⚖️ BIA: OUTSDE, INSIDE: Garland Reportedly Will Tap “Practical Scholar” Professor Homero López, Jr., & Temp. Appellate Immigration Judge Joan B. Geller To Prior Vacancies, With One Judgeship Still “In Competition!”
By Paul Wickham Schmidt
Special to Courtside
March 19, 2024
Although there has been no official announcement from DOJ/EOIR, I have learned that Professor (and legal services provider) Homero López and Temporary Appellate Judge (and long-time BIA attorney) Joan Geller will be appointed to two of the three existing vacancies at the BIA. The BIA is the highest administrative tribunal in immigration law and exercises nationwide jurisdiction over the Immigration Courts with authority to issue binding precedents.
Professor López‘s appointment was announced by Loyola University Law (New Orleans) where he has been an Adjunct Professor of Law:
Adjunct Professor Promoted to Board of Immigration Appeals
Adjunct Law Professor Homero Lopez has been appointed to the Board of Immigration Appeals, the top administrative appellate agency to review immigration court decisions in the United States! Judge Lopez will start considering appeals on April 1st!
PHOTO: ILSA website
In addition to his adjunct professorship at Loyola, Judge-designate López most recently has been the Co-Founder & Legal Director of Immigration Services and Legal Advocacy (“ISLA”) in New Orleans, “a legal services organization that defends the rights of our immigrant communities and advocates for just and humane immigration policy.”
Here’s his bio from the ISLA website:
Homero is ISLA’s Legal Director. As the son of a migrant worker, Homero grew up moving around the country and living among immigrant communities his entire life. Before co-founding ISLA, Homero was the managing attorney at Catholic Charities-Archdiocese of New Orleans where he oversaw a legal team of 30 attorneys, accredited representatives, and legal assistants focusing on representing Unaccompanied Children and immigrant victims of crime. Before that, Homero was a staff, and later, supervising attorney at Catholic Charities of the Diocese of Baton Rouge where he conducted the Legal Orientation Program for detained immigrants at the LaSalle Detention Facility and primarily focused on detained cases. Homero is a graduate of Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas and Tulane University Law School in New Orleans, Louisiana.
López recently was featured by Dan Kowalski in LexisNexis for his successful litigation of a major due process/credibility victory in the Fifth Circuit, Nkenglefac v. Garland, 34 F.4th 422, 430 (2022), and for prevailing in the fee award litigation in the same case. See:
Judge-designate Geller has spent the bulk of her legal career as on the BIA staff and has also served as a Temporary Appellate Immigration Judge/Board Member. Here’s her “official bio” from the EOIR website:
Joan B. Geller was appointed as a temporary board member in January 2018. Ms. Geller, who has prior experience as a temporary board member, has over 14 years of experience as an attorney advisor at the Board. Prior to joining the Board, Ms. Geller served for seven years with the District of Columbia Court of Appeals, first as a staff attorney and later as a deputy staff counsel. Ms. Geller received her B.A. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and her J.D.from Georgetown University Law Center. She is a member of the District of Columbia and Maryland Bars.
Significantly, from my standpoint, she graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Georgetown Law, two institutions with which I have long-time associations. While Geller’s BIA service began after my tenure there, sources tell me she was “held in high regard by the staff attorneys.” That’s important, given that the bulk of the opinion-drafting work at the BIA is done by the staff and the endemic quality control issues now plaguing this appellate body.
Hopefully, López and Geller will bring some much-needed due process focus, quality control, and practical progressive scholarship, leadership, and energy to a floundering, yet critically important, tribunal badly in need of the foregoing.
Indeed, López’s stellar work in Nkenglefac went right to the heart of the chronic due process and quality control problems of the BIA, particularly in life or death asylum cases, under Sessions, Barr, and now Garland: failure to follow precedent favorable to the respondent, “phantom finding of waiver,” lack of critical analysis, misrepresentation of the record, misuse of non-record materials, improper allocation of the burdens, and ignoring or minimizing voluminous testimony! In other words, a classic example of prejudgement and “any reason to deny” (even if not in the record) decision-making!
So totally miserable was EOIR’s and OIL’s performance in Nkenglefac that in a rare move the Fifth Circuit in subsequent litigation found them to be “not substantially justified at each stage of this litigation” and awarded costs and attorneys fees to the respondent! Having seen first-hand just how absurdly skewed and unfair the EOIR system has become in “life on the line” cases, López should be well-positioned to “just say no” to this type of appellate nonsense and inject a long-missing dose of reality, humanity, and real scholarship into this “ivory (actually glass) tower tribunal!”
Those of us who care about justice in America have ripped Garland’s BIA for sloppiness, anti-asylum culture, anti-immigrant attitudes, and failure to establish clear, practical, positive precedents facilitating the timely granting of asylum to the many qualified refugees now stuck in the largely USG-created morass at our Southern Border. See, e.g., https://immigrationcourtside.com/2024/03/18/⚖️-winograd-whomps-🥊-garlands-eoir-again-this-time-on-particularly-serious-crime-psc-annor-v-garland-fo/. For example, the failure to issue a precedent requiring presumptive grants of asylum to Afghan women, instead making them laboriously work their way through the system with potentially incorrect results, is an egregious, but not certainly not the only, example of the BIA’s abject failure to “get the job done for American justice.”
Even as I write this, my friend Dan Kowalski over at LexisNexis has just forwarded yet another glaring example of “judicial malpractice” on asylum by the BIA — this latest rebuke coming from the Sixth Circuit (Vasquez-Rivera v. Garland). See https://www.lexisnexis.com/community/insights/legal/immigration/b/insidenews/posts/ca6-on-nexus-social-group-vasquez-rivera-v-garland.
I also trust that López and Geller will be “throwbacks” to a time when senior leaders EOIR actually believed in the noble (now abandoned) “vision” of EOIR that I once had a role in crafting: “Through teamwork and innovation, be the world’s best administrative tribunals, guaranteeing fairness and due process for all.”
Rather than making that vision a reality, disgracefully, under the last four Administrations, the EOIR motto appears to have devolved into “any reason to deny, good enough for government work, numbers over quality, institutional survival over individual justice, go along to get along, and don’t rock the boat!”
Finally, the appointment of Judge-designate López illustrates my constantly-made point that NDPA warriors can and must compete for EOIR judgeships, particularly at the BIA level, when they are advertised! This system needs practical, positive, due-process-focused, protection-oriented change, and it needs it now! Things are only going to improve if the pressure comes from both better-qualified judges on the “inside” and unrelenting litigation and media coverage from the “outside!”
So, get those applications in before April 12, 2024 to join Judge-designates López and Geller on the BIA bench! See https://immigrationcourtside.com/2024/03/15/⚖%EF%B8%8F🗽👩🏾⚖%EF%B8%8F-calling-ndpa-all-stars🌟-wanted-bia-appellate-judge-dedicated-to-due-process-asylum-expertise/
And, of course, good luck to both these new Appellate Immigration Judges! May you never, ever forget that due process is the one and only mission of EOIR!
🇺🇸 Due Process Forever!
PWS
03-19-24