’t “rocket science.” That’s why Wilkinson had to cloak his anti-immigrant bias with 71 pages of irrational nonsense and legal gobbledygook. 

Just another example of the U.S. District Judge “getting it right” only to be undermined by bad judging from higher Federal Courts. Unwillingness of the Federal Judiciary to take a unified strand for equal justice and against institutionalized racism and the White Nationalist agenda of the Trump regime is literally ripping our nation apart as well as showing the fatal weakness of the Federal Judiciary as a protector of our democracy and our individual rights.

Folks like Wilkinson and Niemeyer are what they are. But, we have the power to elect a President and a Senate who will appoint judges who actually believe in Constitutional due process and equal justice for all, regardless of color or status. Judges who will “tell it like it is,” “just say no” to “Dred Scottification” of “the other,” and courageously stand up for an unbiased interpretation the law and for simple human decency, rather than pretzeling themselves to defend an indefensible Executive agenda of unbridled White Nationalism and racism.

This November vote like your life and the future of our nation depend on it. Because they do.

PWS

08-06-20

Related posts:

  1. PURE BS 💩 — TRUMP’S “BIG LIE” ABOUT MIGRANT APPEARANCES FOR HEARINGS BOGUS AS $3 BILL 🤮👎🏻— Replacing DHS/EOIR With Rational, Qualified, Fact-Based Governance & Real Judiciary Could Bring Appearance Rate Close To 100%!  — Two Items From ImmigrationProf Blog!
  2. HOW “AMERICA’S KILLER COURTS” PROMOTE “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” — HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH: TRUMP & HIS WHITE NATIONALIST SYCOPHANTS & TOADIES TOUT LAWLESS POLICIES THAT VIOLATE LEGAL OBLIGATIONS & HELP KILL, RAPE, TORTURE THOSE RETURNED TO EL SALVADOR — Supremes & Article III Judiciary Complicit In Gross Human Rights Violations! 
  3. REGIME’S NEWEST SCHEME TO SCREW ASYLUM SEEKERS: BOGUS REGS THAT WOULD ILLEGALLY & UNNECESSARILY EXTEND THE GROUNDS OF “MANDATORY DENIAL,” DECREASE ADJUDICATOR DISCRETION, & SHAFT REFUGEE FAMILIES — Regime’s Outlandish “Efficiency Rationale” Fails to Mask Their Cruelty, Racism, Fraud, Waste, & Abuse – Julia Edwards Ainsley (NBC News) & Dean Kevin R. Johnson (ImmigrationProf Blog) Report
  4. 👹🎃HALLOWEEN HORROR 🏴‍☠️☠️🤮⚰️👎🏻REICHSREPORT: GRUPPENFUHRER MILLER REVEALS “REICHSPLAN” FOR EXTERMINATION OF IMMIGRATION, ASYLUM, REFUGE BY EXECUTIVE DECREE!  — “The Final Solution??”  — Parents, Protect Your Kids, Families, & Your Country From This Grotesque Un-American Monster!

🏴‍☠️☠️🤮👎🏻KAKISTOCRACY ON PARADE: “Billy The Bigot Barr” Rips The Heart Out Of the Rule Of Law!

https://apple.news/AKhj9lEQ0T9ucyrOTcSmbxw

Andrew Weissmann writes in The Atlantic:

. . . .

So what does this all mean? It means that if you are personally connected to the president or have information that could hurt the president, or both, you can be treated far more favorably by this attorney general, as he will bend the law and facts to the president’s desired result. His [Billy the Bigot’s] actions in U.S. v. Stone strike at the heart of the Aristotelian principle central to the rule of law, that we treat likes alike. John Locke warned that “where law ends, tyranny begins.” Now, more than three centuries later, that statement applies to the head of the American system of justice.

*********************

Read the rest of the article at the link.

Billy is destroying the rule of law. Look that the absolute disaster he has created in America’s Star Chambers (a/k/a Immigration “Courts” that aren’t).

But he has help. The GOP Senate that signals a refusal to consider impeachment and Federal Judges who fail to call out his totally unethical, corrupt, and often illegal conduct also are to blame! He should have been removed from office, stripped of his law license, and perhaps prosecuted. Instead, he’s free to abuse.

When the career prosecutors resign from a case, that’s a clear sign that something’s wrong! Yet those empowered to stop the misconduct look the other way.

Let’s put this in perspective. This is an regime that has prosecuted individuals and taken their children away from them for the “crime” of entering the U.S., turning themselves in to the Border Patrol, and applying for asylum. Yet, convicted felons with ties to the President are given preferential treatment.

Stone, a felon, gets favorable treatment, allegedly because of COVID-19. Meanwhile, “civil” immigration detainees who have not been convicted of anything, and are merely waiting for a fair hearing process in Barr’s wholly owned “courts” which he has grossly mismanaged into total dysfunctionality, are subjected to COVID-19 as part of DHS’s “Detain Until Dead” (“DUD”) policy.

Due Process Forever! Corrupt AG’s (Like Barr & Sessions), Never Again!

PWS

08-06-20

Related posts:

  1. EX-US JUDGE UNLOADS TRUTH IN USDC FILING ABOUT BILLY BARR’S ATTEMPT TO SUBVERT JUSTICE BY UNDOING FLYNN PROSECUTION: Corrupt, Dishonest, Unethical, Unprofessional – DOJ’s Request to Dismiss Flynn Prosecution is “Preposterous” – Our Police Departments Aren’t The Only Part of Our Foundering, Rudderless, & Disturbingly Ineffective, Racially & Morally “Tone-Deaf” Justice System That Needs Substantial & Meaningful Reform!        
  2. 🤮NO PEACE ON EARTH GOODWILL TOWARD MEN (WOMEN, OR ESPECIALLY CHILDREN) FROM REGIME OF “BAD SANTAS” 🦹🏿‍♂️🎅🏻— Illegally Separated Families Continue To Suffer Irreparable Trauma, 😰 Volunteer Groups 😇🗽⚖️ Left To Pick Up Pieces — A Reminder That Defeated Regime Has Mocked, Disparaged, & Trashed Christ’s Values & Assaulted Humanity Over Four Christmases!🏴‍☠️🤮☠️⚰️👎🏻
  3. GROSS NATIONAL DISGRACE: “A Fucking Disaster That Is Designed to Fail”: How Trump Wrecked America’s Immigration Courts — Fernanda Echavarri Reports For Mother Jones On How Our Failed Justice System Daily Abuses The Most Vulnerable While Feckless Legislators &   Smugly Complicit Article III Judges Look On & Ignore The Human Carnage They Are Enabling — “ Two days after US immigration officials sent her to Tijuana, she was raped.”
  4. JULIA AINSLEY & JACOB SOBOROFF @ NBC NEWS REPORT ON WHITE NATIONALIST WHITE HOUSE: Neo-Nazi Stephen Miller & Cabinet Racists Voted To Abuse Brown Children: “If we don’t enforce this, it is the end of our country as we know it,” Said The New American Gruppenfuhrer!” — “Any moral argument regarding immigration ‘fell on deaf ears’ inside the White House, said one of the officials.”

🏴‍☠️DUE PROCESS FARCE CONTINUES AT BIA: “Good Enough For Government Work” Standard For Notice of Address Only Applies To DHS — Foreign Nationals Held To Strict Compliance — Matter of NIVELO CARDENAS, 28 I&N Dec. 68 (BIA 2020)

Matter of NIVELO CARDENAS, 28 I&N Dec. 68 (BIA 2020)

The Board of Immigration Appeals has issued a decision in the Matter of NIVELO CARDENAS, 28 I&N Dec. 68 (BIA 2020)

(1) Where an alien who has been personally served with a notice to appear advising him of the requirement to notify the Immigration Court of his correct address fails to do so and is ordered removed in absentia for failure to appear for the scheduled hearing, reopening of the proceedings to rescind his order of removal based on a lack of proper notice is not warranted under section 240(b)(5)(C)(ii) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, 8 U.S.C. § 1229a(b)(5)(C)(ii) (2018).
(2) The respondent’s failure to update his address for over 18 years indicates a lack of due diligence and may properly be found to undermine the veracity of his claim that he has taken actions to maintain his rights in the underlying removal proceedings.

BIA PANEL: MALPHRUS and HUNSUCKER, Appellate Immigration Judges; GEMOETS, Temporary Appellate Immigration Judge.

