ACLU DESPERATELY TRIES TO GET ATTENTION OF FEDERAL JUDICIARY AS COVID-19 HITS SAN DIEGO DETENTION CENTER! ☠️☠︎😰⚰️🧫

https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/immigration/story/2020-04-06/aclu-sues-for-release-of-ice-detainees-at-otay-mesa-detention-center-as-covid-19-cases-at-facility-increase

Kate Morrissey reports for the San Diego Union Tribune:

On the same day the first person in immigration custody in San Diego was confirmed to have the new coronavirus, the American Civil Liberties Union sued for the release of certain high-risk detainees at the region’s two detention centers.

In the lawsuit, ACLU attorneys argue that specific detainees at Otay Mesa Detention Center and Imperial Regional Detention Facility who have pre-existing conditions that would make severe symptoms of COVID-19 more likely should be released in order to protect them from likely exposure to the virus. Some similar cases, filed by other groups around the country, have been successful in getting immigrant detainees released.

This coverage of the coronavirus pandemic is part of your subscription to The San Diego Union-Tribune. We also provide free coverage as a service to our community.

“During this pandemic, we’ve seen institutions at all levels take these really drastic, life-altering measures to preserve public safety and community well being,” said Monika Langarica, an attorney with the ACLU of San Diego & Imperial Counties. “(U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement), which oversees massive detention operations across the country, rather than follow the course of these other institutions, has done almost the opposite.”

. . . .

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

Read the rest of Kate’s article at the above link.

Similar suits have produced mixed results throughout the country. While some U.S. District Judges have ordered or threatened to order the release of certain detainees, others have “blown off” legitimate health concerns and the failure of DHS and DOJ authorities to follow health guidelines during the pandemic.

Of course, the idea that social distancing, universal testing, basic hygiene, or individual protective equipment is being employed in any part of the “DHS Gulag” and the Immigration “Courts” is preposterous on its face. Yet, remarkably, some U.S. District Judges prefer the “show me the dead bodies approach” as an alternative to the sensible preventive measures recommended by health professionals. After all, “they are only aliens” in the eyes of the regime and some Federal Judges.

Others, more astutely, have recognized that those stuck in the Gulag and the never-ending dysfunction of the Immigration “Courts” are actually their fellow human beings, most without serious criminal convictions. They are also “persons” under the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, entitled to have their health, safety, and lives protected from dangerous and unreasonable actions by the Federal Government.

Due Process Forever!

PWS

04-07-20

SET OUR CHILDREN FREE! — AMERICA OFFICIALLY ABUSES CHILDREN IN THE TIME OF PLAGUE — Lee Sunday Evans & Waterwell With A 90-Second Video Using The Words Of The Abused!

Dearest Flores Readers –

I hope this finds you and your loved ones as safe and comfortable as possible right now.

We created a 90-second video – its a series of excerpts about the lack of access to healthcare in immigration detention facilities as a way to highlight how dangerous it is for anyone to be in detention during COVID-19.

Can you post or share this video on social media?

It will have a great impact – it will help engage more people in the movement to get people out of detention.

All info about how to post is below.

I’ve also included a few relevant news stories in case you’re interested in more context. And, there is information about one direct action you can take if you are interested.

Feel free to be in touch if you have any questions.

(AND – if you are also working on this issue and have other ideas about how this video, or the project, can be most effective at this time, we are all ears, our digital doors are open.)

With love,

Lee

SHARE / REPOST

The video is posted to our social media channels:

Twitter

Instagram

Facebook

or DOWNLOAD the video directly:

https://vimeo.com/403007841 / password: criterion

(*choose the 4K file)

CAPTION – use ours or write your own:

These first-hand stories from June 2019 can help us understand why it’s so urgent to get people out of detention during the COVID-19 Pandemic.

COPY These Hashtags

#FreeThemAll #FreeThemAllGov #HealthNotPunishment #floresexhibits

(This is the most direct way to connect your message and your followers to the movement among advocates and policy makers.)

ACTION – if you want to take an action today, this is from RAICES Texas:

> Call the San Antonio ICE Field Office at (210) 283-4712

> “Hi, my name is _____ and I am calling to demand the release of all immigrant detainees from the Residential Centers at Karnes and Pearsall due to the imminent threat of COVID-19. If you don’t, we are all at risk.”

NEWS

Judge orders release of 10 detained immigrants from NJ jails

Judge Gee orders gov’t to “rmake continued efforts” to release migrant children

Judge declines to release families in detention in TX + NJ

Detained Immigrants File a Lawsuit

FOLLOW these incredible advocacy organizations to stay informed about the issues and amplify important actions they are instigating:

Detention Watch Network (@DetentionWatch)

Raices (@RAICESACTION @RAICESTEXAS)

Southern Border Community Coalition (@SBCCoalition)

New Sanctuary Coalition (@NewSanctuaryNYC)

ACLU – Border Rights (@ACLU_BRC)

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

Join the New Due Process Army and fight to end official child abuse and Article III judicial complicity!

What kind of society allows its government to abuse children? Whatever happened to accountability? How about ethics and common sense for Article III Judges who could end the abuse, but haven’t? How would you feel if your children were treated this way by the authorities? There is a reprehensible “double standard” at work here!

Due Process Forever! Child Abuse Never!

PWS

04-02-20

UPDATE: While folks like McHenry and the operators of the DHS Gulag provide misleading information, or perhaps outright lies, to Federal Judges, Courtside’s sources say that at least six individuals with some connection to the Immigration Courts have died from coronavirus. While I admittedly have no way of “independently verifying” this information, I’d bet that there are many more Immigration Court or Gulag-related coronavirus deaths and serious infections out there that I do not know about!

Why, I wonder, would any Federal Judge accept the word of someone like McHenry or officials in the DHS Gulag over affidavits from detainees, filings from experts, and the advice we hear from the Surgeon General, Dr, Fauci, and Dr. Birx every day? Stay home means “stay home!”

Nobody with any understanding of our immigration system could reasonably believe that running one more removal hearing or keeping non-criminals in prison is worth endangering lives and spreading disease! What in the recent public history of DHS Detention and EOIR would lead a Federal Judge to credit any information on “best practices” on public health provided by these inherently unreliable and incompetent organizations?

PWS

04-02-20

CLEAR AS MUD: Politicized Immigration “Courts” Continue To Bobble The Message In The Time Of Plague, Endangering Their Own Employees, Attorneys, & The Public! — America’s Clown Courts 🤡☠️ Enter A Deadly New Phase As Feckless Article III Courts Watch The Show Go On! —“I don’t know who’s making the calls, but they’re wrong.” — DUH!

https://apple.news/Af7cWvYFbT5CO7qZKyldm3w

Dara Lind reports for Pro Publica:

Interviews with 10 workers at immigration courts around the country reveal fear, contradictory messages and continuing perils for the employees.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

On Tuesday night — over a day after several Bay Area counties issued shelter-in-place orders barring most people from leaving their homes — the San Francisco immigration court sent an email to staff: Hearings were being postponed nationwide for most immigrants, so the court would be closed starting Wednesday. (The text of the email was provided to ProPublica.)

On Wednesday, however, employees were directed to get onto a conference call, according to two participants. There they were told the Tuesday night email was wrong. The court wasn’t closed. They would have to come into the office — or use their vacation time to stay home. When staff asked about the shelter-in-place orders, the response was that the Department of Justice, which runs immigration courts, took the position that those were local laws and didn’t apply to federal employees.

The Trump administration has reduced immigration court operations in the past week, by postponing hearings for non-detained immigrants and closing a handful of courts to the public. Those actions came after the unions representing immigration prosecutors and judges issued a rare public call for courts to close.

The reduced court operations came after weeks of employees raising concerns privately and, they say, receiving few and unhelpful answers. And because the closures are determined solely by whether a court is hearing cases of detained immigrants, rather than by the level of health peril, employees still feel they’re putting their health at risk every time they come into the office as instructed.

That’s the picture that emerges from interviews with 10 federal employees who work at immigration courts across the country. Most spoke on the condition of anonymity. Many said they had raised concerns internally about their exposure to COVID-19 to their managers or hadn’t been informed of potential exposures.

“When I signed up for this job, I thought it might be morally compromising at times,” one immigration court employee told ProPublica, “but I never thought it would be compromising of my health and safety.”

The Executive Office for Immigration Review, the DOJ agency that oversees immigration courts, told ProPublica that agency headquarters was responsible for deciding when courts closed, but it did not confirm or deny specifics of the employees’ allegations, saying, “We do not comment on internal communications or internal personnel operations.”

In Denver, one prosecutor interviewed by ProPublica was alarmed by a judge’s frequent coughs during a hearing last Friday. “Don’t mind my coughing,” the judge said, according to the prosecutor. “I don’t think it’s coronavirus.” The following Tuesday, the prosecutor noticed that the judge was out for the rest of the week and emailed a court staffer in concern: Was it the coronavirus? Should she be taking precautions? The staffer’s reply: For privacy reasons, the prosecutor’s questions couldn’t be answered.

Only after news broke to the public on Tuesday night that a judge at the Denver immigration court had been diagnosed with COVID-19 (the disease caused by the new coronavirus) did court officials follow up with the prosecutor and confirm her suspicions. Other attorneys the judge had been in close contact with were notified the next day. The court remained open through Thursday, when the entire building it was housed in was shut down for deep cleaning by the General Services Administration. (It’s currently set to reopen Monday.)

In New York, legal aid groups sent a letter to immigration court officials saying that two of their attorneys had symptoms of COVID-19 and a third had been exposed to someone who’d tested positive. All three attorneys had appeared in court the past week, and all had hearings scheduled the following day. The courts didn’t say anything to their employees about the letter, according to multiple sources.

Since taking office, the Trump administration has pressured the immigration courts to process as many immigrants as quickly as possible — pressuring judges to hear more cases and complete them within a year, and making it harder for immigrants or attorneys to postpone hearings. Now, they face a public health crisis that requires everyone to reduce person-to-person contact.

Immigration court workers have two concerns. The first is that the courts are often crowded and require close contact with members of the public. The second is that, like most employees of any type, especially those who take public transit, they are exposed every time they leave their homes to work.

Employees remain concerned about their exposure over the past few weeks, while courts were running as usual. Employees in New York and California — the states hardest hit by the pandemic to date — told ProPublica that their requests for “deep cleaning” were rejected by managers, and that they were bringing their own Clorox wipes and disinfectant spray to the office.

Most immigration court business happens in person. Even trying to postpone an immigration hearing (for example, due to illness) requires an attorney to file a paper form with a clerk. And if an immigrant doesn’t show up for a hearing, they’re at risk of getting ordered deported in absentia. In at least one New York court, according to two people who work there, the chief judge told employees Monday to issue absentia deportation orders if immigrants weren’t showing up, even if the coronavirus was the suspected cause.

Policies the Trump administration introduced before the COVID-19 pandemic put considerable pressure on judges and prosecutors not to allow immigrants to postpone their hearings. Judges face a “performance standard” of completing 80% of their cases within a year — a standard over 90% of judges don’t meet, according to the National Association of Immigration Judges. But the more than 150 judges who have been hired in the past two years are still in their probationary period, where they could be fired for failing to meet performance standards.

While many judges have been lenient in granting coronavirus-related postponements, others have not. Last week, according to one California immigration court employee, a judge took a break from a hearing to tell colleagues that the immigrant’s attorney claimed to be sick, but because he wasn’t coughing, the hearing would move forward.

One email sent by the chief prosecutor at the Miami court Tuesday, read to ProPublica, told prosecutors that if an immigrant or her attorney claimed to be sick, any postponement should be counted against the immigrant (preventing them from requesting another postponement). If the immigrant didn’t want to postpone, and the judge wasn’t willing to hold the hearing by phone, the prosecutor was instructed to contact her manager — who would assess the claim of illness himself before deciding what to do. (A call to the chief prosecutor in Miami was not immediately returned.)

Most communication, though, has been oral. In at least two courts, chief judges were asked to put policies in writing and declined.

Employees have been in the dark about who, exactly, is making the decisions about which courts are open and when employees are allowed to work from home or take leave to stay home. “The word is that it’s out of their hands. Everything is out of everybody’s hands,” Fanny Behar-Ostrow, president of the union representing immigration prosecutors, told ProPublica Wednesday. “I don’t know who’s making the calls, but they’re wrong.”

An email obtained by the Miami Herald, written by the assistant chief immigration judge in charge of the Miami immigration court on Wednesday, said that closure decisions were ultimately being made by “the White House” — something that employees at other courts also said their managers had suggested. But chief judges gave conflicting explanations about which decisions were subject to White House approval; one chief judge told employees that the White House had to be involved in decisions about remote work, while other chief judges made those decisions themselves.

