Star Chamber Style @ EOIR; Despite the glaring problems, obvious answers, and wide availability of new progressive leadership who should already be removing the deadwood, changing ill-conceived policies, and actually SOLVING representation and other problems at EOIR — America’s most dysfunctional “court” system — Judge Garland would like to study (while ignoring) what’s wrong rather than take needed progressive action!
You can read it here in all of its glorious bureaucratic nothingness and hollow rhetoric:
Department of Justice
Office of Public Affairs
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Tuesday, May 18, 2021
Attorney General Launches Review to Reinvigorate the Justice Department’s Commitment to Access to Justice
U.S. Attorney General Merrick B. Garland today announced that the Justice Department will immediately begin work to reinvigorate its Office for Access to Justice and to restore the Justice Department’s role in leading efforts across government to seek and secure meaningful access to justice.
“Trust in the rule of law – the foundation of American democracy – depends upon the public’s faith that government seeks equal justice for all. That is the Justice Department’s core duty, and the mission upon which it was built. But without equal access to justice, the promise of equal justice under law rings hollow,” wrote Attorney General Garland in a memo to departmental leadership this afternoon.
The Attorney General directed the Justice Department’s leadership offices to immediately begin a review process that will engage all relevant stakeholders, both within the department and beyond. The review will initially explore, among other things, how the Justice Department and partners across federal, state, territorial, and tribal governments can alleviate entrenched disparities in our criminal justice system, address barriers to access in our immigration and civil legal systems, and advance health, economic, and environmental justice efforts. The Attorney General’s memo also charged Deputy Attorney General Lisa M. Monaco and Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta with developing recommendations regarding the resources that will be required to reinvigorate the department’s Office for Access to Justice including a staffing strategy and placement within the department in light of its responsibilities.
The Attorney General will submit a detailed plan to the President for expanding the department’s role in leading access to justice initiatives across government within 120 days.
The Justice Department first launched an access to justice initiative in 2010. Building upon that important effort, the Office for Access to Justice was formally established in 2016 to plan, develop, and coordinate the implementation of access to justice policy initiatives of high priority to the department and the executive branch, including in the areas of criminal indigent defense and civil legal aid. However, during the prior administration, the office was effectively shuttered.
In addition to leading this strategic review within the Justice Department, Attorney General Garland will also help to lead access to justice initiatives across government as co-chair of the Legal Aid Interagency Roundtable, which the President reconvened today. That initiative will bring together more than two dozen federal departments and agencies to address the most pressing legal services challenges that low-income communities, communities of color, and many others across our country face today.
Component(s):
Office of the Attorney General
Press Release Number:
21-456
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As always, actions speak louder than words or bureaucratic promises to “think about it, and get back to you!”
So hopefully somebody will ask Garland how the following things going on in HIS EOIR right now “assist access to justice:”
- Continuous, ongoing “Aimless Docket Reshuffling“ at EOIR that generates an astounding, unnecessary, growing, unaddressed by Garland 1.3 million case backlog that generally disadvantages and wears down the private bar;
- Elimination of reasonable continuances @ EOIR for the express purpose of favoring the DHS and making it more difficult to represent individuals in Immigration Court consistent with ethical requirements relating to adequate preparation and verification of claims;
- “Courts” improperly located in obscure, out of the way DHS detention centers where lawyers are seldom readily available and substandard conditions are intentionally used to duress individuals into giving up viable claims;
- Court schedules controlled by unqualified bureaucrats in Falls Church who arbitrarily and capriciously set cases without regard to the needs of parties for preparation time, ethical guidelines, or their workloads;
- Unreasonable, shortened, cookie cutter “briefing schedules,” designed to expedite removals at the expense of quality and legal excellence and to artificially “stress out” private attorneys, many serving pro bono or low bono;
- Kids and other vulnerable individuals forced to “represent” themselves in Immigration Courts;”
- “Judges” who lack immigration expertise and practical experience, therefore forcing already overburdened immigration counsel to “train” these judges, who never should have been appointed in the first place;
- Hiring of “judges” at the trial and appellate level renowned for their hostility to asylum seekers (particularly women and those of color) and sometimes with established records of bias, rudeness, hostility, and unprofessional conduct toward the private bar;
- Systemic exclusion of private bar immigration, human rights, clinical advocates and experts from the Immigration Judiciary;
- Bogus, due-process-denying “deportation quotas” that discourage scholarship and thoughtful complete litigation of life or death cases in favor of meeting artificial production requirements and timelines designed to keep the “EOIR deportation railroad” running;
- Promulgation of “operating produces” for Immigration Courts by Falls Church bureaucrats who have never appeared in Immigration Court, without prior consultation with either sitting Immigration Judges or “stakeholders” in the private bar;
- Failure after two decades of wasted effort and false starts to implement even a rudimentary nationwide e-filing system, thereby increasing the burden on private practitioners;
- Wrong-headed, anti-immigrant “precedents” intended to discourage individuals from pursuing claims in Immigration Court and to require advocates to appeal to Courts of Appeals to have any chance of obtaining justice for their clients;
- Following of “worst practices” designed to abuse and increase the stress for advocates in Immigration Court, including failure to follow best health and sanitation practices;
- Failure to have any qualified progressive immigration practical scholar “on staff” at DOJ who has actually practiced before the Immigration Courts and could credibly lead the reform effort.
Actually, I’m just getting started! But, I have other things on my agenda today, and you get the point!
Unless progressive immigration advocates “raise hell” with the higher-up in the Biden Administration and on the Hill about Garland’s gross mismanagement of EOIR to date and his lack or expertise or genuine interest in long overdue, badly needed reforms, this is just another Dem “designed to fail” cosmetic effort; yet another insulting attempt by DOJ to fob off immigrants, the private bar, progressives, and their very legitimate needs with more BS “all talk, no action” ineffective policies and plans where immediate, radical progressive, due process reforms are needed, led by progressive experts!
To state the painfully obvious, Vanita Gupta has enough knowledge and enough contacts in the human rights/civil rights community to have gotten someone from the outside in to take control of EOIR, empowered to knock heads, transfer the Trump/Miller anti-due-process “denial club” crowd and their enablers out, and start recruiting and hiring competent administrators, well-qualified progressive judges, and instituting due process enhancing procedures. Things should already be operating much better; and, as many of us told the Biden Transition Team, having “due process take hold and start acting” would send much needed “shock waves” throughout the “go along to get along” bureaucracy at EOIR who assisted Trump and Miller in putting the “final nail in the coffin” of the already-reeling Immigration Courts.
Advocates and members of the NDPA, the first step in vindicating your clients’ legal rights is to insist that your rights, professionalism, and expertise be respected by those in power. Team Garland is effectively “giving you the big middle finger!” 🖕 If you don’t stand up to this outrageous, dismissive treatment from a Dem Administration, how can you make things better for your clients?
🇺🇸🗽⚖️Due Process Forever!
PWS
05-19-21