OPINION BY: HUNSUCKER, Appellate Immigration Judge:

*****************************

So, let’s get this a straight. The DHS has the burden of proof on notice and removability in an in absentia case. The BIA has previously said that writing some street in Tijuana, Mexico is a sufficient address for DHS to provide EOIR as part of the “Remain in Mexico” program. Matter of J.J. RODRIGUEZ, 27 I&N Dec. 762 (BIA 2020). https://immigrationcourtside.com/2020/01/31/bia-any-ol-notice-is-good-enough-for-endangered-asylum-seekers-orbited-to-mexico-beyond-matter-of-j-j-rodriguez-how-judges-at-all-levels-are-abandoning-the-rule-of-law-enab/

I call this the “good enough for Government work” approach. So, if the Government is basically allowed to get away with minimal compliance with address notice, one would expect an equally lenient approach for foreign nationals, who, after all, have far less control over the system and far fewer resources than the Government. No way!

When an individual apparently writes a “b” instead of an “h” (notice any similarity?) in a U.S. Street address, it’s “tough noogies.” That’s even where there is some evidence to suggest that the DHS actually had the correct address somewhere in their files. Normally, it would be standard practice for an Immigration Judge to check the address with DHS before entering an in abstentia order. Additionally, the BIA surmised that the some unknown individual at the incorrect address must have received and rejected the letter.

That’s not to mention the practical reality that even if the respondent had corrected his address using the proper form, there is little chance of it actually getting in the Court’s file in a timely manner. I used to marvel at the piles of unfiled address change forms I witnessed at various times during my EOIR career.

I’d also bet that it would have taken less time and effort to reopen this case and give this respondent a merits hearing than it took to deny the MTR, have it appealed to the BIA, and make it a precedent. There was a time when EOIR actually viewed its function as providing due process hearings. Now, the idea is to use as many gimmicks as possible to avoid fear hearings and produce numbers.

In other words, Billy the Bigot’s BIA will do whatever is necessary to assist their “partners” (actually “superiors”) at DHS to rack up removal orders. Because, foreign nationals are “numbers” and “stats,” not humans. And if you can do it “in absentia” — that is without any real hearing at all — so much the better.

PWS

08-05-20

Related posts:

  1. THE TRUTH IS OUT, THANKS TO MICHELLE MENDEZ @ CLINIC: Practice Pointers on Matter of Castillo-Perez & “Takeaways” From FOIA Trove On In Absentias!
  2. PURE BS 💩 — TRUMP’S “BIG LIE” ABOUT MIGRANT APPEARANCES FOR HEARINGS BOGUS AS $3 BILL 🤮👎🏻— Replacing DHS/EOIR With Rational, Qualified, Fact-Based Governance & Real Judiciary Could Bring Appearance Rate Close To 100%!  — Two Items From ImmigrationProf Blog!
  3. “GOOD ENOUGH FOR GOVERNMENT WORK?” — Any Ol’ Notice Will Do! — BIA Continues To “Fill In The Blanks” In Aid Of “Partners” @ DHS Enforcement — MATTER OF HERRERA-VASQUEZ, 27 I&N DEC. 825 (BIA 2020)
  4. REGIME’S NEWEST SCHEME TO SCREW ASYLUM SEEKERS: BOGUS REGS THAT WOULD ILLEGALLY & UNNECESSARILY EXTEND THE GROUNDS OF “MANDATORY DENIAL,” DECREASE ADJUDICATOR DISCRETION, & SHAFT REFUGEE FAMILIES — Regime’s Outlandish “Efficiency Rationale” Fails to Mask Their Cruelty, Racism, Fraud, Waste, & Abuse – Julia Edwards Ainsley (NBC News) & Dean Kevin R. Johnson (ImmigrationProf Blog) Report

🏴‍☠️☠️🤮⚰️👎🏻 “PERP NATION” — DHS’S “NEW AMERICAN GULAG” IS A DEATH TRAP FOR MIGRANTS SEEKING JUSTICE — So Why Haven’t Congress & The Federal Courts Required DHS To Comply With The Constitution? — Because We Have The Wrong Folks In Congress & The Federal Courts!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/migrants-at-ice-detention-centers-are-sitting-ducks-because-of-an-inhumane-policy/2020/08/04/578c668c-c2f7-11ea-9fdd-b7ac6b051dc8_story.html

From WashPost Editorial Board:

Opinion by the Editorial Board
August 4 at 6:20 PM ET

COVID-19 has exploded at migrant detention centers nationwide, infecting detainees and employees alike and seeding the disease aboard deportation flights to countries ill-equipped to respond, especially in Latin America. The facilities, run by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, are petri dishes of contagion, and the residents — many of whom have no serious criminal record — are sitting ducks in the crosshairs of an inhumane policy.
A federal judge has ordered the release of migrant children at two ICE family detention centers in Texas and one in Pennsylvania, having found them at risk to the virus and to spotty enforcement of safety measures. But across the country, scores more facilities have been hit hard by the pandemic, and ICE has been unable to contain it.
[Full coverage of the coronavirus pandemic]
Roughly 1,000 new covid-19 cases have been diagnosed in ICE facilities since early July, bringing the number who have tested positive for the disease since March to roughly 4,000. That’s roughly a fifth of all those who have been tested, though some were infected before ICE took them into custody.
Courts have ordered more than 500 at-risk detainees released, and ICE has released an additional 900 at its own initiative. Those reductions, along with ongoing deportations, have cut the detainee population by 40 percent since March, to roughly 22,000 now. That’s good, but it is clear that the agency’s steps to mitigate the outbreak have been inadequate. It is also clear that testing at the facilities has lagged, proper distancing at some is insufficient, and health care is not equal to the task of containment. At the Farmville Detention Center in Virginia, west of Richmond, nearly two-thirds of 400 detainees have tested positive for the virus in recent weeks.
Moreover, ICE has been complicit in accelerating the pandemic’s reach into Central America, the Caribbean and elsewhere, by deporting tens of thousands of migrants since the spring, including some who were infected. At least a dozen countries assert that deportees arrived with the virus.
Many were not tested before boarding the flights. On one deportation flight to India in May, 22 passengers — about 15 percent of those onboard — tested positive upon arriving in India. In Guatemala, authorities say more than 160 deportees who have arrived since April tested positive for the virus. “We understand the United States wants to deport people,” said Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei in May. “What we don’t understand is why they send us all these contaminated flights.”
[We are interested in hearing about how the struggle to reopen amid the pandemic is affecting people’s lives. Please tell us yours.]
Advocates and public health officials have urged ICE to accelerate the release of at-risk detainees, who can be fitted with ankle monitors to encourage their appearance at immigration court proceedings. ICE has done some of that; it is critical that it do more.
To continue detaining nonviolent detainees as the virus tightens its grip on ICE facilities is pointless and dangerous — for detainees and for employees, scores of whom have been infected with covid-19. It’s past time for ICE to intensify the fight against covid-19, and reassess a policy that has failed to contain a pandemic behind bars.

************************

ICE is a White Nationalist enabler operating within a White Nationalist kakistocracy.

Expecting ICE to do the right thing without being ordered to do so by Congress or the Federal Courts is absurd. We’re in the middle of a deadly meltdown of our democratic institutions.

And, led by the Roberts’ Court’s spineless complicity in the face of clear unconstitutionality, illegality, immorality, and inhumanity from the Trump regime, the failure of the Federal Courts to take a strong, unified approach against the “crimes against humanity” committed by the Trump regime on migrants and others is a national disgrace. Something we have to consider as a nation moving forward.

Better judges for a better America! Time to stop appointing “Dred Scottifyers” and non-believers in due process, human rights, and equal justice for all to our life-tenured courts! The damage they have done will take decades to repair. We can’t afford to continue the GOP’s recent tradition of elevating bad judges who won’t stand up for and don’t believe in American democracy.

When our nation is experiencing massive and deadly institutional failure and a failure of legal and moral leadership, we must start looking at the qualifications and values (or in some cases the rather obvious lack thereof) of the folks in those failing institutions! In a democracy, bad leadership doesn’t “drop out of the sky.” It’s a product of bad decisions and apathy among those with the power to select our leaders. That means all of us who can vote or encourage others to vote.

This November, vote like your life and the future of our democracy depend on it! Because they do!

Due Process Forever!