It’s not clear who at the White House is involved or how. Immigration officials told the Herald that the ultimate decision was made by the Office of Management and Budget. However, according to the employees ProPublica spoke to, some immigration court officials used “White House” to refer to policies set by the Office of Personnel Management. The assistant chief immigration judge (the judge in charge of a given immigration court location) for one California court told employees on March 12 that they’d had a phone call with staff for Vice President Mike Pence, who’s running the official coronavirus task force.

But to many employees, the specter of “White House” involvement raised concerns that the administration’s immigration policy priorities were getting in the way of its public health obligations.

. . . .

Read Dara’s full article at the link.

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

The confusion engendered by politicized immigration enforcement in support of a White Nationalist agenda doesn’t end with the Immigration Courts. Despite, or perhaps because of, a number of public statements by DHS political hacks, there’s still plenty of uncertainty and angst about DHS’s enforcement and detention policies. Chloe Hadavas over at Slate sets out what happens when politicos take over law enforcement and justice.

Chloe Havadas — Chloe Hadavas
Intern Reporter
Slate

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/03/ice-halts-immigration-enforcement-coronavirus.html

Immigration and Customs Enforcement announced on Wednesday that it will halt most arrests and deportations, focusing only on individuals who are “public safety risks” and who are “subject to mandatory detention based on criminal grounds,” as the coronavirus sweeps across the U.S. and public health officials scramble to limit the virus’ spread.

Undocumented immigrants are often afraid to seek medical care for fear of deportation. And even as state and local officials encouraged anyone who needed medical treatment to seek help, ICE officers continued to make arrests, including in areas hit hard by the virus. But in the temporary change in enforcement, ICE also said that it won’t carry out operations near health care facilities, including hospitals, doctors’ offices, and urgent care facilities, “except in the most extraordinary of circumstances,” the agency said in a statement. “Individuals should not avoid seeking medical care because they fear civil immigration enforcement.”

Immigration experts said ICE’s decision was somewhat unexpected, though they remain cautious about how to interpret it. “I’m always surprised to hear that they’re going to scale back on their efforts,” said Jennifer M. Chacón, a UCLA law professor who focuses on immigration. ICE’s statement marks a distinct shift from the agency’s operations under the Trump administration. Both Chacón and Karla McKanders, a law professor who directs the Immigration Practice Clinic at Vanderbilt University, said that it reminded them of the “felons, not families” immigration policy of the Obama administration. “You read it and it basically looks like the Obama-era enforcement priority statement, and you just wonder why it takes a pandemic to get ICE to think about prioritizing resources and focusing efforts on public safety,” said Chacón.

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

You can read the rest of Chloe’s article at the link.

“I don’t know who’s making the calls, but they’re wrong.” Kind of “says it all” about how the regime treats its own employees and the public good.

Meanwhile, Article III Courts, which have had more than ample opportunity to put an end to the constitutional farce taking place in Immigration Court and also to direct the DHS to take overdue steps to release non-dangerous (that is, most) immigration detainees before the epidemic sweeps chronically health-endangering immigration prisons in their New American Gulag (“NAG”), have once again “swallowed the whistle.” The Gulag, where kids are caged and put in “iceboxes,” families separated, and folks sometimes left to die, all for no reason other than “we can do it and nobody’s going to stop us” will haunt not only those corrupt public servants who established and operated it, but also those like legislators, judges, and public health officials who failed in their duties to end the human rights abuses.

Perhaps the Article IIIs are “running scared” because without the ongoing clown show in the U.S. Immigration Courts, the Article IIIs would be in line for the title of “Americas’s Most Dysfunctional Courts.”

Also, I think it’s time for Slate to take “Intern” off Chloe Hadavas’s title and ink this “up and coming talent” to a full time contract covering immigration and justice issues.

Due Process Forever. Dysfunctional Courts That Endanger The Public, Never!

🤡☠️

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

PWS

03-21-20

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

UPDATE: Gullible, complicit U.S. Judges in their ivory tower bubbles with plenty of hand sanitizers might be willing to believe DHS’s claims that everything is “hunky dory” in the New American Gulag, but the truth is stark, ugly, and predictable for anyone familiar with the regime’s immigration antics, lies, and cover-ups:

“The cells stink. The toilets don’t flush. There’s never enough soap. They give out soap once a week. One bar of soap a week. How does that make any sense?”

Read the latest from Vice News, as hunger strikes break out in three New Jersey detention facilities:

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/pkew79/immigrants-are-now-on-hunger-strike-in-3-ice-detention-centers–fears

Meanwhile, Courtside has been receiving reports from multiple sources in New Jersey about rapidly deteriorating conditions in Immigration Courts and the Gulag, failure to follow Federal health guidelines, possible positive coronavirus tests among ICE employees, and efforts by the the regime to keep the truth about about the growing health risks for detainees, judges, lawyers, and other personnel forced to deal with this dangerous, broken, and totally dysfunctional system “under wraps.”

I have also received disturbing, yet credible, reports of continuances for “at risk” attorneys being denied by some Immigration Judges, while other judges have received “no assurances” from their management “handlers” that the regime’s due-process-mocking “production quotas” will be waived during the health emergency! ☠️☠️☠️☠️☠️

PWS

03-21-20

BORDER CLOSINGS GO BOTH WAYS: Guatemala Refuses More U.S. Deportations — Regime’s “4-D” Approach About To Hit a Brick Wall?

Molly O’Toole
Immigration Reporter
LA Times

https://edition.pagesuite.com/popovers/dynamic_article_popover.aspx?guid=e7303b6a-98d8-40e2-af8f-cc25ea5200ab&v=sdk

Molly O’Toole and Cindy Carcamo report for the LA Times:

GUATEMALA CITY — Guatemala on Tuesday became the first Central American nation to block deportation flights from the United States in an effort to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, a dramatic turnabout on Trump administration policies barring entry to asylum seekers from the region.

Guatemala’s Foreign Ministry announced that all deportation flights would be paused “as a precautionary measure” to establish additional health checks. Ahead of the announcement, President Alejandro Giammattei said in a Monday news conference that Guatemala also would close its borders completely for 15 days.

“This virus can affect all of us, and my duty is to preserve the lives of Guatemalans at any cost,” he said.

Guatemala, a major source of migration to the United States as well as a primary transit country for people from other nations headed to the U.S.-Mexico border, in recent days has blocked travelers from the U.S., as well as arrivals from Canada and a few European and Asian countries.

The Guatemalan government under Giammattei’s new administration had confirmed six coronavirus cases as of Monday morning. But it has taken a hard tack in its response to the pandemic to try to prevent the rapid spread seen in North America and elsewhere, becoming among the first in the region to bar entry of Americans.

Other nations in the Western Hemisphere, including El Salvador, Honduras, Panama, Colombia, Ecuador, Argentina, Chile and Peru, also have taken steps to bar foreigners and, in some cases, to shut their borders, including to their own returning citizens.

Guatemala’s move to refuse deportations will have a significant impact on the Trump administration’s efforts to ramp up a controversial agreement under which the United States sends migrants who are seeking asylum in the United States to Guatemala instead, even those who aren’t Guatemalan citizens.

The deal between the U.S. and Guatemala, called the Asylum Cooperative Agreement, denies the asylum seekers the opportunity to apply in the United States for refuge and instead allows them only to seek asylum in Guatemala.

Guatemala’s highest court initially blocked the agreement. Since November, the U.S. has sent Guatemala more than 900 men, women and children who have arrived at the border from El Salvador and Honduras.

. . . .

On Monday, the ACLU and other groups filed suit against ICE, seeking the release of immigrants in detention who are particularly vulnerable to COVID-19. Immigration judges, prosecutors and lawyers also called on the Justice Department to close immigration courts.

Judge A. Ashley Tabaddor, president of the National Assn. of Immigration Judges, said judges had been told to continue holding hearings with immigrants during the health crisis.

“Call DOJ and ask why they are not shutting down the courts,” she said, referring to the Justice Department.

O’Toole reported from Guatemala City and Carcamo from Los Angeles. Times staff writer Maura Dolan in Orinda, Calif., contributed to this report.

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

Read the full article at the link.

I suppose that the regime will just start dumping all deportees from all countries in Mexico. But, viruses know no borders.

To date, Mexico’s reported number of coronavirus cases is much lower than the U.S. However, we don’t know whether or not that is a product of there actually being fewer cases or Mexico having poor testing and reporting procedures. But, eventually what happens in Mexico will affect the U.S. Of that, we can be sure. And, no wall or Executive Order will stand in the way.

Seems like it would be a good time for some mutual cooperation between the U.S. and Mexico to determine the best mutually effective ways of handling border control issues in the time of pandemic, consistent with controlling the spread of disease in both countries. The regime did reach an agreement with Canada on border limitations today. But, when dealing with countries to our south, the regime has shown a strong preference for unilateral actions or bogus “agreements” obtained by duress and threats.

In any event, the end of direct deportations by air could be a consequence of the pandemic. And, given the limitations on detention and its health risks, the regime might be forced to come up with other approaches on how best to treat all persons within our borders, whether we like it or not. The regime’s “4-D Immigration Policy” — Detain, Deny, Deport, Distort — might be “hitting the wall.”

Still not clear what’s happening in the Immigration Courts.

PWS

03-18-20

U.S. DISTRICT JUDGE LYNN S. ADELMAN CHANNELS “COURTSIDE” — BLASTS ROBERTS & COMPANY FOR AIDING THE FORCES SEEKING TO DESTROY OUR DEMOCRACY — “Instead of doing what it can to ensure the maintenance of a robust democratic republic, the Court’s decisions ally it with the most anti-democratic currents in American politics,”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/03/11/lynn-adelman-roberts-trump/

Fred Barbash reports for the WashPost:

Lynn S. Adelman, a U.S. district judge in Milwaukee, has riled conservatives by publishing a blistering critique of the Supreme Court’s record under Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., focusing on a string of decisions that he argues have fostered “economic inequality,” “undermined democracy” and “increased the political power of corporations and wealthy individuals” at the expense of ordinary Americans.

Adelman also criticized President Trump, who he wrote ran as a populist but failed to deliver “policies beneficial to the general public. … While Trump’s temperament is that of an autocrat,” Adelman wrote, “he is disinclined to buck the wealthy individuals and corporations who control his party.”

The article by Adelman was all the more unusual because it went after the chief justice directly. Roberts, he said, was “misleading” in his 2005 confirmation hearing testimony when he pledged to be a passive “umpire” calling balls and strikes.

Adelman called that metaphor a “masterpiece of disingenuousness,” saying the court under Roberts “has been anything but passive” as its “hard right majority” has actively participated in “undermining American democracy.”

As president, Donald Trump has repeatedly accused federal judges of being political and beholden to the presidents who appointed them. (JM Rieger/The Washington Post)

The article, entitled “The Roberts Court’s Assault on Democracy,” is scheduled for publication in an unspecified forthcoming issue of the Harvard Law & Policy Review, which describes itself as the official publication of the liberal American Constitution Society. It was published in full at SSRN this month.

Adelman, appointed to the bench by President Bill Clinton in 1997, is a former Democratic state senator in Wisconsin and Legal Aid Society trial lawyer. Perhaps his best-known decision nationally was a 2014 ruling striking down Wisconsin’s voter ID law.

His broad critique of the Roberts court, with particular reference to its decisions on voting rights and campaign finance by corporate interests, is not an uncommon one — coming, that is, from liberal scholars or political leaders, including former president Barack Obama.

But coming from a sitting federal judge in a journal article accompanied by such a blunt attack on Roberts, not to mention Trump, it has attracted uncommon attention.

. . . .

**********

Read the complete article at the link.

So I’m not the only one to note the Chiefie’s “Taneyesque” performance, particularly on issues involving the rights of migrants, refugees, Muslims, and other persons of color. He has joined the regime in “Dred Scottifying” those with brown skins who are entitled to the protection of our Constitution and our laws, which Trump has eliminated without legislation, relying largely on transparently fraudulent “national security rationales.”

But, Roberts hasn’t been much good for African Americans or other minorities either, joining his right winger activist colleagues in disingenuously dismantling key parts of civil rights and voting rights protections and turning an intentionally blind eye to partisan gerrymandering carried out by the GOP to disenfranchise minorities. Election results get skewed and folks actually die as a result of these intentional miscarriages of justice to further a toxic right wing agenda aimed at destroying America’s democratic institutions, promoting inequality, and institutionalizing privilege. As Judge Adelman said “the transformation of the Supreme Court from what he described as a defender of ordinary people and ‘subordinated groups’ to an enabler of an ‘anti-democratic’ Republican agenda.” Right on, Judge A!

I also found this comment telling:

Adelman was unapologetic. “I think it’s totally appropriate to criticize the court when there’s a basis for it,” he said. “Judges are encouraged to comment on the law because we have a particular interest, knowledge and familiarity.”