PWS

08-05-20

 

 

 

Related posts:

  1. 🏴‍☠️☠️⚰️🤮👎🏻THE TRUMP REGIME & A CORRUPT SOLICITOR GENERAL HAVE CONDUCTED A WAR OF ATTRITION AGAINST AMERICAN LAWYERS ON THE FRONT LINES OF THE BATTLE TO SAVE DEMOCRACY — John Roberts & His GOP Buddies On The Supremes Have Aided, Abetted, & Encouraged It! — Constant Improper & Ethically Questionable Interference With Thoughtful, Legally Correct Lower Court Rulings Holding The Regime Accountable Have Demoralized The Profession’s Best & Bravest! — The Answer Is Better Judges For A Better America!
  2. 👹🎃HALLOWEEN HORROR 🏴‍☠️☠️🤮⚰️👎🏻REICHSREPORT: GRUPPENFUHRER MILLER REVEALS “REICHSPLAN” FOR EXTERMINATION OF IMMIGRATION, ASYLUM, REFUGE BY EXECUTIVE DECREE!  — “The Final Solution??”  — Parents, Protect Your Kids, Families, & Your Country From This Grotesque Un-American Monster!
  3. 🏴‍☠️☠️⚰️KAKISTOCRACY WATCH: AILA Blasts Appointment Of Prosecutors Without Judicial Qualifications To Top Judicial Positions in Billy the Bigot’s Weaponized Anti-Due-Process “Court” System — Dysfunction, Bias, Illegitimate Decisions Run Rampant As Congress, Article IIIs Fail to Enforce U.S. Constitution!
  4. 🏴‍☠️☠️🤮👎🏻IN NYT OP-ED, FORMER TRUMP DOJ ATTORNEY ERICA NEWLAND ADMITS COMPLICITY! — Having Undermined Democratic Institutions, Sold False Narratives To (Too Often Willing) Federal Judges, & Participated In Racist-Inspired “Dred Scottification” (“Dehumanization”) Of the Other Is Actually a BIG Deal! — So Is The Destruction Of Due Process & Fundamental Fairness In The Immigration Courts (Now, “Clown Courts”🤡, or “America’s Star Chambers”☠️) 

🏴‍☠️🤮👎🏻⚰️”PERP NATION” — Cowardly Regime Uses COVID-19 As Pretext For Grotesque Abuses Of Migrant Children, As Congress, Federal Courts Spinelessly Allow It To Happen! — “Crimes Against Humanity” Have Consequences For “Perp Nations!”

Lomi Kriel
Lomi Kriel
Immigration Reporter
Texas Tribune & Pro Publica

https://www.texastribune.org/2020/08/04/border-migrant-children-hotels/

Federal agents are expelling asylum seekers as young as 8 months from the border, citing COVID-19 risks

Thousands of migrant children have been expelled by the Trump administration since March. Some have been held in hotels without access to lawyers or family. Advocates say many are now “virtually impossible” to find.

BY LOMI KRIEL, THE TEXAS TRIBUNE AND PROPUBLICA AUG. 4, 20208 HOURS AGO

A teenage girl carrying her baby arrived at the U.S. border this summer and begged for help. She told federal agents that she feared returning to Guatemala. The man who raped her she said had threatened to make her “disappear.”

Then, advocates say, the child briefly vanished — into the custody of the U.S. government, which held her and her baby for days in a hotel with almost no outside contact before federal officers summarily expelled them from the country.

Similar actions have played out along the border for months under an emergency health order the Trump administration issued in March. Citing the threat of COVID-19, it granted federal agents sweeping powers to almost immediately return anyone at the border, including infants as young as 8 months. Children are typically entitled to special protections under the law, including the right to have their asylum claims adjudicated by a judge.

Under this new policy, the administration is not deporting children — a proceeding based on years of established law that requires a formal hearing in immigration court.

It is instead expelling them — without a judge’s ruling and after only a cursory government screening and no access to social workers or lawyers, sometimes not even their family, while in U.S. custody. The children are not even granted the primary registration number by which the Department of Homeland Security tracks all immigrants in its care, making it “virtually impossible” to find them, Efrén C. Olivares, a lawyer with the Texas Civil Rights Project, wrote in a court declaration arguing that the practice is illegal.

Little is known about how the process works, but published government figures suggest almost all children arriving at the border are being rapidly returned.

. . . .

A sense of deja vu

Thirty-five years ago, a 15-year-old Salvadoran girl fleeing a civil war in her homeland was also imprisoned in an American hotel under the care of unlicensed private security guards. Jenny Flores’ case forced the most significant overhaul yet of how U.S. authorities can detain migrant children. In fact, the 1997 federal settlement is named for her.

Carlos Holguín, who began litigating that case in 1985, said there is now a sense of “deja vu … but the degree of lawlessness is even beyond what was going on then.”

Since taking office, the Trump administration has tried to end the Flores Settlement, arguing that it and a 2008 trafficking law work as “loopholes” encouraging families to send children here alone. The government has attempted to undo the settlement through regulations and requested Congress curtail the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, which requires certain safeguards for children arriving alone at the border.

So far, both efforts have failed.

The administration tried separating parents and children at the border, but a federal judge largely ruled against the practice in 2018, allowing it only in narrow circumstances such as if the adult poses a danger.

U.S. District Judge Dolly Gee, who is in charge of the Flores Settlement, has determined the administration must quickly release children locked up with their parents in immigrant detention centers, most recently citing the risk of coronavirus spreading.

“The family residential centers are on fire and there is no more time for half measures,” she wrote in a June 26 order.

The government is now arguing it can force detained parents to choose between freeing their children or staying indefinitely imprisoned with them.

But none of the administration’s attempts to undo either the settlement or the law have been as effective as the expulsion order, which is “eviscerating every single protection mechanism outlined by Congress and the courts with one sweeping gesture,” said Podkul of KIND.

Late last month, the ACLU sued to allow its lawyers access to children detained in the McAllen Hampton Inn after a video went viral showing a Texas Civil Rights Project lawyer forcibly pushed away.

“The children are in imminent danger of unlawful removal,” the attorneys wrote.

Facing a public relations scandal, Hilton quickly announced that all three hotels had canceled reservations with MVM.

“We expect all Hilton properties to reject business that would use a hotel in this way,” a Hilton spokesperson said.

Government attorneys agreed to pause the expulsion of the migrants who they said remained in the McAllen hotel on the date of the lawsuit — once again, ACLU attorneys said, mooting litigation on the broader policy. A separate suit involving a 13-year-old Salvadoran girl who was expelled this summer is still pending in a Washington, D.C., federal court.

By the time the administration stopped the removal of the migrants detained at the Hampton Inn, most who had been held there had already been expelled or transferred elsewhere — some, advocates said, just before the ACLU filed its lawsuit. Only 17 family members, including one unaccompanied child, remained in that hotel.

What happened to the rest? No one would say.

*****************

Read the rest of the article at the link.

It might be “below the radar screen” during COVID-19. After all, that’s what criminals like the Trump kakistocracy and their DHS accomplices count on — a diversion so that they can abuse children and violate human rights and human dignity to the content of their evil, White Nationalist hearts.

But, eventually, the truth about the “crimes against humanity” by the regime’s cowards as well as the complicity of legislators, the Roberts Court, and a host of others will come out.

How will we explain to future generations what we have done to our fellow humans, particularly the most vulnerable who have sought our legal protection and found only cruelty, racism, and lawlessness? How will we justify racist-driven institutionalized child abuse and “Dred Scottification” of  “the other” on our watch? We have become “Perp Nation!”

Due Process Forever!

PWS

08-05-20

Related posts:

  1. COURTSIDE HAS BEEN AT THE FOREFRONT OF EXPOSING THE “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” COMMITTED BY THE REGIME AND THE MORAL CULPABILITY OF THOSE WHO WILLFULLY CARRY OUT & ENABLE THESE ATROCITIES — The “Mainstream Media” Is Now Channeling Courtside! — “In the meantime, no government has the right to treat people with such abject inhumanity. History will remember Trump for this, but it will also remember the people who enable such atrocious acts.”
  2. COMPLICITY HAS COSTS:  Article III Judges’ Association Apparently Worries That Trump, Barr, GOP Toadies Starting To “Treat Them Like Immigration Judges” — Do They Fear Descent To Status Of Mere Refugees, Immigrants, “Dreamers,” Unaccompanied Children, Or Others Treated As “Less Than Persons” By Trump, 5th Cir., 11th Cir., 9th Cir., & The Supremes’ “J.R. Five?” 
  3. HOW “AMERICA’S KILLER COURTS” PROMOTE “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” — HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH: TRUMP & HIS WHITE NATIONALIST SYCOPHANTS & TOADIES TOUT LAWLESS POLICIES THAT VIOLATE LEGAL OBLIGATIONS & HELP KILL, RAPE, TORTURE THOSE RETURNED TO EL SALVADOR — Supremes & Article III Judiciary Complicit In Gross Human Rights Violations! 
  4. GROSS NATIONAL DISGRACE: “A Fucking Disaster That Is Designed to Fail”: How Trump Wrecked America’s Immigration Courts — Fernanda Echavarri Reports For Mother Jones On How Our Failed Justice System Daily Abuses The Most Vulnerable While Feckless Legislators &   Smugly Complicit Article III Judges Look On & Ignore The Human Carnage They Are Enabling — “ Two days after US immigration officials sent her to Tijuana, she was raped.”

THE GIBSON REPORT 08-03-20 — Compiled By Elizabeth Gibson, Esquire, NY Legal Assistance Group

Elizabeth Gibson
Elizabeth Gibson
Attorney, NY Legal Assistance Group
Publisher of “The Gibson Report”

THE GIBSON REPORT 08-03-20 — Compiled By Elizabeth Gibson, Esquire, NY Legal Assistance Group

COVID-19

Note: Policies are rapidly changing, so please verify the latest policies on the relevant government websites and with colleagues on listservs as best you can.

 

New

  • Opening dates for some non-detained courts: Hearings in non-detained cases at courts without an announced date are postponed through, and including, August 21, 2020.
  • USCIS Visitor Policy (If requesting telephonic appearance of counsel at an interview, don’t forget to send the client to the interview with a signed G-28 that contains the number where USCIS should call you.)

 

Closures

 

Guidance:

 

TOP NEWS

 

The Trump Administration Will Start Charging Immigrants Fees For Applying For Asylum

Buzzfeed: The US now joins the ranks of Iran, Fiji, and Australia in charging a fee. In the US, there will be a $50 charge on asylum applications starting in October…The asylum fee is just one of many changes included in the rule issued by USCIS, which is primarily funded by immigrants’ applications, such as filing for a green card or work permit. The agency is required to review its fee structure every two years. The final rule will make it so immigrants seeking to naturalize and applying to become US citizens will have to pay upwards of $1,170, a jump from $640. See also Changes to USCIS Fee Schedule; USCIS Pleads for Money to Avoid Furloughs, Democrats Float Making the Funds Contingent on Policy Changes.

 

Trump administration won’t accept new DACA applications

AP: The Trump administration said Tuesday that it will reject new applications and shorten renewal periods for an Obama-era program that shields young people from deportation, taking a defiant stance after the U.S. Supreme Court refused to let it be scrapped completely.

 

DOJ loses bid to nix union for immigration judges

Reuters: A Federal Labor Relations Authority (FLRA) official on Friday rejected the Trump administration’s bid to dissolve a union that represents U.S. immigration judges, saying the judges are not “management officials” who are barred from joining unions.

 

Homeland Security seized $2 billion from travelers, but most were never charged with a crime, report says

WaPo: Federal law allows CBP and other agencies to take cash from travelers as a way to combat drug trafficking and other criminal enterprises, but the new report by the Institute for Justice found nearly 70 percent of such cases are like Nwaorie’s — no arrest accompanies a seizure.

 

Acting ICE chief announces retirement following clashes with Trump officials

Politico: White House officials had accused Albence of favoring humanitarian concerns about the treatment of immigrants over the chance to take more aggressive action.

 

Border Patrol Launches Militarized Raid Of Borderlands Humanitarian Aid Camp

Intercept: For the second time in two years, Border Patrol launched a raid against No More Deaths within days of the group releasing embarrassing information about the agency.

 

Pardoned By Cuomo But Detained By ICE, Bronx Immigrant Marks Three Years In ICE Detention

Gothamist: In an extraordinary move six months ago, Governor Andrew Cuomo pardoned the 26-year-old Gambian immigrant from the Bronx for the one adult criminal conviction on his record — for robbing two gold chains from a female neighbor’s neck, which he said he didn’t do. His attorneys and the legion of activists who are supporting him thought that would pave the way for authorities to release him. That hasn’t happened.

 

Trump To Limit Federal Contractors’ Use Of Foreign Labor

Law 360: President Donald Trump will sign an executive order Monday that will require federal agencies to prioritize U.S. citizens and nationals for contractor roles, expanding on previous orders limiting immigration from June and April.

 

LITIGATION/CASELAW/RULES/MEMOS

 

District Court Issues Nationwide Injunction on Both DOS and DHS Public Charge Regulations Due to COVID-19

A district judge issued a nationwide injunction on both the DOS and DHS public charge rules due to COVID-19. (Make the Road New York, et al., v. DHS, 7/29/20) AILA Doc. No. 20072935

 

Attorney General Rules on Categorical Approach to Determining Aggravated Felonies

Ruling on the application of the categorical approach to determining aggravated felonies and that respondent’s conviction for grand larceny in the second degree in NY was an aggravated felony, the AG vacated BIA’s decision in Matter of Reyes. Matter of Reyes, 28 I&N Dec. 52 (A.G. 2020) AILA Doc. No. 20073131

 

USCIS Newark Asylum Office to Open Manhattan Branch

The Newark Asylum Office is adding a Manhattan branch which will open for interviews on Aug. 17, 2020…The Manhattan branch will be located in the federal building at 201 Varick Street in lower Manhattan. The main asylum office, currently located in Lyndhurst, N.J., has been closed to the public due to recent, ongoing facility issues.

 

Federal Judge Shuts Down Law Groups’ Intervention in Long-Standing Immigration Case

Courthouse News: A California federal judge denied a motion from nonprofit legal service providers to intervene in a decades-old case that determines the treatment and release of immigration children held by the United States.

 

AILA’s New Jersey Chapter Seek to Enjoin Newark Immigration Court from Compelling In-Person Proceedings

The AILA New Jersey Chapter filed a complaint in district court seeking to enjoin the Newark Immigration Court from forcing immigration attorneys to appear for in-person proceedings during the COVID-19 pandemic. (AILA New Jersey Chapter v. EOIR, 7/31/20) AILA Doc. No. 20080301

 

Citizenship requirements a sticking point in CARES Act and COVID Relief Funding

ImmProf: A federal judge for the U.S. District Court of Massachusetts issued a preliminary injunction Friday ordering that the Department of Education could not deny funding authorized by the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act to a Bunker Hill Community College student based on her immigration status.

 

USCIS and EOIR Proposed Rule on Pandemic-Related Security Bars to Asylum and Withholding of Removal

USCIS and EOIR proposed rule allowing DHS and DOJ to consider “emergency public health concerns based on communicable disease due to potential international threats from the spread of pandemics” when determining whether an individual is ineligible for asylum or withholding of removal on security grounds. AILA Doc. No. 20070831

 

USCIS Provides Information on Injunction of the Public Charge Grounds Final Rule

USCIS provided information on how it plans to adjudicate applications or petitions in light of the July 29, 2020, injunction from the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York which enjoins the government from enforcing USCIS’s Inadmissibility on Public Charge Grounds Final Rule. AILA Doc. No. 20073140

 

DHS Reissues Privacy Impact Assessment for CBP and ICE DNA Collection

DHS updated a previously issued PIA to provide notice to the public of biometric DNA collection from individuals detained by ICE and CBP and the associated privacy risks. DHS reissued the PIA to note that CBP Office of Field Operations is expanding the minimum age for DNA collection from 18 to 14. AILA Doc. No. 20072701

 

ICE Final Rule on Changes Applicable to Surety Bond Companies

ICE final rule which requires surety companies seeking to overcome a bond breach determination to exhaust administrative remedies, and which sets forth “for cause” standards so that ICE may decline bonds from companies that do not cure their deficient performance. (85 FR 45968, 7/31/20) AILA Doc. No. 20073134

 

USCIS Announces Special Instructions for Liberian Refugee Immigration Fairness Program

USCIS announced that it has added special instructions regarding eligibility requirements, filing, and adjudication of adjustment of status applications based on the Liberian Refugee Immigration Fairness provision in the NDAA. Individuals should read these special instructions before applying. AILA Doc. No. 20042034

 

RESOURCES

 

 

EVENTS

 

Note: Check with organizers regarding cancellations/changes

 

ImmProf

 

Monday, August 3, 2020

Sunday, August 2, 2020

Saturday, August 1, 2020

Friday, July 31, 2020

Thursday, July 30, 2020

Wednesday, July 29, 2020

Tuesday, July 28, 2020

Monday, July 27, 2020

 

**********************

Thanks, Elizabeth.

PWS

08-04-20

Related posts:

  1. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⚖️🗽🇺🇸FORMER DEPUTY AG DON AYER, JUDGE MIMI TSANKOV AMONG “HEADLINERS” AT TIMELY UPCOMING NY CITY BAR ASSN. EVENT: “Rule of Law Forum – Preserving the Rule of Law in an Age of Disruption” — Register Now, Right Here!
  2. THE GIBSON REPORT — 10-12-20 — Compiled By Elizabeth Gibson, Esquire. NY Legal Assistance Group —  DocumentedNY Takes You Inside The Maliciously Incompetent Kakistocracy Known As Immigration “Courts,” That Aren’t “Courts” At All & Where The Victims Might Never Have Any Idea Of Why They Are Being “Ordered Deported” By “Judges” Beholden To the Regime’s Corrupt & Racist Enforcement Apparatus! (Item #5 Under “Top- News”) — Plus Other News From The Regime’s “Twilight Zone!”
  3. ⚖️THE GIBSON REPORT — 02-07-22 — Compiled By Elizabeth Gibson Esquire, NY Legal Assistance Group — BONUS: “Ethics On Vacation @ DHS & DOJ”
  4. THE GIBSON REPORT — 02-14-21💝 — Compiled By Elizabeth Gibson, Esquire, NY Legal Assistance Group — Mandatory E-Filing @ EOIR Starts & Lots Of Other “Interesting Stuff!”  — CMS Study Shows How Garland Is Ignoring the “Low Hanging Fruit” On His Out of Control EOIR Backlog! ☹️

🛡⚔️⚖️🗽 ROUND TABLE ASSISTS FIGHT AGAINST “AMERICA’S STAR CHAMBERS” — Here’s Our Amicus Brief In Las Americas v. Trump! — With Thanks To Our Pro Bono Friends STOLL STOLL BERNE LOKTING & SHLACHTER P.C. in Portland, OR!