Compare that with the “muzzling” of the Immigration Judiciary by the Executive reported recently on Courtside. https://immigrationcourtside.com/2020/03/03/🤡🤡clown-court-report-as-due-process-goes-into-death-spiral-regime-muzzles-immigration-judges/

And, as I constantly point out, the Immigration Courts aren’t “courts” at all. They are blatantly unconstitutional “star chambers” run by the Executive Branch with the complicity of the Article III Judiciary who see their work daily and know full well that they are often “rubber stamping” final orders sending folks into potentially life-threatening exile with only a transparently thin veneer of “due process.” But, according to Roberts and his gang, brown-skinned refugees aren’t entitled to even access this process in a reasonable manner, let alone receive the fair hearings to which they are entitled before being “orbited” to potential death in foreign lands. What if it were his wife and kids? I’ll bet their lives would get more consideration.

I also appreciate Judge Adelman’s “spotlighting” the disingenuous testimony of Roberts and other right wingers under oath before the Senate when they “feigned impartiality” to disguise their anti-democracy agenda (without, of course, losing the support of the rightest Republicans who were “licking their chops” at finally getting their long-awaited “judicial wrecking crew” in place).

As one of my esteemed Round Table colleagues said recently: “In the words of Balzac, ‘to distrust the judiciary marks the beginning of the end of society.’”

Unhappily, thanks to Roberts and other complicit Article IIIs, we’re there. Which is exactly how Trump and his supporters want it!

In reality, judges were among those inside Germany who might have effectively challenged Hitler’s authority, the legitimacy of the Nazi regime, and the hundreds of laws that restricted political freedoms, civil rights, and guarantees of property and security. And yet, the overwhelming majority did not. Instead, over the 12 years of Nazi rule, during which time judges heard countless cases, most not only upheld the law but interpreted it in broad and far-reaching ways that facilitated, rather than hindered, the Nazis ability to carry out their agenda.

— United States Holocaust Museum, Law, Justice, and the Holocaust, at 8 (July 2018)

How soon we forget!

So much for the bogus ”passive “umpire” calling balls and strikes.”

Due Process Forever! Complicit Courts Never!

PWS

03-11-20

LET THE KILLING CONTINUE — PREDICTABLY, SUPREMES “GAME” SYSTEM TO GIVE THUMBS UP TO “LET ‘EM DIE IN MEXICO” — “Brown Lives Don‘t Matter” In Full Gear @ High Court – Justice Sotomayor Only One To Stand For Constitution & Human Rights As Race Toward Authoritarianism Accelerates!

Robert Barnes
Supreme Court Reporter
Washington Post

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/courts_law/supreme-court-trump-remain-in-mexico/2020/03/11/7abd4b9c-62d7-11ea-acca-80c22bbee96f_story.html

Supreme Court says Trump administration may continue ‘Remain in Mexico’ policy for asylum seekers

Robert Barnes

Migrants are led back down Paso del Norte International Bridge in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, last month after the United States refused them entry. (Paul Ratje/AFP/Getty Images)

The Supreme Court on Wednesday said the Trump administration may continue its “Remain in Mexico” policy for asylum seekers while lower-court challenges continue, after the federal government warned that tens of thousands of immigrants amassed at the southern border could overwhelm the immigration system.

The justices reversed a decision of a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, which had ordered the policy be suspended Thursday on parts of the border. Justice Sonia Sotomayor was the only noted dissenter.

The Trump administration had warned the justices of a dire situation without their intervention.

“Substantial numbers of up to 25,000 returned aliens who are awaiting proceedings in Mexico will rush immediately to enter the United States,” Solicitor General Noel Francisco wrote in a brief. “A surge of that magnitude would impose extraordinary burdens on the United States and damage our diplomatic relations with the government of Mexico.”

The experimental U.S. policy requires migrants to wait in Mexico while their asylum claims are processed. (Luis Velarde/The Washington Post)

Trump’s ‘Remain in Mexico’ policy blocked in federal appeals court

The program — officially known as the Migrant Protection Protocols, or MPP — is among the tools the Trump administration has used to curb mass migration from Central America and elsewhere across the southern U.S. border.

In the 13 months it has been in place, the government said, 60,000 migrants have been sent back into Mexico to await their U.S. asylum hearings, part of an effort to limit access to the United States and deter people from attempting the journey north.

The administration implemented the program last year, after more than 470,000 migrants — including parents and children — crossed into the United States illegally, with most quickly freed amid a massive immigration court backlog.

The American Civil Liberties Union, representing immigration groups and individuals, called it an “unprecedented policy that fundamentally changed the nation’s asylum system, contrary to Congress’s design and the United States’ treaty obligations.”

A panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit last month issued an injunction against the policy along the borders of California and Arizona, states within the court’s authority.

Judges William A. Fletcher and Richard A. Paez, both appointed by President Bill Clinton, agreed with a lower-court judge in California that MPP probably violated federal immigration law by ousting undocumented asylum seekers who should be allowed to apply for protection in the United States.

‘Remain in Mexico’ program dwindles as more immigrants are flown to Guatemala or are quickly deported

The judges also said the program probably violated the administration’s “non-refoulement” obligations under international and domestic law, which prohibit the government from sending people to countries where they face danger. The 57-page ruling cited asylum seekers who feared kidnapping, threats and violence in Mexico.

“There is a significant likelihood that the individual plaintiffs will suffer irreparable harm if the MPP is not enjoined,” Fletcher wrote in the opinion. “Uncontested evidence in the record establishes that non-Mexicans returned to Mexico under the MPP risk substantial harm, even death, while they await adjudication of their applications for asylum.”

Judge Ferdinand F. Fernandez, a President George H.W. Bush appointee, dissented, arguing that the panel should have adhered to a prior appeals court decision that allowed MPP to take effect.

The Supreme Court’s action marks another case in which the Trump administration has asked the high court to immediately intervene after an adverse ruling from a regional appeals court.

The court on a 5-to-4 vote in January allowed the administration to begin implementing new “wealth test” rules making it easier to deny immigrants residency or admission to the United States because they have used or might use public-assistance programs.

Maria Sacchetti contributed to this report

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So much for human dignity, our Constitution, and the rule of law. How many will die because of the Supreme’s dereliction of duty before we finally get regime change? Of course, the Supremes haven’t shown much interest in voting rights and fair elections either.

Due Process Forever!

PWS

03-11-20

AS THOSE CHARGED WITH PROTECTING JUSTICE “TOADY UP” & ENABLE TRUMP REGIME’S “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY,” ONE GROUP OF CIVIL SERVANTS HAS THE COURAGE TO STAND UP FOR DUE PROCESS, THE RIGHTS OF ASYLUM SEEKERS, & SIMPLE HUMAN DIGNITY: USCIS ASYLUM OFFICERS! BONUS+: My Latest Monday Essay: “Heroes & Enablers”

https://apple.news/AOKo5byofRfKem24qSuLsaA

Joe Jurado reports for The Root:

The immigration policies executed by the Trump administration have been, to be succinct, f***ed up. That’s not even just me saying that. The people who have to execute his policies are saying it too.

The New York Times reports that a union of federal asylum workers has filed an amicus brief stating that a policy from the Trump Administration that diverts migrants to Guatemala is unlawful. The union, National CIS Council 119, represents 700 asylum and refugee officers of the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services. The brief states that international treaty obligations are being violated as a result of having to deport migrants to a country where they will likely face prosecution. The Trump administration made a deal with Guatemala that allows the United States to deport migrants seeking asylum in the States to Guatemala. The union believes that these new rules are forcing them to violate the laws they were trained to uphold.

. . . .

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Read the complete report at the link.

HEROES & ENABLERS — Judges Who Aid The Trump Regime’s Deadly Oppression Of The Most Vulnerable Among Us Will Eventually Hear The Voices Of Those They Abandoned & Dehumanized — Even From The Graves Of The Oppressed, History Will Pass Judgement On The Smugly Powerful Who Abuse The Weak!

By Paul Wickham Schmidt

Courtside Exclusive

March 9, 2020

USCIS Asylum Officers are the “NDPA Heroes of the Week!”

So, one group of courageous civil servants is willing to put their careers on the line to defend the Constitution and the rights of the vulnerable. But, others in more protected positions, like, for example, Supreme Court Justices and some Court of Appeals Judges, are afraid to stand up to Trump and defend the rule of law and the humanity of those whose only “crime” is to trust in our legal protection system. The courage of one group contrasts with the willful ignorance and cowardly complicity of the other. What’s wrong with this picture?

At some point, there will be “regime change” in the Executive as well as the Senate. When that happens, our system needs a complete re-examination of the immigration scholarship, commitment to human rights, and the moral leadership of those we are giving lifetime appointments to the Federal Bench, particularly the Supremes.

Obviously, the system has failed when two current justices choose to use their power and privileged positions disingenuously to rail about the “bogus horrors” of nationwide injunctions, and thereby spur the regime on to even grater abuses, while papering over the real issue of the actual grotesque legal, constitutional, and human rights violations inflicted on migrants and others by a White Nationalist would-be authoritarian regime that would eventually do away with almost all of our legal rights.

In the future, perhaps we should consider elevating more Asylum Officers with law degrees and a record of fair adjudication and speaking truth to power to the Article III Judiciary, including the Supremes. There are younger members of our Round Table of Former Immigration Judges who were forced by the regime into “early retirement” who could bring scholarship, fairness, practicality, and justice back to the Article IIIs. How about some pro bono lawyers, clinical professors, and NGO leaders who combine scholarship with real life experience and whose proven creativity and problem solving skills far exceed the pedestrian and wooden approaches we see all too often from today’s failing Article III Judiciary. Although their efforts are mocked, disrespected, and undermined by complicit Article III Judges, like the “J.R. Five,” these courageous “defenders of democracy and the rights of the weak” are the ones who are in fact keeping our legal system afloat in the face of Article III willful ignorance and complicity in tyranny.

And, we definitely need fewer corporate lawyers (except those who have extensive pro bono immigration/human rights experience), prosecutors, and right wing “think tankers” occupying the Federal bench.We have an oversupply of those folks on the bench right now, and our rights are suffering for it. It will take years, perhaps decades, to repair the damage they are causing and to bring the Federal Judicial system back into a proper balance.

These aren’t “liberal/conservative philosophical questions.” They are black and white questions of moral courage and the willingness to enforce Due Process and protect those whose lives are endangered by the Trump regime’s cruel and lawless programs and constant racially-inspired lies, naked bias, and misrepresentations. Sending folks back to dangerous countries without functioning asylum systems is wrong as a matter of law. Period. Making them “Remain in Mexico” is wrong. Period. A so-called “court system” run by a transparently biased, disingenuous, “uber enforcement” official like Billy Barr does not provide the “fair and impartial adjudications” required by Due Process. Period. Separating families and putting kids in cages and “kiddie gulags” is wrong. Period. Those initiating and carrying out those policies should be chastised and held accountable, not enabled. Period.

Actually, many courageous and scholarly U.S. District Judges have gotten these straightforward legal questions exactly right and promptly entered life-saving injunctions. A number of U.S. Immigration Judges have also courageously adhered to the rule of law in the face of excruciating and unethical pressure from DOJ politicos and their toadies to cut corners and railroad individuals out of the country without due process.

It’s the Supremes and too many Circuit Court Judges who who have “rolled over” for the regime’s cruel and inhuman nonsense. By doing so, they essentially “pull the rug” out from under those judges who have the encourage and integrity to “just say no” to the regime’s constant overreach. In doing so, the Federal Appellate Courts and the Supremes are actually engaging in undermining the system they serve and encouraging “worst practices” and even worse results. What truly reprehensible “role models” for upcoming lawyers. Fortunately, many newer lawyers are members of the New Due Process Army and are ignoring the poor and immoral examples of judicial spinelessness set by their supposed “elders.”

Life tenure protects the jobs and paychecks of Article III Judges. But, it won’t protect them from justified criticism and the ultimate judgement of history. Bashing the oppressed in behalf of those in power might seem like a good short-term strategy. After all, the deported, the abused, and the dead don’t normally get to “write history.”

But others are watching this travesty unfold and are pledged to “give a voice” to those silenced by the gross dereliction of legal duties and ignoring simple human decency and values by many with power who could have put an end to these obscene human rights abuses. Chief Justice Roger Taney might have been hailed by the White Supremacists of his age for his opinion in Dred Scott. But, he hasn’t “weathered the test of time” too well! Nor will Chief Justice Roberts and others who have been “going along to get along” with cruel and illegal abuses wantonly inflicted by the White Nationalist regime on the most needy and vulnerable among us.

Congrats and much appreciation from all of us in the New Due Process Army to USCIS Asylum Officers for your courage and integrity in the face of tyranny!