Jeffrey S. Chase
Hon. Jeffrey S. Chase
Jeffrey S. Chase Blog
Coordinator & Chief Spokesperson, Round Table of Former Immigration Judges

Excerpt:

The immigration court system lacks independence. An agency within the Department of Justice, the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) houses the immigration court system, which consists of trial-level immigration courts and a single appellate tribunal known as the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA). Immigration judges, including appellate immigration judges, are viewed by EOIR “management” not as judges, but as Department of Justice attorneys who serve at the pleasure and direction of the Nation’s prosecutor-in-chief, the Attorney General.

As former immigration judges, we offer the Court our experience and urge that corrective action is necessary to ensure that immigration judges are permitted to function as impartial adjudicators, as required under the Immigration and Nationality Act. The INA and its implementing regulations set forth procedures for the “timely, impartial, and consistent” resolution of immigration proceedings. See 8 U.S.C. §§ 1103, 1230; 8 C.F.R. § 1003.1(d)(1) (charging the Board with appellate review authority to “resolve the questions before it in a manner that is timely, impartial, and consistent with the [INA] and regulations”) (emphasis added); 8 C.F.R. § 1003.10(b) (similarly requiring “immigration judges . . . to resolve the questions before them in a timely and impartial manner”) (emphasis added).

Although housed inside an enforcement agency and led by the Nation’s chief prosecutor, immigration judges must act neutrally to protect and adjudicate the important rights at stake in immigration cases and check executive overreach in the enforcement of federal immigration law. Applying a detached and learned interpretation of those laws, judges must correct overzealous bureaucrats and policy makers when they overstep the bounds of reasonable interpretation and the requirements of due process.

Here’s the full brief:

Las Americas Amicus (full case)

************************

As I often say, it’s an honor to be a part of this group with so many of my wonderful colleagues. It’s also an honor to be able to assist so many wonderful “divisions and brigades” of the New Due Process Army, like the SPLC and Immigration Law Lab.

Here’s another thought I often express: What if all of this talent, creativity, teamwork, expertise, and energy were devoted to fixing our broken Immigration Court System rather than constantly fighting to end gross abuses that should not be happening? There is a “systemic cost” to “maliciously incompetent” administration and the White Nationalist agenda promoted by the Trump kakistocracy!

Knightess
Knightess of the Round Table

Due Process Forever!

PWS

08-04-20

Related posts:

  1. PURE BS 💩 — TRUMP’S “BIG LIE” ABOUT MIGRANT APPEARANCES FOR HEARINGS BOGUS AS $3 BILL 🤮👎🏻— Replacing DHS/EOIR With Rational, Qualified, Fact-Based Governance & Real Judiciary Could Bring Appearance Rate Close To 100%!  — Two Items From ImmigrationProf Blog!
  2. GROSS NATIONAL DISGRACE: “A Fucking Disaster That Is Designed to Fail”: How Trump Wrecked America’s Immigration Courts — Fernanda Echavarri Reports For Mother Jones On How Our Failed Justice System Daily Abuses The Most Vulnerable While Feckless Legislators &   Smugly Complicit Article III Judges Look On & Ignore The Human Carnage They Are Enabling — “ Two days after US immigration officials sent her to Tijuana, she was raped.”
  3. 🏴‍☠️☠️🤮👎🏻IN NYT OP-ED, FORMER TRUMP DOJ ATTORNEY ERICA NEWLAND ADMITS COMPLICITY! — Having Undermined Democratic Institutions, Sold False Narratives To (Too Often Willing) Federal Judges, & Participated In Racist-Inspired “Dred Scottification” (“Dehumanization”) Of the Other Is Actually a BIG Deal! — So Is The Destruction Of Due Process & Fundamental Fairness In The Immigration Courts (Now, “Clown Courts”🤡, or “America’s Star Chambers”☠️) 
  4. REGIME’S NEWEST SCHEME TO SCREW ASYLUM SEEKERS: BOGUS REGS THAT WOULD ILLEGALLY & UNNECESSARILY EXTEND THE GROUNDS OF “MANDATORY DENIAL,” DECREASE ADJUDICATOR DISCRETION, & SHAFT REFUGEE FAMILIES — Regime’s Outlandish “Efficiency Rationale” Fails to Mask Their Cruelty, Racism, Fraud, Waste, & Abuse – Julia Edwards Ainsley (NBC News) & Dean Kevin R. Johnson (ImmigrationProf Blog) Report

🛡⚔️👍🗽⚖️👩🏻‍⚖️FIGHTING THE STAR CHAMBER! — US District Judge Holds That Constitutional Challenge To Weaponized Immigration “Courts” Can Proceed! — “Both policies change the way immigration judges run their dockets and their courtrooms. Accordingly, Plaintiffs have at least sufficiently alleged that such docket management has practical consequence for parties or their attorneys.”

Melissa Crow
Melissa Crow
Senior Supervising Attorney
Southern Poverty Law Center
Tess Hellgren
Tess Hellgren, Staff Attorney and Justice Catalyst Legal Fellow

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

 

August 3, 2020

Contact: 

Marion Steinfels, marionsteinfels@gmail.com / 202-557-0430
Ramon Valdez, ramon@innovationlawlab.org / 971-238-1804

Federal Court Denies Government’s Motion to Dismiss in Immigration Court Case
Advocates’ challenge to immigration courts as “deportation machines”
moves forward; constitutionality of immigration court system at issue  

 

PORTLAND, OR – Immigrant rights advocates challenging the weaponization of the U.S. immigration courts applaud Friday’s late-afternoon ruling by the U.S. District Court of Oregon that their lawsuit, Las Americas v Trump, will move forward. The legal services providers, Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center, Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project (ASAP), Catholic Legal Immigration Network, Inc. (CLINIC), the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), Innovation Law Lab, and Santa Fe Dreamers Project (SFDP), working with Perkins Coie LLP for pro bono support, allege that the Administration has failed to establish an impartial immigration court as required under the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) and the Take Care Clause of the U.S. Constitution – weaponizing them into deportation machines against asylum seekers and other noncitizens – and asks the court to end the unlawful use of the courts to effectuate mass deportations instead of fair decisions.

 

In Friday’s order, the Honorable Karin Immergut denied the government’s motion to dismiss the case.   The district court rejected the government’s arguments, holding that all of the organizations’ claims could proceed, including their claim that the Attorney General has grossly mismanaged the immigration court system and weaponized the system against asylum seekers.

“This is a clear victory for everyone who has sought a fair hearing in immigration court, only to face a system plagued by rampant dysfunction and policies designed to subvert justice,” said Melissa Crow, senior supervising attorney with the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Immigrant Justice Project. “For asylum seekers and those who represent them, the current process is like playing Russian roulette. Despite the life-or-death stakes in these cases, there is little rhyme or reason to the court’s workings apart from prioritizing deportation at all costs.”

 

“Friday’s decision is an important milestone in our fight for a truly fair, transparent, and independent immigration court,” said Tess Hellgren, staff attorney with Innovation Law Lab. “Whether an asylum seeker wins or loses should not depend on the political whims of the President or Attorney General. ”

 

Not only does the Court’s decision confirm that the gross mismanagement of the immigration court system is subject to judicial review, it also recognizes that there may be important constitutional checks and balances on the power of presidential administrations to manipulate the immigration courts to achieve mass deportation.

“This win is incredibly validating. We often operate under the guise that the work we are doing is impossible,” said Linda Corchado, Managing Attorney of the Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center. “We feel uplifted as we can take the giant step forward to tackle the system now, with everything we’ve got.”

 

“ASAP works with families across the United States and at the border who fled persecution and now face countless obstacles to seeking asylum in the U.S. immigration court system,” said Conchita Cruz, Co-Executive Director of ASAP. “This decision gets us one step closer to showing that the injustices of the U.S. immigration court system are not only wrong, but illegal. We stand with asylum seekers and immigrants’ rights advocates in bringing these abuses to light and demanding better from our government.”