Due Process Forever; Complicity & Enabling Cruelty Never!

PWS

03-09-20

WELL, THAT DIDN’T TAKE LONG: After Enjoining the Regime’s “Let ‘Em Die in Mexico” Program On Friday, 9th Cir. Appeals Panel Later “Suspends” Its Order Pending Further Responses From The Parties — Gov’s Illegal Abuse of Asylum Seekers Allowed to Continue for Now!

https://apple.news/AdZkiR13zQPmHAlPE8ZIKXw

Elliott Spagat reports for AP:

SAN DIEGO (AP) — A 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel voted unanimously Friday to suspend an order it issued earlier in the day to block a central pillar of the Trump administration’s policy requiring asylum seekers to wait in Mexico while their cases wind through U.S. courts.

The three-judge panel told the government to file written arguments by the end of Monday and for the plaintiffs to respond by the end of Tuesday.

The Justice Department said at least 25,000 asylum seekers subject to the policy are currently waiting in Mexico and expressed “massive and irreparable national-security of public-safety concerns.”

Government attorneys said immigration lawyers had begun demanding that asylum seekers be allowed in the United States, with one insisting that 1,000 people be allowed to enter at one location.

“The Court’s reinstatement of the injunction causes the United States public and the government significant and irreparable harms — to border security, public safety, public health, and diplomatic relations,” Justice Department attorneys wrote.

Customs and Border Protection had already begun to stop processing people under the policy.

ACLU attorney Judy Rabinovitz called the suspension of Friday’s order “a temporary step.”

“We will continue working to permanently end this unspeakably cruel policy,” she said.

. . . .

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Read the full report at the link.

Remember what I said in my post yesterday: “But, hold the ‘victory dance.’” It’s not over till it’s over. And this one might not be over until the regime sends the last asylum seeker to death or into harm’s way, thereby achieving their “ultimate deterrent” at the expense of human lives and the rule of law.

Of course, the Government’s health, national security, and public safety concerns are phony as a three-dollar bill. But, that might or might not make any difference.

Stay tuned.

PWS

02-29-20

FINALLY: SPLIT 9TH CIR PANEL ENTERS NATIONWIDE INJUNCTION AGAINST “LET ‘EM DIE IN MEXICO” A/K/A “MIGRANT ‘PROTECTION’ PROTOCOLS” — Innovation Law Lab v. Wolf

9thMPPInjunction

Innovation Law Lab v. Wolf, 9th Cir., 02-28-20, published

PANEL: Ferdinand F. Fernandez, William A. Fletcher, and Richard A. Paez, Circuit Judges.

OPINION BY: Judge William A. Fletcher

DISSENTING OPINION: Judge Ferdinand F. Fernandez

KEY QUOTE FROM MAJORITY:

In addition to likelihood of success on the merits, a court must consider the likelihood that the requesting party will

INNOVATION LAW LAB V. WOLF 49

suffer irreparable harm, the balance of the equities, and the public interest in determining whether a preliminary injunction is justified. Winter, 555 U.S. at 20. “When the government is a party, these last two factors merge.” Drakes Bay Oyster Co. v. Jewell, 747 F.3d 1073, 1092 (9th Cir. 2014) (citing Nken v. Holder, 556 U.S. 418, 435 (2009)).

There is a significant likelihood that the individual plaintiffs will suffer irreparable harm if the MPP is not enjoined. Uncontested evidence in the record establishes that non-Mexicans returned to Mexico under the MPP risk substantial harm, even death, while they await adjudication of their applications for asylum.

The balance of equities favors plaintiffs. On one side is the interest of the Government in continuing to follow the directives of the MPP. However, the strength of that interest is diminished by the likelihood, established above, that the MPP is inconsistent with 8 U.S.C. §§ 1225(b) and 1231(b). On the other side is the interest of the plaintiffs. The individual plaintiffs risk substantial harm, even death, so long as the directives of the MPP are followed, and the organizational plaintiffs are hindered in their ability to carry out their missions.

The public interest similarly favors the plaintiffs. We agree with East Bay Sanctuary Covenant:

On the one hand, the public has a “weighty” interest “in efficient administration of the immigration laws at the border.” Landon v. Plasencia, 459 U.S. 21, 34 (1982). But the public also has an interest in ensuring that “statutes enacted by [their] representatives”

50 INNOVATION LAW LAB V. WOLF

are not imperiled by executive fiat. Maryland v. King, 567 U.S. 1301, 1301 (2012) (Roberts, C.J., in chambers).

932 F.3d at 779 (alteration in original).

VII. Scope of the Injunction

The district court issued a preliminary injunction setting aside the MPP—that is, enjoining the Government “from continuing to implement or expand the ‘Migrant Protection Protocols’ as announced in the January 25, 2018 DHS policy memorandum and as explicated in further agency memoranda.” Innovation Law Lab, 366 F. Supp. 3d at 1130. Accepting for purposes of argument that some injunction should issue, the Government objects to its scope.

We recognize that nationwide injunctions have become increasingly controversial, but we begin by noting that it is something of a misnomer to call the district court’s order in this case a “nationwide injunction.” The MPP operates only at our southern border and directs the actions of government officials only in the four States along that border. Two of those states (California and Arizona) are in the Ninth Circuit. One of those states (New Mexico) is in the Tenth Circuit. One of those states (Texas) is in the Fifth Circuit. In practical effect, the district court’s injunction, while setting aside the MPP in its entirety, does not operate nationwide.

For two mutually reinforcing reasons, we conclude that the district court did not abuse its discretion in setting aside the MPP.

INNOVATION LAW LAB V. WOLF 51

First, plaintiffs have challenged the MPP under the Administrative Procedure Act (“APA”). Section 706(2)(A) of the APA provides that a “reviewing court shall . . . hold unlawful and set aside agency action . . . not in accordance with law.” We held, above, that the MPP is “not in accordance with” 8 U.S.C. § 1225(b). Section 706(2)(A) directs that in a case where, as here, a reviewing court has found the agency action “unlawful,” the court “shall . . . set aside [the] agency action.” That is, in a case where § 706(2)(A) applies, there is a statutory directive—above and beyond the underlying statutory obligation asserted in the litigation—telling a reviewing court that its obligation is to “set aside” any unlawful agency action.

There is a presumption (often unstated) in APA cases that the offending agency action should be set aside in its entirety rather than only in limited geographical areas. “[W]hen a reviewing court determines that agency regulations are unlawful, the ordinary result is that rules are vacated—not that their application to the individual petitioners is proscribed.” Regents of the Univ. of Cal. v. U.S. Dep’t of Homeland Sec., 908 F3d 476, 511 (9th Cir. 2018) (internal quotation marks omitted). “When a court determines that an agency’s action failed to follow Congress’s clear mandate the appropriate remedy is to vacate that action.” Cal. Wilderness Coalition v. U.S. Dep’t of Energy, 631 F.3d 1072, 1095 (9th Cir. 2011); see also United Steel v. Mine Safety & Health Admin., 925 F.3d 1279, 1287 (D.C. Cir. 2019) (“The ordinary practice is to vacate unlawful agency action.”); Gen. Chem. Corp. v. United States, 817 F.2d 844, 848 (D.C. Cir. 1987) (“The APA requires us to vacate the agency’s decision if it is ‘arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, or otherwise not in accordance with law . . . .”).

52 INNOVATION LAW LAB V. WOLF

Second, cases implicating immigration policy have a particularly strong claim for uniform relief. Federal law contemplates a “comprehensive and unified” immigration policy. Arizona v. United States, 567 U.S. 387, 401 (2012). “In immigration matters, we have consistently recognized the authority of district courts to enjoin unlawful policies on a universal basis.” E. Bay Sanctuary Covenant, 932 F.3d at 779. We wrote in Regents of the University of California, 908 F.3d at 511, “A final principle is also relevant: the need for uniformity in immigration policy. . . . Allowing uneven application of nationwide immigration policy flies in the face of these requirements.” We wrote to the same effect in Hawaii v. Trump, 878 F.3d 662, 701 (9th Cir. 2017), rev’d on other grounds, 138 S. Ct. 2392 (2018): “Because this case implicates immigration policy, a nationwide injunction was necessary to give Plaintiffs a full expression of their rights.” The Fifth Circuit, one of only two other federal circuits with states along our southern border, has held that nationwide injunctions are appropriate in immigration cases. In sustaining a nationwide injunction in an immigration case, the Fifth Circuit wrote, “[T]he Constitution requires ‘an uniform Rule of Naturalization’; Congress has instructed that ‘the immigration laws of the United States should be enforced vigorously and uniformly’; and the Supreme Court has described immigration policy as ‘a comprehensive and unified system.’” Texas v. United States, 809 F.3d 134, 187–88 (5th Cir. 2015) (emphasis in original; citations omitted). In Washington v. Trump, 847 F.3d 1151 (9th Cir. 2017), we relied on the Fifth Circuit’s decision in Texas to sustain the nationwide scope of a temporary restraining order in an immigration case. We wrote, “[W]e decline to limit the geographic scope of the TRO. The Fifth Circuit has held that such a fragmented immigration policy would run afoul of the

INNOVATION LAW LAB V. WOLF 53 constitutional and statutory requirement for uniform

immigration law and policy.” Id. at 1166–67. Conclusion

We conclude that the MPP is inconsistent with 8 U.S.C. § 1225(b), and that it is inconsistent in part with 8 U.S.C. § 1231(b). Because the MPP is invalid in its entirety due to its inconsistency with § 1225(b), it should be enjoined in its entirety. Because plaintiffs have successfully challenged the MPP under § 706(2)(A) of the APA, and because the MPP directly affects immigration into this country along our southern border, the issuance of a temporary injunction setting aside the MPP was not an abuse of discretion.

We lift the emergency stay imposed by the motions panel, and we firm the decision of the district court.

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

At last, a breath of justice in halting, at least temporarily, an outrageously illegal program that is also a grotesque violation of our national values and humanity. Unfortunately, it has already resulted in thousands of injustices and damaged many lives beyond repair. That’s something that a clueless shill for authoritarianism, wanton cruelty, and abrogation of the rule of law like dissenting Judge Fernandez might want to think about.

But, hold the “victory dance.” The regime will likely seek “rehearing en banc,” appealing to other enablers of human rights atrocities like Fernandez. And, if the regime fails there, they always can “short circuit” the legal system applicable to everyone else by having Solicitor General Francisco ask his GOP buddies on the Supremes, “The JR Five,” to give the regime a free pass. As Justice Sotomayor pointed out, that type of “tilt” has already become more or less “business as usual” as the regime carries out its nativist, White Nationalist immigration agenda. Indeed, Justices Gorsuch and Thomas have already announced their eagerness to carry the regime’s water for them by doing away with nationwide injunctions, even though they are the sole way for doing justice in immigration cases like this.

But, at least for today, we can all celebrate a battle won by the New Due Process Army in the ongoing war to restore our Constitution, the rule of law, and human dignity.

Due Process Forever!

PWS

02-29-20

FEDERAL JUDGE IN MD ZAPS REGIME’S ILLEGAL DETENTION POLICY: “(T)his order is in the public interest because it requires Respondents to comport with their own rules and regulations, bars arbitrary agency action toward vulnerable immigrant communities, and diminishes the emotional and financial impact on families participating in the provisional waiver process.”

https://apple.news/AcWMzcJwDQSmvOGCYhZfQog

Regina Garcia Cano reports for AP:

BALTIMORE (AP) ― A federal judge in Maryland has banned immigration officials from arresting, detaining and deporting immigrants who are seeking legal status based on their marriages to U.S. citizens.

U.S. District Judge George J. Hazel issued the ruling Friday in a case filed by six couples accusing immigration officials of luring families to marriage interviews in Baltimore, only to detain the immigrant spouse for deportation. Hazel also ordered U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to release from custody immigrants married to U.S. citizens detained before they could complete the first step of the process to obtain legal residency.

Federal regulations allow U.S. citizens to try to legalize the status of spouses who have been living in the country illegally, including those with deportation orders. But the American Civil Liberties Union, which is representing the Maryland couples, has argued that a growing number of officers have “cruelly twisted” the rules by detaining immigrant spouses following the required marriage interviews.

The months-long process typically requires couples to demonstrate the legitimacy of their marriage as part of the first step. If the couples pass an interview and earn other approvals, immigrant spouses eventually must travel abroad for a visa interview at a U.S. consulate. Only if they receive a visa can they return to the U.S. legally.

It’s unclear how many people have become permanent U.S. residents through the Obama-era regulations. They were created to significantly reduce the time that U.S. citizens are separated from immediate family members while trying to build a lawful immigration case from their home countries.

WATCH: For-profit prisons reap business benefit from Trump’s immigration stance

“(T)his order is in the public interest because it requires Respondents to comport with their own rules and regulations, bars arbitrary agency action toward vulnerable immigrant communities, and diminishes the emotional and financial impact on families participating in the provisional waiver process,” Hazel wrote. He has not ruled on the class certification sought by the plaintiffs.

ICE did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The government in its response filed last year asked Hazel to dismiss the case arguing the court lacked jurisdiction and the plaintiffs’ “claims are not likely to be successful.”

The ruling only applies to anyone living in Maryland, but the ACLU is also pursuing a similar complaint in Massachusetts. It is unclear how many people must be released from custody under Hazel’s ruling.

Among the plaintiffs is Elmer Sanchez, a native of Honduras who was ordered in absentia to be deported in 2005 and married a U.S. citizen in 2013. He was taken into custody in May moments after he and his wife successfully finished their interview with an immigration officer in Baltimore. He was released six weeks later after the ACLU sought an emergency order to prevent imminent deportation.

“These families endured trauma under the actions of ICE,” ACLU of Maryland attorney Nick Steiner said in a statement Monday. “Their blatant disregard for their own rules and regulations that are meant to prevent family separation is unconstitutional. We are hopeful about the ruling and we believe it’s a step in the right direction in recognizing that immigrants have constitutional protections too.”

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Not many things this regime hates more than being required to follow the law!

PWS

02-11-20

FEDERAL JUDGE AGAIN FAULTS DHS DETAINER PROGRAM

https://apple.news/AmD6XgoXgST-3d3Rtb9esMQ

Joel Rubin and Brittany Mejia report for the LA Times:

A federal judge in Los Angeles upends the way ICE may use local police to detain people it suspects of being in the country illegally.

A federal judge in Los Angeles this week issued his final judgment in a long-running immigration case, upending the way Immigration and Customs Enforcement uses local police to detain people it suspects of being in the country illegally.

The judgment filed Wednesday by U.S. District Judge Andre Birotte formalized a ruling he made in September that included a permanent injunction barring ICE from using error-prone databases when issuing so-called detainers, which are requests made to police agencies to keep people who have been arrested in custody for up two days beyond the time they would otherwise be held.

The earlier ruling also blocked ICE from issuing such requests to state and local law enforcement in states where there isn’t an explicit statute authorizing police to arrest someone or keep them in custody on an immigration detainer.

The ruling, which applied to ICE activity in all but a few states, appeared to have enormous implications for how the government targets people for deportation. However, attorneys from the U.S. Department of Justice and civil rights groups that brought the case disagreed over whether the injunction went into effect immediately, and ICE gave no indication it had changed its practices.

Last fall, an ICE spokesman said the agency was “reviewing the ruling and considering our legal options.”

This week’s judgment erased any ambiguity.

Under the judgment, ICE has three months to “adopt and implement any policies, practices, trainings, and systems changes necessary to ensure consistent and effective compliance” with the judgment, Birotte wrote. The judge ordered government lawyers to provide him with evidence it had implemented new policies.

“This judgment ensures that ICE has to comply with the court’s findings that the program it’s had for decades is grounded in unconstitutional practices that have to end,” said Jennie Pasquarella, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, who helped argue the case.

The class-action lawsuit alleged that the databases that agents consult to issue detainers are so badly flawed by incomplete and inaccurate information that ICE officers should not be allowed to rely on them as the sole basis for keeping someone in custody.

In September, the judge agreed with that assessment, finding that the databases often contained “incomplete data, significant errors, or were not designed to provide information that would be used to determine a person’s removability.”

These errors, according to that decision, have led to arrests of U.S. citizens as well as noncitizens in the country lawfully. From May 2015 to February 2016, of the 12,797 detainers issued in that period, 771 were lifted, according to ICE data. Of those 771, 42 were lifted because the person was a U.S. citizen.

In the years since the lawsuit was filed, ICE has amended its policies, saying the changes made the process for issuing detainers more rigorous.

Previously, for example, agents would check individual databases in search of evidence of someone being in the country illegally. But three years ago, the agency launched a new system, in which 10 databases are automatically queried. A supervisor is required to sign off on decisions to issue detainers.

Birotte said in his judgement this week that conducting interviews with people suspected of being in the country illegally and checking the hard copy files the government keeps on immigrants is the most reliable source of information for issuing detainers.

The judge’s decision affects any detainer requests issued by an ICE officer in the federal court system’s Central District of California. That designation is significant because it includes the Pacific Enforcement Response Center, a facility in Orange County from which ICE agents send out detainer requests to authorities in 43 states, Guam and Washington, D.C.

Dozens of deportation officers and contract analysts work in shifts around the clock every day at the center. In 2018, the center issued 45,253 detainers and alerted agents at field offices to more than 28,000 additional people released from law enforcement custody before ICE could detain them.

If ICE tries to move its detainer operation to another facility, Birotte said, it must alert him in advance and the injunction would follow it to the new location.

All existing detainers issued by the enforcement center were also nullified by the judge’s ruling. Pasquarella said it was unknown how many people that affects, but said it is in “the thousands.”

Finally, Birotte gave ICE a month to alert the thousands of local and state police departments to which it sent detainer requests of his judgment and “its impact on detainers issued by ICE.” He ordered ICE to post its notice prominently on its website and said the agency “shall specifically inform these agencies that a detainer does not provide the legal authority for a state or local law enforcement officer to make a civil immigration arrest.”

The detainer process begins when police arrest and fingerprint a person. The prints are sent electronically to the FBI and checked against the prints of millions of immigrants in Homeland Security databases. If there is a match — such as someone who applied for a visa or was apprehended by Border Patrol — it triggers a review process, which often culminates with an agent at the center deciding whether to issue a detainer.

Approximately 70% of the arrests ICE makes occur after the agency is notified about someone being released from local jails or state prisons. In fiscal year 2019, ICE had lodged more than 160,000 detainers with local law enforcement agencies, according to the agency.

An ICE spokeswoman declined to comment on the judgment and would not say whether ICE had yet changed its practice of issuing detainer requests. Instead, she referred reporters to a statement released Thursday by the White House.

“A single, unelected, district judge in the Central District of California issued a legally groundless and sweeping injunction that — if not immediately lifted — will guarantee the release of innumerable criminal illegal aliens into our communities putting citizens at dire risk,” the statement said. “This ruling undermines the pillars of immigration enforcement and blocks traditional and vital law enforcement cooperation that has occurred for decades.”

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Judge Andre Birotte found that the ICE detainer program is riddled with legal errors. Not too surprising. In addition to using DHS’s inherently unreliable databases, immigration “detainers” are issued by immigration agents, not neutral and detached magistrates as they should be, which makes them constitutionally suspect and has led to rulings across the country that they should not be honored.

If I were the ACLU, however, I wouldn’t “do the victory dance” yet. Led by the complicit “J.R. Five,” the Supremes often have shown themselves to be willing, sometimes enthusiastic, enablers of the regime’s White Nationalist campaign to dehumanize and “Dred Scottify” immigrants under our laws.

As the ACLU accurately has stated: “The fundamental constitutional protections of due process and equal protection embodied in our Constitution and Bill of Rights apply to every person, regardless of immigration status.”

Unfortunately, the “J.R. Five” has ignored the rule of law and our Constitution when it comes to protecting the rights of immigrants. They have managed to “tune out” their own immigration heritages, their own good fortune and privileged positions, and turn a deaf ear to humanity and its unnecessary suffering. Instead they have allied themselves with Trump, Stephen Miller, and the other White Nationalists in subjecting immigrants and other people of color to the “New Era of Jim Crow.”

Someday, if America survives as a democracy, we will get “regime change.” But, the problems of a life-tenured judiciary infected with too many at its highest levels who are unwilling to stand up for human rights and/or who are driven by a twisted far-right ideology incorporating many of the worst aspects of white supremacy and its abuses of power over history will not necessarily disappear overnight.

Due Process Forever!

PWS

02-09-20

THE NDPA STRIKES BACK: ACLU Sues In DC To End The Regime’s Bogus “Safe Third Country” Abuse Of Human Rights & The Rule Of Law! — Regime’s Actions Could Be Characterized As “Crimes Against Humanity!”

https://apple.news/ALbDFozeyQemj7zT-zO0VUA

Camilo Montoya-Galvez reports for CBS News:

ACLU files lawsuit to halt Trump policy of sending asylum-seekers to Guatemala

Washington — The American Civil Liberties Union on Wednesday mounted the first legal challenge against the Trump administration’s policy of sending migrants who seek protection at the U.S.-Mexico border to Guatemala, a country with a skeletal asylum regime that has seen an exodus of hundreds of thousands of its own citizens in the past two years because of extreme poverty and endemic violence.

The lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., seeks to halt the implementation of a controversial asylum agreement with the Guatemalan government. Under the deal forged last summer, the U.S. has sent more than 150 asylum-seekers from Honduras and El Salvador to Guatemala, denying them access to America’s asylum system and requiring them to choose between seeking refuge in the Central American country or returning home.

The agreement, the ACLU said in its 54-page complaint, amounts to “a deadly game of musical chairs that leaves many desperate asylum-seekers without a safe haven, in violation of U.S. and international law.”

“If this rule remains in effect, it means that the U.S. can completely wash their hands of any responsibility to provide safe haven for people fleeing persecution,” Lee Gelernt, the ACLU’s top immigration litigator, told CBS News. “It would end asylum at the southern border, plain and simple.”

A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security told CBS News that while it cannot comment on litigation, “the U.S. Government and the Government of Guatemala remain committed to the asylum cooperative agreement and stand behind the integrity of the program.”

For lead plaintiff, returning home isn’t an option

As of last week, 158 Honduran and Salvadoran migrants have been rerouted by the U.S. to Guatemala, including dozens of families and at least 43 children, according to the Guatemalan migration institute. Nine people initially chose to request protection in Guatemala, but five of them have since abandoned their claims, the institute said. The rest have asked for help returning to their home countries.

The lead plaintiff in the ACLU’s lawsuit is a gay man from El Salvador who was sent by the U.S. to Guatemala after asking for asylum at the southern border. The man, identified only by the initials U.T., says he was sexually abused as a child, disowned by his family because of his sexuality and threatened by a gang member who solicited him for sex in El Salvador.

When he arrived at the U.S.-Mexico border, he was told he would be sent to Guatemala. He told Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officials, who make the initial determination about whether migrants should be subject to the U.S.-Guatemala deal, that he feared being sent to Guatemala. His concerns fell on deaf ears.

He was then referred for an interview with an asylum officer and again expressed fear of persecution in Guatemala. Nonetheless, he was deported to the country shortly afterward.

During these types of interviews, migrants must affirmatively say they fear being sent to Guatemala. Even if they do, they have to meet a fear of persecution threshold that is much higher than that of the typical “credible fear” interviews most asylum-seekers at the southern border are subject to.

The ACLU says the man applied for asylum once in Guatemala, but officials there advised him to seek protection in Mexico instead, since Guatemala is “unsafe for gay people.” The State Department warns of “societal discrimination” and police abuse against LGBTI people in Guatemala.

Returning to El Salvador is not an option for the asylum-seeker, who is currently in Mexico, since he “fears that he will be attacked or killed for his sexual orientation if he tries to live openly as a gay man,” according to the ACLU.

“A way for the U.S. to simply pass the buck”

There are five other individual plaintiffs in the ACLU’s lawsuit, including a woman and two families who were sent to Guatemala by the U.S. The Tahirih Justice Center and Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center, two organizations that provide legal services to asylum-seekers, are also named as plaintiffs in the lawsuit — which the National Immigrant Justice Center, Center for Gender & Refugee Studies and Human Rights First joined the ACLU in filing.

The group is asking the court to prohibit officials from enforcing a regulation the administration unveiled in November to implement the Guatemala deal and similar agreements that the U.S. brokered with Honduras and El Salvador which have not yet been implemented. The suit also challenges a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) guidance document for asylum officers carrying out the agreement.

The ACLU alleged that both measures violate U.S. statutes designed to prevent officials from sending asylum-seekers to places where they may face persecution and that provide legal safeguards for migrants the government seeks to deport quickly. The group also said the policy violates administrative law, since the administration did not give the public a chance to comment on it and failed to provide “reasoned explanations” for dramatically changing the asylum system at the southern border.

The administration maintains that its agreements with Guatemala and the other countries in Central America’s Northern Triangle will foster the “distribution” of asylum claims among nations in the region and provide protection to migrants “closer to home.” But the ACLU says the so-called “Asylum Cooperative Agreements” represent a dramatic departure from the “safe third country” provision in U.S. law that the administration is using to defend their legality.

In 1996, President Bill Clinton signed into law an act that codified the “safe third country” concept, allowing the U.S. to enter into bilateral or multilateral agreements to send asylum-seekers to third countries, as long as the U.S. government made sure those asylum-seekers would not face persecution based on a protected ground under U.S. asylum law and would have access to a “full and fair” process to request protection in those nations.