 

The lawsuit, which was filed in December 2019, alleges President Trump, Attorney General Barr, and other members of the executive branch have failed to establish a fair immigration court system in which the plaintiff organizations can provide meaningful legal assistance to their asylum-seeking clients. The complaint outlines pervasive dysfunction and bias within the immigration court system, including:

  • The Enforcement Metrics Policy, , which requires immigration judges to decide cases quickly, at the expense of a fair process, in exchange for favorable performance reviews.
  • The “family unit” court docket, which stigmatizes the cases of recently arrived families and rushes their court dates, often giving families inadequate time to find an attorney and prepare for their hearings.
  • Areas that have become known as “asylum-free zones,” where virtually no asylum claims have been granted for the past several years.
  • The nationwide backlog of pending immigration cases, which has now surpassed 1 million — meaning that thousands of asylum seekers must wait three or four years for a court date.

In June 2019, Innovation Law Lab and SPLC also released a report, based on over two years of research and focus group interviews with attorneys and former immigration judges from around the country, documenting the failure of the immigration court system to fulfill the constitutional and statutory promise of fair and impartial case-by-case adjudication. The report can be accessed here: The Attorney General’s Judges: How the U.S. Immigration Courts Became a Deportation Tool.

 

The court’s opinion is HERE.

###

 

The Southern Poverty Law Center, based in Alabama with offices in Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi and Washington, D.C., is a nonprofit civil rights organization dedicated to fighting hate and bigotry, and to seeking justice for the most vulnerable members of society. For more information, see www.splcenter.org and follow us on social media: Southern Poverty Law Center on Facebook and @splcenter on Twitter.  

 

Innovation Law Lab, based in Portland, Oregon with projects around the country and in Mexico, is a nonprofit organization that harnesses technology, lawyers, and activists to advance immigrant justice. For more information, visit www.innovationlawlab.org.

 

The Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project (ASAP) provides community support and emergency legal aid to asylum seekers, regardless of where they are located. ASAP’s model has three components: online community support, emergency legal aid, and nationwide systemic reform. For more information, see www.asylumadvocacy.org and follow us on social media at @asylumadvocacy on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

 

************************

So, finally, the clear unconstitutionality of  “Star Chambers” run by a biased prosecutor who basically views himself as the personal lawyer for a racist xenophobic President is going to get some scrutiny, along with the beyond grotesque mismanagement of EOIR that has created a “backlog” that in all likelihood now exceeds 2 million cases. But, of course we don’t know, and may never know, the exact extent of the backlog because of 1) the notoriously defective record keeping at EOIR; and 2) the manipulation of and sometimes outright misrepresentation of data by the Trump Administration.

Thanks to SPLC and Innovation Law Lab for undertaking this long-overdue effort. And, special appreciation to my friends and New Due Process Army superstars Melissa and Tess.

Due Process Forever!🗽⚖️👩🏻‍⚖️

PWS

08-03-20

Related posts:

  1. 🛡⚔️⚖️🗽 ROUND TABLE ASSISTS FIGHT AGAINST “AMERICA’S STAR CHAMBERS” — Here’s Our Amicus Brief In Las Americas v. Trump! — With Thanks To Our Pro Bono Friends STOLL STOLL BERNE LOKTING & SHLACHTER P.C. in Portland, OR!
  2. COMPLICITY HAS COSTS:  Article III Judges’ Association Apparently Worries That Trump, Barr, GOP Toadies Starting To “Treat Them Like Immigration Judges” — Do They Fear Descent To Status Of Mere Refugees, Immigrants, “Dreamers,” Unaccompanied Children, Or Others Treated As “Less Than Persons” By Trump, 5th Cir., 11th Cir., 9th Cir., & The Supremes’ “J.R. Five?” 
  3. THE TRUTH IS OUT, THANKS TO MICHELLE MENDEZ @ CLINIC: Practice Pointers on Matter of Castillo-Perez & “Takeaways” From FOIA Trove On In Absentias!
  4. PURE BS 💩 — TRUMP’S “BIG LIE” ABOUT MIGRANT APPEARANCES FOR HEARINGS BOGUS AS $3 BILL 🤮👎🏻— Replacing DHS/EOIR With Rational, Qualified, Fact-Based Governance & Real Judiciary Could Bring Appearance Rate Close To 100%!  — Two Items From ImmigrationProf Blog!

MUST SEE TV:  “IMMIGRATION NATION” PREMIERES TODAY ON NETFLIX:  Time Magazine Says “Netflix’s Searing Docuseries Immigration Nation Is The Most Important TV Show You’ll See In 2020!” 

Immigration Nation 

Directed by Christina Clusiau and Shaul Schwarz

I appear, along with many others, in a later episode.

As you watch, ask this question: What does most of the enforcement you see have to do with any legitimate notion of “homeland security” except in the sense that abusing, terrorizing, separating, and removing individuals of color evidently makes some folks in the U.S., particularly Trump supporters, feel “more secure?”

No, it’s not “just enforcing the law!” No law is enforced 100% and most U.S. laws are enforced to just a limited extent due to priorities, funding, and sensible prosecutorial discretion used by every law enforcement agency. 

How much does the Trump Administration “enforce” environmental protection laws, civil rights laws, laws protecting the LGBTQ community from discrimination, fair housing laws, financial laws, health and safety laws, tax laws, or for that matter ethics laws, whistleblower protections, or anti-corruption laws? 

Indeed, as hate crimes directed against the Hispanic, Asian, and Black communities have risen, prosecutions have actually fallen under Trump. See e.g., https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/02/us/hate-crimes-latinos-el-paso-shooting/index.html.

Although domestic violence hasn’t decreased in ethnic communities, prosecutions have gone down as a result of the Administration’s “terror tactics” as illustrated in Immigration Nation. Jeff “Gonzo Apocalypoto” Sessions’s racially-motivated prosecutions of minor immigration violators, intended to promote family separation and “deter” others from asserting legal rights, actually diverted Federal prosecutorial resources from real crimes like drug trafficking and white collar crimes.

Remember, Jeff Sessions walks free (his biggest “trauma” being a well-deserved primary defeat in Alabama); his victims aren’t so lucky; some of their trauma is permanent; their lives changed for the worse, and in some cases eradicated, forever! Where’s the “justice” and the “rule of law” in this?

Prosecutions are always prioritized and “targeted” in some way or another, sometimes rationally, reasonably, and prudently, and other times with bias and malice. So, as you watch this and hear folks like former Acting ICE Director Tom Homan and other Government officials pontificate about “just enforcing the law” or “required by law,” you should recognize it for the total BS that it is!

The Trump Administration’s immigration enforcement program is clearly designed by folks like Stephen Miller, Sessions, and others to be invidiously motivated and to terrorize communities of color including U.S. citizens and lawful residents who are part of those communities. They are an affront to the concepts of “equal justice under law” and eliminating “institutional racism.” 

The Administration’s policies are actually “Dred Scottification” or “dehumanization of the other.” You can see and hear it in the voices of DHS enforcement officials, a number of whom eventually view other humans as “numbers,” “priorities,” “quotas,” “missions,” “ops” (“operations”), “beds,” or “collateral damage.” 

That’s exactly how repressive bureaucracies in Germany, the Soviet Union, China, and other authoritarian states have worked and prospered, at least for a time. By breaking dehumanization into “little bureaucratic steps” individuals are relieved of moral responsibility and lulled into losing sight of the “big picture.” 

Did the folks repairing the tracks and switches for the German railroads focus on where the boxcars were heading and what eventually would happen to their passengers? Did they even know, wonder, or care what was in those boxcars?

And, in case you wonder, family and child separations, supposedly eventually abandoned by Trump, might have diminished as a result of court cases, but they still regularly occur. Only now they are kept largely “below the radar screen” and disingenuously disguised under the bureaucratic rubric “binary choice.”

What has really diminished is less the abuses and more the national and international outrage about those abuses. Dishonesty, immorality, and cruelty have simply become “normalized” under Trump as long it’s largely “out of sight, out of mind.”

What do you imagine happens to those turned away at our borders without any meaningful process and “orbited” to the Northern Triangle — essentially “war zones?” (Preliminary studies show that many die or disappear.) A majority of the Supremes don’t care, and apparently most Americans don’t either as long as the carnage and tears aren’t popping up on their TV screens.

And, in many cases, the “removals” and denials of fair process, both the ones you see in Immigration Nation and the ones you don’t, are actually detrimental to our nation, our values, our society, and our future. The series mentions “being one on the wrong side of history;” that’s precisely where the DHS is under Trump. But, so is the rest of our nation for having allowed an evil charlatan like Trump to have power over our humanity.

This November, vote like your life and the future of our nation depend on it! Because they do! We can’t undo the past! But, we can make Trump part of that past and change our future for the better!