Gelernt and his group believe the accords with Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras violate this law because the countries do not have fully functioning asylum regimes, unlike Canada — the only nation which has an official “safe third country” agreement with the U.S.

“There is no way the administration can plausibly claim that Guatemala can provide a safe, fair and full asylum process. This administration has simply thumbed their nose at Congress,” Gelernt said, noting that Canada, a developed country with a robust asylum system, is a safe place for refugees.

“This is not a way to provide people with a fair asylum process but a way for the U.S. to simply pass the buck,” he added.

Guatemala has experienced moderate economic growth since the end of a bloody civil war in the 1990s, but it continues to grapple with high homicides rates, drug trafficking, political instability and widespread poverty, especially among its large indigenous communities in the Western highlands of the country. Only about 262 migrants sought refuge in Guatemala in 2018, according to the United Nations.

The ACLU also noted in its lawsuit that the Trump administration hasn’t publicly revealed any designations certifying that the Northern Triangle countries have the capacity to take in migrants rerouted there by the U.S., despite a requirement that such a certification be included in the government regulation to enforce the asylum agreements.

Sweeping implications for asylum-seekers

All three agreements the U.S. made last year suggest that they could grant the U.S. the power to reroute most asylum-seekers from any country in the world, barring a few exceptions, like unaccompanied children, to Central America. The ACLU underscored the sweeping nature of the deals in its suit, saying that in practice, the U.S. could send asylum-seekers from Afghanistan to one of the Northern Triangle countries, even if they did not travel through there to get to the U.S. southern border.

The administration believes it can include “all populations” in the agreements, and it recently announced it was planning to send Mexican asylum-seekers to Guatemala. The move sparked scathing criticism at home and abroad, with Mexico’s government objecting to the proposal.

Unlike migrants from Honduras and El Salvador, Mexican asylum-seekers do not travel through Guatemalan territory to reach the U.S.-Mexico border. A plan to subject Mexicans to the U.S.-Guatemala accord could, in practice, lead to the U.S. flying a Mexican asylum-seeker from Tijuana, San Diego’s neighboring city, some 1,500 miles away, asking her to seek protection in Guatemala.

How Guatemala continues to implement its “Asylum Cooperative Agreement” with the Trump administration will now be decided by conservative government of President Alejandro Giammattei, who took office on Tuesday.

The asylum agreements with countries in Central America are part of a series of policies the administration rolled out over the past year to restrict asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border. These also include a sweeping rule that renders most non-Mexican migrants ineligible for asylum and the Migrant Protection Protocols program, which has required more than 57,000 asylum-seekers from Central America to wait in dangerous Mexican border cities for the duration of their U.S. immigration proceedings.

First published on January 15, 2020 / 4:19 PM

© 2020 CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved.

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The bogus “Safe Third Country Agreements” with Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras, clearly unsafe countries without functioning asylum systems, in violation of U.S. and international laws, are daunting acts of malicious fraud. This fraud is undertaken, in the open, by a neo-fascist regime that has contempt for humanity and human rights, believes itself above the law, and has no fear of being held accountable by the Federal Courts or Congress (notwithstanding Trump’s impeachment).

The regime’s unlawful fraudulent actions are defended in court by DOJ lawyers who believe the obligation of truthfulness before tribunals and other ethical requirements simply don’t apply to them. And, that’s probably with good reason.

The Trump regime has been peddling lies, false narratives, and bad faith legal arguments to the Federal Courts, all the way up to the Supremes, for nearly three years now with no consequences to the lawyers or their political clients. Indeed, Wilbur Ross lied under oath in the “Census Case,” but continues to be the Secretary of Commerce; to my knowledge, the Government lawyers who tried to present, defend, and rationalize. Ross’s census fraud are still on the payroll. A few Supremes even voted to sweep it all under the rug. It took an unusual display of backbone by Chief Justice Roberts to prevent the fraud from being perpetrated on American voters, particularly targeting voters of color.

Private lawyers who conducted themselves in a similar manner would likely be facing state disciplinary proceedings. A private executive who lied under oath like Ross probably would have been referred for a perjury prosecution or held in contempt of court.

But, Federal Judges, who are used to giving U.S. government lawyers pretty much a “free pass,” don’t seem to “get” that they are now dealing with a willfully corrupt, thoroughly dishonest, neo-fascist regime, not “just another Administration.”

When the laws, rules, and our Constitution don‘t apply to our Government, and nobody is held accountable for outrageous official wrongdoing (arguably “crimes against humanity” in the “Safe Third Country Fraud”) we all lose!

Due Process Forever! Complicity In The Face Of Tyranny, Never!

PWS

01-16-20

US DISTRICT JUDGE DANA SABRAW REJECTS ACLU CLAIM THAT DHS HAS RETURNED TO POLICY OF “SYSTEMATICALLY SEPARATING” FAMILIES AT BORDER

Mica Rosenberg
National Immigration Reporter, Reuters

Kanishka Singh
Political News Journalist
Reuters

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-immigration-children/judge-rules-in-favor-of-trump-administration-in-family-separation-case-idUSKBN1ZD1LY?il=0

Judge rules in favor of Trump administration in family separation case

(Reuters) – A U.S. federal judge has ruled that the Trump administration’s ongoing separations of families at the U.S.-Mexico border based on parents’ criminal history or health exclusions are being carried out with proper discretion.

Mexican asylum seekers camping near the Paso del Norte international border crossing bridge while waiting to apply for asylum to the U.S. are evicted by the local government, who will move them to a local shelter, in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico January 7, 2020. REUTERS/Jose Luis Gonzalez

The ruling, by U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw in San Diego, California, on Monday, was a rare victory for the government in a case that has been ongoing since 2018.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) first brought the case over President Donald Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy of criminally prosecuting all border crossers, which led to the separation of hundreds of families and sparked national outrage. Sabraw had ordered the administration to find and reunite separated families.

Trump officially halted the practice with an executive order on June 20, 2018. But the ACLU claimed in court that since then, the government has continued the practice and separated more than 1,000 families in violation of Sabraw’s order.

The government has said it separates families when it suspects the parent has a criminal record, a communicable disease, or when there are questions about the relationship between the adult and the migrant child. It claimed its current practice is no different than prior administrations.

The rights group argued, however, that the administration was taking children from parents when they had only minor infractions like traffic violations or previous illegal border crossings.

Sabraw found government officials were “generally exercising their discretion to separate families at the border” in a manner consistent with migrants’ “rights to family integrity and the Court’s orders.”

The judge added there was no evidence before the court that the government has “returned to systematically separating families at the border.”

Sabraw did say that the government should use its rapid DNA testing technology to confirm parentage and not separate families based on “subjective concerns” alone.

The ACLU highlighted that part of the ruling in a statement: “The court strongly reaffirmed that the Trump administration bears the burden if it attempts to separate families based on an accusation that the adult is not the child’s parent,” ACLU attorney Lee Gelernt said.

The group said it was considering its next move in the case.

The U.S. Department of Justice did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Reporting by Kanishka Singh in Bengaluru and Mica Rosenberg in New York; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Matthew Lewis

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While most news commentators to date have viewed this as a “victory” for the Trump Administration,” Judge Sabraw did reaffirm the principles of his original injunction that had forced a change in Government policy. He did, however, reject the ACLU’s request for expanded injunctive relief, except for timely DNA testing. He found no evidence that the DHS had failed to comply with the terms of the prior injunction on a systemic basis.

PWS

01-14-20

WE KNOW THAT SESSIONS, WHITAKER, & BARR HAVE TURNED THE DOJ INTO A LEGAL, MORAL, PROFESSIONAL, & ETHICAL CESSPOOL — Some Federal Judges Are Beginning To Take Notice: “To say the least, it is disappointing that [DOJ] counsel, after consulting with other counsel including ‘prosecutors and appellate attorneys’ in this District’s United States Attorney’s office, submitted a legal memorandum to the Court that failed to acknowledge contrary case law that did not support its position.”

Hon. Elizabeth A. Wolford
U.S. District Judge
WDNY

Dan Kowalski over @ LexisNexis Immigration Community reports:

FW: due process victory: Hassoun v. Searls

“[T]he Court finds that 8 C.F.R. § 241.14(d) is not a permissible reading of § 1231(a)(6), and that it is accordingly a legal nullity that cannot authorize the ongoing, potentially indefinite detention of Petitioner. … The Court further finds that an evidentiary hearing is necessary before it can determine the lawfulness of Petitioner’s continued detention under 8 U.S.C. § 1226a.”

Note also the roasting, on page 11, of DOJ lawyers for failure to do basic 1L legal research: “To say the least, it is disappointing that Respondent’s counsel, after consulting with other counsel including “prosecutors and appellate attorneys” in this District’s United States Attorney’s office, submitted a legal memorandum to the Court that failed to acknowledge contrary case law that did not support its position.”

https://www.aclu.org/sites/default/files/field_document/hassoun_op.pdf

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I hear and appreciate U.S District Judge (WDNY) Elizabeth A. Wolford’s outrage and frustration.

But, for hard working members of the New Due Process Army this is “just another day at the office” in dealing with the Trump Regime’s unethical, scofflaw, fact free White Nationalist nativist agenda: lies and pretexts presented to the Supremes to hide an intentional census undercount directed at reducing Hispanic voting and political power; false narratives about migrants and crime; a bogus largely self-created “border emergency;” fraudulent “national security” justifications; EOIR “administrative changes” intended to undermine the right to representation and eliminate due process; twisted unethical “precedents” entered by the chief prosecutor that always come out against the individuals; misogynist racist misinterpretations of asylum law intended to kill, maim, and torture vulnerable women of color; child abuse cloaked in disingenuous “law enforcement” rationales; bogus “civil detention” to punish lawful asylum seekers; a grotesquely dishonest “Migrant Protection Protocol” intended to subject migrants to deadly conditions in Mexico; “Safe” Third Countries that are among the most dangerous in the world without functioning asylum systems; irrational “public charge” regulations intended to reduce legal immigration without legislation; EOIR’s distorted statistics intentionally manipulated to minimize asylum grants and cover up the anti-asylum bias improperly infused into the system; vicious unsupported attacks on the private bar by the Attorney General and other regime politicos. The list goes on forever.

Unfortunately, this scofflaw and unethical behavior will continue until Federal Judges back up their words with actions: declarations of unconstitutionality; sanctions against the Government for frivolous litigation; removing political control over EOIR; referring Barr and other DOJ attorneys who are abusing the justice system to bar authorities for possible discipline.

“This ain’t your Momma’s or Papa’s DOJ!” (Or for that matter one that those of us who served in the recent past would recognize.) Its antecedents and “role models” are America’s vile, deadly, discredited Jim Crow era and 20th & 21st Century fascist regimes.

Time for Article III Judges to get out of their ivory towers, stop tiptoeing around Government corruption, dishonesty and misconduct, and start looking at things from the human perspective of the individuals and their courageous attorneys caught up in this legal, moral, and ethical quagmire and fighting not only for their own lives but for the future of our nation! There is and will be “only one right side of history” in this existential struggle!

Due Process Forever; The Corrupt White Nationalist Immigration Agenda Never!

PWS

12-21-19

BIA SEEKS TO REPEAL CAT BY MISINTERPRETATION; MUSALO’S FACT FINDING MISSION TO EL SALVADOR SHOWS MALICIOUS ABSURDITY OF REGIME’S BOGUS “SAFE THIRD COUNTRY” ASSAULT ON HUMAN RIGHTS; 9th & 11th CIRCUITS CONTINUE TO TANK ON THE RULE OF LAW; & OTHER LEGAL NEWS ABOUT THE WHITE NATIONALIST REGIME & THE RESISTANCE — The Gibson Report — 12-10-19 — Compiled By Elizabeth Gibson, Esquire, NY Legal Assistance Group

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

TOP UPDATES

NY to begin issuing driver’s licenses to undocumented immigrants<https://www.newsday.com/news/nation/immigrants-driver-s-licenses-new-york-1.39283599>

Newsday: The Green Light Law also allows new kinds of records to be used by immigrants to apply for licenses. These include an unexpired passport from another country, an unexpired identification number from a consulate, and a foreign driver’s license that is valid or expired for less than 24 months. If an applicant doesn’t have a Social Security number, they need to sign an affidavit that they hadn’t been issued one. Even the federal government would need a court order to obtain these records. The law requires that most of the records to eventually be destroyed, and supporters expect that would happen before court orders could be issued. The documentation is specifically identified as not being a public record under the law.

Justices Lean Toward Broader Review of Deportation Orders<https://news.bloomberglaw.com/us-law-week/justices-lean-toward-immigrants-over-deportation-review>

Bloomberg: Justices from both the conservative and liberal wings of the court aggressively questioned the government’s attorney in a case examining what immigration decisions are reviewable in federal court.