PWS

08-03-20

pastedGraphic.png

Related posts:

  1. HOW “AMERICA’S KILLER COURTS” PROMOTE “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” — HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH: TRUMP & HIS WHITE NATIONALIST SYCOPHANTS & TOADIES TOUT LAWLESS POLICIES THAT VIOLATE LEGAL OBLIGATIONS & HELP KILL, RAPE, TORTURE THOSE RETURNED TO EL SALVADOR — Supremes & Article III Judiciary Complicit In Gross Human Rights Violations! 
  2. COMPLICITY HAS COSTS:  Article III Judges’ Association Apparently Worries That Trump, Barr, GOP Toadies Starting To “Treat Them Like Immigration Judges” — Do They Fear Descent To Status Of Mere Refugees, Immigrants, “Dreamers,” Unaccompanied Children, Or Others Treated As “Less Than Persons” By Trump, 5th Cir., 11th Cir., 9th Cir., & The Supremes’ “J.R. Five?” 
  3. 👹🎃HALLOWEEN HORROR 🏴‍☠️☠️🤮⚰️👎🏻REICHSREPORT: GRUPPENFUHRER MILLER REVEALS “REICHSPLAN” FOR EXTERMINATION OF IMMIGRATION, ASYLUM, REFUGE BY EXECUTIVE DECREE!  — “The Final Solution??”  — Parents, Protect Your Kids, Families, & Your Country From This Grotesque Un-American Monster!
  4. PURE BS 💩 — TRUMP’S “BIG LIE” ABOUT MIGRANT APPEARANCES FOR HEARINGS BOGUS AS $3 BILL 🤮👎🏻— Replacing DHS/EOIR With Rational, Qualified, Fact-Based Governance & Real Judiciary Could Bring Appearance Rate Close To 100%!  — Two Items From ImmigrationProf Blog!

🏴‍☠️☠️👎🏻NATIONAL SECURITY: The Threat Isn’t On The Streets Of Portland Or From The Virtually Non-Existent & Largely Mythical “Antifa” — Leaving Aside The Existential Threat Posed By Trump, The Biggest Threat To America’s Future Existence Is On Our Payroll & Operates With Impunity  From The 5th Floor Of The USDOJ — “Billy The Bigot” Barr Is Hell-Bent On Seeing The US Become A Hitlerian/Putinist State! — “It isn’t arguable; it’s wrong.” — So Why Does The “JR Five” Give Billy A Pass While Failing To Protect Humanity & The Rule of Law?

From the LA Times:

https://edition.pagesuite.com/popovers/dynamic_article_popover.aspx?guid=9c0e081f-1c63-4c31-af1d-af5fddcb108d&v=sdk

What makes Barr a danger to democracy

The attorney general channels Trump

HARRY LITMAN

Atty. Gen. William Barr left us with a terrifying certainty in the wake of his testimony Tuesday in front of the House Judiciary Committee: Under him, the Department of Justice stands ready to advance any pro-Trump policy, justifying it on the basis of a blinkered, tenuous view of the facts and the law, or maybe just Barr’s personal ideological intuitions.

For all its finger-wagging, the Judiciary Committee is not in a position to constrain the attorney general. There is no real brake on Barr’s conduct short of a Trump loss in November. Or, to adopt Barr’s own unsettling gloss, a Trump loss that is sufficiently “clear” that he and his boss would accept it.

Since the hearing, commentators have seized on a couple of blows that Democrats on the Judiciary Committee — Reps. Eric Swalwell (D-Dublin) and Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) primarily — landed on the attorney general. But there was nothing close to a knockdown, and the hard facts remain: The House will not impeach Barr and President Trump will continue to give him full rein.

It’s no secret that the Democrats in Congress (and more than half of the country) view Barr as Mephistopheles — dishonest, partisan, corrupt, even racist. He did nothing Tuesday to try to revise that view; in fact, he seemed indifferent to it.

Norms of evenhandedness, professionalism and especially political disinterest, which traditionally check U.S. attorneys general, do not moderate his conduct. He championed every partisan act his DOJ has taken on the president’s behalf, blandly claiming they reflected the faithful application of the rule of law.

For example, when he defended the highly unusual deployment of federal agents in Portland, Ore., Barr described a “Batman”-like dystopia in which a few U.S. marshals were beset by a marauding horde of uncontrollable professional anarchists. If that were accurate, it would be hard to quibble with sending in the feds.

But the justification dries up immediately if the protests were, as a lot of the reporting on the ground indicates, largely peaceful, and if local law enforcement were capable of defending the Portland federal courthouse and separating lawbreakers from peaceful protestors. (The announcement Wednesday that the Department of Homeland Security’s mystery troops were withdrawing suggests the argument for the invasion was tenuous all along.)

Or consider Barr’s legally tortured defense of the president’s memo attempting to exclude immigrants who are in the U.S. illegally from the 2020 census. The plain language of the 14th Amendment, as well as a unanimous opinion of the Supreme Court, leaves no room for argument: Everyone who “inhabits” the U.S. must be counted.

But Barr claims that Congress has delegated to the Commerce Department an ability to advance an Orwellian definition of “inhabitant.” He called it an “arguable position.” It isn’t arguable; it’s wrong.

And given that it is the attorney general’s job to uphold the law of the land, he shouldn’t even bring up the theory, regardless of the half- or quarter-baked views of the president.

Barr’s partisan proclamations went on and on, with this whopper as a high point: “From my experience, the president has played a role properly and traditionally played by presidents.”

. . . .

********************

Read the rest of the op-ed at the link.

Beyond Congressional fecklessness, perhaps the most disturbing and scary aspect of Billy’s anti-democracy, anti-humanity, racist agenda is that it has received only “light pushback” from the supposedly independent Article III Courts, particularly the Supremes’ majority led by Roberts.

Private practitioners who made the types of specious, disingenuous, and wrong arguments to Federal Courts advanced by Billy and fellow Trump toady Solicitor General Noel Francisco and their minions would probably have been disbarred or even in jail by now. Not only do these guys continue their wanton destruction of our legal system, but Roberts & Co. sometimes actually reward the DOJ’s fraud, racism, and bad faith. 

Crooked and corrupt politicos are one thing. But, Supreme Court Justices who won’t call them out for their invidious motivations, won’t stand up for equal justice under law, allow racist abuses in the guise of patently bogus “national security” and Executive prerogative pretexts, won’t protect refugees, asylum seekers, children, or migrants of color, favor tyranny over humanity, and allow their courts to be paralyzed by frivolous Government litigation, dilatory appeals, and transparently bogus procedural gimmicks are the real problem here!  

As Litman points out, despite the “smokescreens” thrown up by Barr and complicit courts, there’s really no ambiguity about what’s happening here. It’s straightforward! It’s a full scale attack on our justice system, our democracy, and our humanity by a bunch of would-be facist thugs operating out of the Executive Branch of our Government. America needs better Justices and Federal Judges who will cut through the legalistic BS, show courage, have integrity,  and stand up for democracy, humanity, and equal justice for all!

Due Process Forever! Complicit Courts Never!

 

PWS

08-03-20

Related posts:

  1. 🏴‍☠️☠️⚰️KAKISTOCRACY WATCH: AILA Blasts Appointment Of Prosecutors Without Judicial Qualifications To Top Judicial Positions in Billy the Bigot’s Weaponized Anti-Due-Process “Court” System — Dysfunction, Bias, Illegitimate Decisions Run Rampant As Congress, Article IIIs Fail to Enforce U.S. Constitution!
  2. COMPLICITY HAS COSTS:  Article III Judges’ Association Apparently Worries That Trump, Barr, GOP Toadies Starting To “Treat Them Like Immigration Judges” — Do They Fear Descent To Status Of Mere Refugees, Immigrants, “Dreamers,” Unaccompanied Children, Or Others Treated As “Less Than Persons” By Trump, 5th Cir., 11th Cir., 9th Cir., & The Supremes’ “J.R. Five?” 
  3. 🏴‍☠️☠️⚰️🤮👎🏻THE TRUMP REGIME & A CORRUPT SOLICITOR GENERAL HAVE CONDUCTED A WAR OF ATTRITION AGAINST AMERICAN LAWYERS ON THE FRONT LINES OF THE BATTLE TO SAVE DEMOCRACY — John Roberts & His GOP Buddies On The Supremes Have Aided, Abetted, & Encouraged It! — Constant Improper & Ethically Questionable Interference With Thoughtful, Legally Correct Lower Court Rulings Holding The Regime Accountable Have Demoralized The Profession’s Best & Bravest! — The Answer Is Better Judges For A Better America!
  4. PURE BS 💩 — TRUMP’S “BIG LIE” ABOUT MIGRANT APPEARANCES FOR HEARINGS BOGUS AS $3 BILL 🤮👎🏻— Replacing DHS/EOIR With Rational, Qualified, Fact-Based Governance & Real Judiciary Could Bring Appearance Rate Close To 100%!  — Two Items From ImmigrationProf Blog!