More immigration judges to be assigned to cases at tent facilities<https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2019/12/06/politics/immigration-court-judges-remain-in-mexico/index.html>

CNN: As of mid-September, there were 19 judges from three separate immigration courts in Texas hearing cases. But the latest expansion includes the use of immigration judges assigned to a center in Fort Worth, Texas, that is closed to the public, leaving little opportunity for people to observe hearings.

Inside the So-Called “Safe Third”—and Trump’s Latest Attack on Asylum-Seekers<https://msmagazine.com/2019/12/04/inside-the-so-called-safe-third-and-the-trump-administrations-latest-attack-on-asylum-seekers/>

Ms.: [Karen Musalo (CGRS)] recently returned from a human rights fact-finding trip with colleagues to El Salvador, and our findings illustrate the absurdity of a U.S. / El Salvador safe third country agreement.

Year In Review: The Most Significant Immigration Stories Of 2019<https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2019/12/09/the-most-disturbing-immigration-stories-of-2019/#74b86cac1302>

Forbes: The year 2019 produced many significant and, in some cases, tragic stories about immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers. The list is not comprehensive but focuses on those stories considered most important to remember.

North Dakota county may become US’s 1st to bar new refugees<https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/north-dakota-county-uss-1st-bar-refugees-67579252>

ABC: If they vote to bar refugees, as expected, Burleigh County — home to about 95,000 people and the capital city of Bismarck — could become the first local government to do so since President Donald Trump issued an executive order making it possible.

Trump Has Built a Wall of Bureaucracy to Keep Out the Very Immigrants He Says He Wants<https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/12/trump-h1b-visa-immigration-restrictions/>

MJ: Even as President Donald Trump has complained about rules that prevent American companies “from retaining highly skilled and… totally brilliant people” from abroad, his administration has made sweeping changes to the H-1B program, denying visas to skilled immigrants, some who have been working in the United States for years. USCIS has been denying H-1B petitions at a record rate: 24 percent of first-time H-1B applications were denied through the third quarter of 2019 fiscal year, compared with 6 percent in 2015.

LITIGATION/CASELAW/RULES/MEMOS

Matter of O-S-A-F-<https://www.justice.gov/eoir/page/file/1224026/download>

(1) Torturous conduct committed by a public official who is acting “in an official capacity,” that is, “under color of law” is covered by the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, adopted and opened for signature Dec. 10, 1984, G.A. Res. 39/46, 39 U.N. GAOR Supp. No. 51, at 197, U.N. Doc. A/RES/39/708 (1984) (entered into force June 26, 1987; for the United States Apr. 18, 1988), but such conduct by an official who is not acting in an official capacity, also known as a “rogue official,” is not covered by the Convention.

(2) The key consideration in determining if a public official was acting under color of law is whether he was able to engage in torturous conduct because of his government position or if he could have done so without a connection to the government.

New Acting Court Administrator at New York – Varick Immigration Court

EOIR: Effective today, Paul Friedman is the Acting Court Administrator for the New York – Varick, Fishkill, and Ulster immigration courts. Paul is currently the Court Administrator for the Elizabeth Immigration Court in New Jersey. He will be splitting his time between the Elizabeth IC and the Varick IC each week.

Appeals court lifts some rulings blocking Trump ‘public charge’ rule for immigrants<https://www.politico.com/news/2019/12/05/trump-public-charge-immigrants-legal-076855>

Politico: A divided 9th Circuit panel clears away obstacles to a key administration immigration policy, but courts in other parts of the country [including SDNY] still have it on hold.

ACLU Files Lawsuit Challenging Programs that Rush Migrants Through Asylum Screenings Without Access to Attorneys in Border Patrol Facilities<https://www.aclutx.org/en/press-releases/aclu-files-lawsuit-challenging-programs-rush-migrants-through-asylum-screenings>

ACLU: The lawsuit states that the new programs – known as Prompt Asylum Claim Review (“PACR”) and the Humanitarian Asylum Review Process (“HARP”) – require the detention of asylum seekers in dangerous CBP facilities known as “hieleras” (or “iceboxes” for their freezing temperatures) with no meaningful way to obtain or consult with an attorney before their hearings.

Acevedo v. Barr Denied<https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca2/17-3519/17-3519-2019-12-03.html>

Justia: The Second Circuit denied a petition for review of the BIA’s decision affirming the IJ’s determination that petitioner was removable and ineligible for cancellation of removal. The court held that petitioner’s conviction under New York Penal Law 110.00, 130.45 for attempted oral or anal sexual conduct with a person under the age of fifteen constitutes sexual abuse of a minor, and was therefore an aggravated felony under the Immigration and Nationality Act. The court explained that petitioner’s conviction under the New York statute did not encompass more conduct than the generic definition and could not realistically result in an individual’s conviction for conduct made with a less than knowing mens rea.

11th Circuit Defers to Matter of A-B-<https://immigrationcourtside.com/2019/12/04/11th-circuit-tanks-defers-to-matter-of-a-b-refugee-women-of-color-sentenced-to-potential-death-without-due-process-by-judges-elizabeth-l-branch-peter-t-fay-frank-m-hull/>

Courtside: The BIA concluded, based on recent precedent from the Attorney General, Matter of A-B-, 27 I. & N. Dec. 316 (A.G. 2018), that Amezcua-Preciado’s proposed social group of “women in Mexico who are unable to leave their domestic relationships” was not a cognizable particular social group under the Immigration and Nationality Act (“INA”).

Typo/ambiguity in the new I-912 instructions for SIJS<https://www.uscis.gov/i-192>

Page 6 of the new I-912 instructions state: “If you are applying for adjustment of status or filing related forms based on SIJ classification, you are not required to complete Part 2. of Form I-912 or to show proof of income to request a fee waiver.” Part 2 is the biographical information. It is possible this is an error and USCIS meant Part 3, regarding income. If you have any test cases that won’t age out, spread the word on how this plays out.

USCIS Extension of Comment Period on Proposed Rule with Adjustments to Fee Schedule and Other Changes<https://www.aila.org/advo-media/submit-feedback-notices-requests-for-comment/84-fr-67243-12-9-19>

USCIS extension of the comment period on the proposed rule published at 84 FR 62280 on 11/14/19, which would significantly alter the USCIS fee schedule and make other changes, including form changes. Comments are now due 12/30/19. (84 FR 67243, 12/9/19) AILA Doc. No. 19120900

EOIR to Open New Immigration Court in Los Angeles<https://www.aila.org/infonet/eoir-to-open-new-immigration-court-in-los-angeles>

EOIR will open a new immigration court in Los Angeles, on December 9, 2019. The Van Nuys Blvd. immigration court will cover Kern, San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, and Ventura counties, and parts of Los Angeles County. Notice includes court’s location, contact information, and hours of operation. AILA Doc. No. 19120234

CBP Meets with Privacy Groups to Discuss Biometric Entry-Exit Mandate<https://www.aila.org/infonet/cbp-meets-with-privacy-groups-to-discuss-biometric>

On 12/3/19, CBP met with privacy groups to discuss its implementation of the congressional biometric entry-exit mandate and the protection of traveler privacy during the biometric facial comparison process at ports of entry. CBP has implemented this technology at more than 20 U.S. ports of entry. AILA Doc. No. 19120432

DOS Final Rule Clarifying Passport Regulations Regarding Applicants with Seriously Delinquent Tax Debt<https://www.aila.org/infonet/dos-84-fr-67184-12-9-19>

DOS final rule making a clarification to the regulations on passports regarding situations in which a passport applicant is certified by the Secretary of the Treasury as having a seriously delinquent tax debt. The rule is effective 12/9/19. (84 FR 67184, 12/9/19) AILA Doc. No. 19120932

USCIS 60-Day Notice and Request for Comments on Additional Proposed Revisions to Form I-290B<https://www.aila.org/advo-media/submit-feedback-notices-requests-for-comment/uscis-84-fr-66924-12-6-19>

USCIS 60-day notice and request for comments on proposed revisions to Form I-290B, Notice of Appeal or Motion. USCIS originally published this notice at 84 FR 39359 and decided to propose additional changes in this new 60-day notice. Comments are due 2/4/20. (84 FR 66924, 12/6/19) AILA Doc. No. 19120934

ICE Opening New Detention Facility in West Texas<https://www.aila.org/infonet/ice-opening-new-detention-facility-in-west-texas>

ICE announced that it is opening the Bluebonnet Detention Center in Anson, Texas, the week of December 9, 2019. The facility, which will be managed by Management and Training Corporation (MTC), will house about 1,000 ICE detainees as they await outcomes of their immigration proceedings or removal.

AILA Doc. No. 19120430

ICE Provides Guidance on the Phase-Out of the Interactive Scheduling System<https://www.aila.org/infonet/ice-provides-guidance-on-the-phase-out>

Obtained via FOIA, ICE provided the guidance to ICE staff regarding the phase-out of the Interactive Scheduling System and replacement by the DHS Portal to schedule Notices to Appear. The Portal replaced CASE-ISS as of August 2019. Special thanks to Aaron Hall. AILA Doc. No. 19120330

Update to Form I-192, Application for Advance Permission to Enter as a Nonimmigrant. New Edition Dated Dec. 2, 2019.<https://lnks.gd/l/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJidWxsZXRpbl9saW5rX2lkIjoxMDAsInVyaSI6ImJwMjpjbGljayIsImJ1bGxldGluX2lkIjoiMjAxOTEyMDMuMTM4MDU4MTEiLCJ1cmwiOiJodHRwczovL3d3dy51c2Npcy5nb3YvaS0xOTI_dXRtX3NvdXJjZT1yc3MtZmVlZCZ1dG1fY2FtcGFpZ249Rm9ybXMlMjBVcGRhdGVzIn0.igkmXB-R6v9goSblHb89LrAWdtcG83febe5H96Erz2U/br/72220790478-l>

Update to Form I-192, Application for Advance Permission to Enter as a Nonimmigrant. New Edition Dated Dec. 2, 2019.

Update to Form I-290B, Notice of Appeal or Motion. New Edition Dated Dec. 2, 2019.<https://lnks.gd/l/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJidWxsZXRpbl9saW5rX2lkIjoxMDIsInVyaSI6ImJwMjpjbGljayIsImJ1bGxldGluX2lkIjoiMjAxOTEyMDMuMTM4MDU4MTEiLCJ1cmwiOiJodHRwczovL3d3dy51c2Npcy5nb3YvaS0yOTBiP3V0bV9zb3VyY2U9cnNzLWZlZWQmdXRtX2NhbXBhaWduPUZvcm1zJTIwVXBkYXRlcyJ9.BnD9VWQtxoxzTff9s58El_ZL4l5JOIv4hyGLDNNvDJE/br/72220790478-l>

Update to Form I-290B, Notice of Appeal or Motion. New Edition Dated Dec. 2, 2019.

Update to Form I-191, Application for Relief Under Former Section 212(c) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA). New Edition Dated Dec. 2, 2019.<https://lnks.gd/l/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJidWxsZXRpbl9saW5rX2lkIjoxMDMsInVyaSI6ImJwMjpjbGljayIsImJ1bGxldGluX2lkIjoiMjAxOTEyMDMuMTM4MDU4MTEiLCJ1cmwiOiJodHRwczovL3d3dy51c2Npcy5nb3YvaS0xOTE_dXRtX3NvdXJjZT1yc3MtZmVlZCZ1dG1fY2FtcGFpZ249Rm9ybXMlMjBVcGRhdGVzIn0.9detMlYAc9qo9rwvtKBwQvFvEDlzTVJbDR2Bych15f0/br/72220790478-l>

Update to Form I-191, Application for Relief Under Former Section 212(c) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA). New Edition Dated Dec. 2, 2019.

RESOURCES

* Asylos<https://www.asylos.eu/>: Free country conditions database and individualized research.