BAD NEWS FOR  BIGOTLAND: Even As Billy The Bigot Blatantly Bashes The “Categorical Approach,” 10th Cir. Blasts Billy’s Biased BIA’s Bogus Blowing Of Same To Illegally Deport Under CO Controlled Substances Law! 

EYORE
“Eyore In Distress”
Once A Symbol of Fairness, Due Process, & Best Practices, Now Gone “Belly Up”
Dan Kowalski
Dan Kowalski
Online Editor of the LexisNexis Immigration Law Community (ILC)

10th-Johnson-drugs19-9550

From: Dan Kowalski 

Sent: Friday, July 31, 2020 4:16 PM
To: ICLINIC@LIST.MSU.EDU; Immigration Law Professors List
Subject: [immprof] FW: victory in Johnson v. Barr – Colorado possession statute overbroad and indivisble!!!

 

 

team,

a huge victory today for one of our clients, and hopefully many other folks in our community.

 

in Johnson v. Barr, the 10th circuit ruled that the Colorado statute of possession of a controlled substance is overboard as to the federal schedule and indivisible as to the particular controlled substance within a schedule.

 

the court honed in on the categorical approach, looking first to the plain language of the statute, the penalties assigned under the statute, its unpublished decision in Arellano, and persuasive state case law in deciding in our favor.

 

-this means that no conviction for possession of a schedule I or II CS can support the CS grounds of inadmissibility or deportability. this will hopefully help countless people who were found inadmissible, deportable, subject to mandatory detention, and ineligible for relief to seek redress of those legal errors.

 

-by extension, this decision is likely to apply to simply possession of a schedule III-V because it is also overbroad and structured nearly identically to the possession statute at issue in Johnson. moreover, due to legislative change last year classifying all PCS of schedule I-V CS as a DM1 offense starting in 2020, all future PCS offenses are likely also overbroad and indivisible.

 

this is definitely a day to celebrate. we will see whether the govt seeks rehearing or cert.

 

keep loving, keep fighting.

h

—

Hans Meyer

The Meyer Law Office, P.C.

— 

To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to immprof+unsubscribe@lists.ucla.edu.

Hans Meyer ESQ
Hans Meyer ESQ
Meyer Law
Denver, CO

****************

Congratulations, Hans!

As noted by Hans, this decision could have “big-time” impact and result in numerous motions to reopen and “redos.” It’s just another example of how the gimmicks and misinterpretations used and encouraged by the Trump regime as part of their “haste makes waste” deport everyone policies actually create backlogs and waste resources while doing grave injustices.

America needs an independent Article I U.S. Immigration Court with real expert judges, with a commitment to human rights and due process,  dedicated to seeing that individual results are fair and just, rather than carrying out a perverted, race and hate driven nativist political agenda to maximize deportations in disregard of the law.

Due Process Forever!

PWS

08-02-20

Related posts:

  1. GROSS NATIONAL DISGRACE: “A Fucking Disaster That Is Designed to Fail”: How Trump Wrecked America’s Immigration Courts — Fernanda Echavarri Reports For Mother Jones On How Our Failed Justice System Daily Abuses The Most Vulnerable While Feckless Legislators &   Smugly Complicit Article III Judges Look On & Ignore The Human Carnage They Are Enabling — “ Two days after US immigration officials sent her to Tijuana, she was raped.”
  2. PURE BS 💩 — TRUMP’S “BIG LIE” ABOUT MIGRANT APPEARANCES FOR HEARINGS BOGUS AS $3 BILL 🤮👎🏻— Replacing DHS/EOIR With Rational, Qualified, Fact-Based Governance & Real Judiciary Could Bring Appearance Rate Close To 100%!  — Two Items From ImmigrationProf Blog!
  3. 🤡WELCOME TO CLOWN COURT: Where The Lives Of Millions Of Humans & The Future Of America Are Treated Like A Cruel Joke, As Complicit Article III Courts Watch This Grotesque Unconstitutional Spectacle & Parody Of Justice Unfold On Their Watch!
  4. REGIME’S NEWEST SCHEME TO SCREW ASYLUM SEEKERS: BOGUS REGS THAT WOULD ILLEGALLY & UNNECESSARILY EXTEND THE GROUNDS OF “MANDATORY DENIAL,” DECREASE ADJUDICATOR DISCRETION, & SHAFT REFUGEE FAMILIES — Regime’s Outlandish “Efficiency Rationale” Fails to Mask Their Cruelty, Racism, Fraud, Waste, & Abuse – Julia Edwards Ainsley (NBC News) & Dean Kevin R. Johnson (ImmigrationProf Blog) Report

🏴‍☠️☠️🤮👎KAKISTOCRACY WATCH: NJ AILA Sues EOIR’s Malicious Incompetents To Stop Deadly ☠️☠️☠️🤮 In-Person Hearings

EYORE
“Eyore In Distress”
Once A Symbol of Fairness, Due Process, & Best Practices, Now Gone “Belly Up”

Laura Lynch

Laura Lynch
Senior Policy Counsel
AILA
 

Hon. Susan G. Roy
Hon. Susan G. Roy
Law Office of Susan G. Roy, LLC
Princeton Junction, NJ
Member, Round Table of Former Immigration Judges

Laura Lynch @ AILA writes:

I wanted to flag this lawsuit that was filed a few hours ago by AILA’s New Jersey Chapter seeking to stop in-person court appearances at the Newark Immigration Court. The attached complaint reveals the following:

 

  • “The Newark Immigration Court is no stranger to the devastating effects of COVID-19. The coronavirus spread through the court before it closed in March, and COVID-19 illnesses tragically caused the deaths of both a longtime private immigration attorney and a staffer at the immigration prosecutor’s office, as well as causing the serious illness of both a senior immigration prosecutor and a court translator. More recently, the head of Federal Protective Services at 970 Broad Street in Newark—the building where the Newark Immigration Court is housed—died from COVID-19.”
  • “Yet, despite the risks posed by the spread of COVID-19, and the actual serious illness and death it has already caused to people involved with the Newark Immigration Court, that court was recently reopened for immigration hearings regarding cases for persons who are not held in detention (the so-called “non-detained docket”). Moreover, even though immigration law and regulations provide for immigration hearings to take place by videoconference—and the Executive Office of Immigration Review, which operates the nation’s immigration courts, has touted its use of such videoconference hearings—the Newark Immigration Court does not provide the option for attorneys or others to appear by videoconference for cases on the non-detained docket.”

The Associated Press wrote a short article about this lawsuit.

 

Unfortunately, the complaint hasn’t been posted on AILA’s website yet. I’ve been sharing the document using this google link:https://drive.google.com/file/d/1TTXt0c7dzflF9Kpvvpe–aeHbQvHbYoV/view.

 

Please let me know if you have any questions.

 

Thanks, Laura

 

Laura A. Lynch, Esq.

Senior Policy Counsel

********************************
It just keeps getting worse and worse. The malicious incompetents at DOJ/EOIR keep endangering lives in an out of their so-called “courts” while those supposedly responsible for “justice in America” let it happen. This is a “Third World Dictatorship-Style Meltdown” happening right here in our country.
How many will have to die or have their lives ruined before this dangerous and dysfunctional embarrassment to humanity is finally put out of its misery (not to mention the misery it brings to others).

This November, vote like your life depends on it! Because it does!

PWS
08-01-20

 

Related posts:

  1. SENATORS DEMAND IG INVESTIGATE BIAS, CORRUPTION, GROSS MISMANAGEMENT @ EOIR!
  2. KILLER “COURTS” ☠️☠️☠️☠️☠️👎🏻👎🏻👎🏻👎🏻👎🏻 — “Malicious Incompetence” Or “Criminal Negligence” @ EOIR? — Experts Chase & Dzubow Rip Into EOIR/DOJ Officials For Needlessly Endangering Lives! — Kakistocracy Turns Deadly!
  3. GROSS NATIONAL DISGRACE: “A Fucking Disaster That Is Designed to Fail”: How Trump Wrecked America’s Immigration Courts — Fernanda Echavarri Reports For Mother Jones On How Our Failed Justice System Daily Abuses The Most Vulnerable While Feckless Legislators &   Smugly Complicit Article III Judges Look On & Ignore The Human Carnage They Are Enabling — “ Two days after US immigration officials sent her to Tijuana, she was raped.”
  4. WILL CLUELESS CLOWN COURTS ENDANGER PUBLIC HEALTH & SAFETY? 🤡🤡 — The Inevitable Spread of Coronavirus Is “Old News” & Poorly Designed & Mismanaged Immigration Courts Appear To Be a “High Risk” Potential Breeding Ground — Predictably, Dysfunctional EOIR Has No Contingency Plans In Place! — 100-Case “Master Calendars” in Mini-Courtrooms Bringing Old & Young, Infirm & Able, From Far & Near Together Under Threat Of In Absentia Deportation — What Could Possibly Go Wrong?