* Practice Advisory: Strategies and Considerations in the Wake of Pereira v. Sessions<https://cliniclegal.org/resources/practice-advisory-strategies-and-considerations-wake-pereira-v-sessions>

* Practice Alert: Updates to the BIA Practice Manual<https://www.aila.org/infonet/practice-alert-updates-to-the-bia-practice-manual>

* USCIS Issues Policy Alert Regarding Fees for Submission of Benefits Requests<https://www.aila.org/infonet/uscis-issues-policy-alert-regarding-fees>

* GAO: Arrests, Detentions, and Removals, and Issues Related to Selected Populations<https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-20-36>

* New NY DMV Guidance<https://dmv.ny.gov/driver-license/driver-licenses-and-green-light-law> and license and permit guide<http://nysdmv.standard-license-and-permit-document-guide.sgizmo.com/s3/?_ga=2.197959914.472787525.1575669305-120439318.1520888742>

* DHS report on CBP detention of children and families<https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/fccp_final_report_1.pdf>

* FAQ: Federal Court’s Preliminary Injunction Restores Asylum Eligibility for Asylum Seekers Turned Back at Ports of Entry Before July 16, 2019<https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/sites/default/files/other_litigation_documents/challenging_custom_and_border_protections_unlawful_practice_of_turning_away_asylum_seekers_faq.pdf>

* Human Rights Fiasco: The Trump Administration’s Dangerous Asylum Returns Continue<https://www.humanrightsfirst.org/sites/default/files/HumanRightsFiascoDec2019.pdf>

* Practice Pointer: CBP Transfer Notices for U Visa Petitions<https://asistahelp.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/Practice-Pointer_-Transfer-Notices-to-CBP.pdf>

* Forced Return to Danger: Civil Society Concerns with the Agreements Signed between the United States and Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador <https://www.lawg.org/wp-content/uploads/Forced-Return-to-Danger-STC-Civil-Society-Memo-12.4.19.pdf>

* Making Way for Corruption in Guatemala and Honduras<https://www.lawg.org/wp-content/uploads/LAWGEF-Guatemala-Honduras-memo-December-2019.pdf>

EVENTS

* 12/10/19 Immigration Justice Campaign for a Free Webinar on Recent Attacks on Asylum<https://www.aila.org/about/announcements/join-ijc-for-free-webinar-recent-attacks-asylum>

* 12/10/19 USCIS Invites Stakeholders to Teleconference on SIJ Classification Updates <https://www.aila.org/infonet/uscis-invites-stakeholders-teleconference-on-sij>

* 12/10/19 Working With Transgender, Gender Non-conforming, and Non-binary Immigrants: A Guide for Legal Practitioners!<https://avp.us8.list-manage.com/track/click?u=fb8da3e27ad6713b5d8945fc2&id=70a5b33685&e=15233cf2a6>

* 12/12/19 Family-Based Immigration<https://mailchi.mp/e0c658697ffb/save-the-dates-new-immigration-law-fundamentals-series?e=09f6a8c81a>

* 12/12/19 Annual AILA New York Chapter Symposium<https://agora.aila.org/Conference/Detail/1637>

* 12/13/19 Walk-through of our latest Practice Advisory: Adjustment Applications of TPS Holders<https://secure.everyaction.com/Ehcp3tCeXkSu6MU8WxWOTw2?emci=458c6463-4518-ea11-828b-2818784d6d68&emdi=eb297b03-6318-ea11-828b-2818784d6d68&ceid=6058633&contactdata=fMDCB%2fqMqZ3aN7qEu%2bEEOZ%2f2u0bt1aESH09dm5dECnvlpUiBkFdYswuRXlQCtzzyIpgKxImxdeQKGFsR9FmfW5bEKkiDV4xpC%2brHKTjalyc7w16jw%2bSgJg5GHlK0kroKZ05AP0aHGbsGnYQCk2EX70whLDCxYaRq%2f0jgrAKy3hBelwcS%2fB5nvMSmoeNxg%2f83NHhP5SSrMwjY6MHa0O9UbSCevL%2frb%2fQ2w9N1BEtsFNwULTT1RpAXYa1Axo%2fAcXRktUZ3InKJH5jCw7olAZDtDVKQemN6U%2fzkwURRNhwT4S32Y5xzNEB9X0qfvoiUKvxe>

* 12/16/19 Census 101: Energizing and Mobilizing NYC Nonprofits to Get Out The Count<https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1rryroN2pG2kYUew8H3e8zCTyLRsqnyrB1o9RQ1e8L6s/edit>

* 12/17/19 Adjustment of Status and Consular Processing<https://mailchi.mp/e0c658697ffb/save-the-dates-new-immigration-law-fundamentals-series?e=09f6a8c81a>

* 12/17/19 Incredibly Credible: Preparing Your Client to Testify<https://agora.aila.org/Conference/Detail/1632>

* 12/17/19 Keeping Our Communities Safe: The Impact of ICE Arrests at NYS Courts<https://www.eventbrite.com/e/keeping-our-communities-safe-the-impact-of-ice-arrests-at-nys-courts-registration-80735649501>

* 12/20/19 Census 101: Energizing and Mobilizing NYC Nonprofits to Get Out The Count<https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1rryroN2pG2kYUew8H3e8zCTyLRsqnyrB1o9RQ1e8L6s/edit>

* 2/6/20 Basic Immigration Law 2020: Business, Family, Naturalization and Related Areas<https://www.pli.edu/programs/basic-immigration-law?t=live>

* 2/7/20 Asylum, Special Immigrant Juvenile Status, Crime Victim, and Other Forms of Immigration Relief 2020<https://www.pli.edu/programs/asylum-juvenile-immigration-relief?t=live>

* 2/28/20 5th Annual New York Asylum and Immigration Law Conference

* 7/23/20 Defending Immigration Removal Proceedings 2020<https://www.pli.edu/programs/defending-immigration-removal?t=live>

ImmProf

Sunday, December 8, 2019

* Music Break: Watch Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Stunning Video: “Immigrants (We Get the Job Done)”<https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/immigration/2019/12/music-break-watch-lin-manuel-mirandas-stunning-new-video-for-immigrants-we-get-the-job-done.html>

* Ninth Circuit Stays Injunction of Trump Public Charge Rule<https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/immigration/2019/12/ninth-circuit-stays-injunction-of-trump-public-charge-rule.html>

* Trump is trying to make it too expensive for poor American immigrants to stay<https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/immigration/2019/12/trump-is-trying-to-make-it-too-expensive-for-poor-american-immigrants-to-stay.html>

Saturday, December 7, 2019

* Immigrants’ access to legal assistance further diminished by EOIR memo<https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/immigration/2019/12/the-justice-department-recently-issueda-policy-memo-that-would-limit-immigrants-ability-to-rely-on-friends-of-the-court-for-l.html>

* Immigration Article of the Day: Aspiring Americans Thrown Out in the Cold: The Discriminatory Use of False Testimony Allegations to Deny Naturalization by Nermeen Arastu<https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/immigration/2019/12/immigrtaion-article-of-the-day-aspiring-americans-thrown-out-in-the-cold-the-discriminatory-use-of-f.html>

Friday, December 6, 2019

* Your Playlist: Luba Dvorak<https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/immigration/2019/12/your-playlist-luba-dvorak.html>

* Workplace Immigration Inquiries Quadruple Under Trump<https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/immigration/2019/12/workplace-immigration-inquiries-quadruple-under-trump.html>

* Inside the Cell Where a Sick 16-Year-Old Boy Died in Border Patrol Care<https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/immigration/2019/12/inside-the-cell-where-a-sick-16-year-old-boy-died-in-border-patrol-care.html>

* From the Bookshelves: The Ungrateful Refugee: What Immigrants Never Tell You by Dina Nayeri (2019)<https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/immigration/2019/12/from-the-bookshelves-the-ungrateful-refugee-what-immigrants-never-tell-you-by-dina-nayeri-2019.html>

Thursday, December 5, 2019

* Russian Finds Inventive Way to Swindle Migrants<https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/immigration/2019/12/russian-finds-inventive-way-to-swindle-migrants-.html>

* Immigration Article of the Day: Becoming Unconventional: Constricting the ‘Particular Social Group’ Ground for Asylum by Fatma E. Marouf<https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/immigration/2019/12/immigration-article-of-the-day-becoming-unconventional-constricting-the-particular-social-group-grou.html>

* University-Wide Scholarship Program for Displaced Students<https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/immigration/2019/12/university-wide-scholarship-program-for-displaced-students.html>

* Joseph A. Vail Asylum Law Workshop<https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/immigration/2019/12/joseph-a-vail-asylum-law-workshop.html>

* New Report Based on 3,000 Legal Screenings of Undocumented Immigrants<https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/immigration/2019/12/new-report-based-on-3000-legal-screenings-of-undocumented-immigrants.html>

* From the Bookshelves: They Came to Toil: Newspaper Representations of Mexicans and Immigrants in the Great Depression by Melita M. Garza<https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/immigration/2019/12/from-the-bookshelves-they-came-to-toil-newspaper-representations-of-mexicans-and-immigrants-in-the-g.html>

* Music Break: Rapper Rich Brian gets vulnerable about his Asian identity, immigration story<https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/immigration/2019/12/music-break-rapper-rich-brian-gets-vulnerable-about-his-asian-identity-immigration-story.html>

Wednesday, December 4, 2019

* Looking for Exam Inspiration?<https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/immigration/2019/12/looking-for-exam-inspiration-.html>

* GAO Report: Immigration-Related Prosecutions Increased from 2017 to 2018 in Response to U.S. Attorney General’s Direction<https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/immigration/2019/12/gao-report-immigration-related-prosecutions-increased-from-2017-to-2018-in-response-to-us-attorney-generals-direction.html>

* Peter Margulies: Court Issues Preliminary Injunction Against President Trump’s Ban on Uninsured Immigrants<https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/immigration/2019/12/peter-margulies-court-issues-preliminary-injunction-against-president-trumps-ban-on-uninsured-immigr.html>

* ICE bought state driver’s license records to track undocumented immigrants<https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/immigration/2019/12/ice-bought-state-drivers-license-records-to-track-undocumented-immigrants.html>

* “Building a Wall Out of Red Tape” from PRI/The World<https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/immigration/2019/12/pris-building-a-wall-out-of-red-tape.html>

* How McKinsey Helped the Trump Administration Detain and Deport Immigrants<https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/immigration/2019/12/how-mckinsey-helped-the-trump-administration-detain-and-deport-immigrants.html>

* Immigration Article of the Day: Faithful Execution: Where Administrative Law Meets the Constitution by Evan D. Bernick<https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/immigration/2019/12/immigration-article-of-the-day-faithful-execution-where-administrative-law-meets-the-constitution-by.html>

Tuesday, December 3, 2019

* From the Bookshelves: Perchance to DREAM: A Legal and Political History of the DREAM Act and DACA by Michael A. Olivas<https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/immigration/2019/12/from-the-bookshelves-perchance-to-dream-a-legal-and-political-history-of-the-dream-act-and-daca-by-m.html>

* Unprecedented: Trump Is First to Use PATRIOT Act to Detain a Man Forever<https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/immigration/2019/12/unprecedented-trump-is-first-to-use-patriot-act-to-detain-a-man-forever.html>

* El Sueño Americano | The American Dream: Photographs by Tom Kiefer<https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/immigration/2019/12/el-sue%C3%B1o-americano-the-american-dream-photographs-by-tom-kiefer.html>

* SCOTUSblog: Argument preview for Guerrero-Lasprilla v. Barr and Ovalles v. Barr<https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/immigration/2019/12/scotusblog-argument-preview-for-guerrero-lasprilla-v-barr-and-ovalles-v-barr.html>

* César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández: Abolish Immigration Prisons<https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/immigration/2019/12/c%C3%A9sar-cuauht%C3%A9moc-garc%C3%ADa-hern%C3%A1ndez-abolish-immigration-prisons-.html>

* History of United States Immigration Laws<https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/immigration/2019/12/history-of-united-states-immigration-laws.html>

Monday, December 2, 2019

* From the Bookshelves: Border Wars by Julie Hirschfield Davis and Michael D. Shear<https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/immigration/2019/12/from-the-bookshelves-border-wars-by-julie-hirschfield-davis-and-michael-d-shear.html>

* Is OPT in peril? Colleges sign amicus brief opposing end of OPT<https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/immigration/2019/12/is-opt-in-peril.html>

* A Fact Worth Remembering: Half of Undocumented Immigrants are Visa Overstays<https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/immigration/2019/12/a-fact-worth-remembering-half-of-undocumented-immigrants-are-visa-overstays.html>

* Immigration in Pop Culture: ICE Raid on “Shameless”<https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/immigration/2019/1

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

The item about the BIA’s atrociously wrong CAT interpretation in Matter of O-F-A-S-, the results of the Musalo visit to El Salvador, the continuing “go along to get along” with Trump’s legal abuses in immigration by gutless panels of the 9th & 11th Circuits in City & County of San Francisco and AMEZCUA-PRECIADO, respectively, and the expansion of lawless “Tent Courts” by EOIR ought to outrage every American.

On the flip side, the possibility that the Supremes will finally stiff the Regime’s bogus arguments for limiting or eliminating judicial review of final orders of removal and the new ACLU suit about the Regime’s unlawful schemes to prevent attorney access for asylum seekers provide at least some hope of better days to come for the “Good Guys of the Resistance.”

Thanks, Elizabeth, for keeping the NDPA informed!

PWS

12-10-19

Due Process Forever!

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🤡☠️

“The cells stink. The toilets don’t flush. There’s never enough soap. They give out soap once a week. One bar of soap a week. How does that make any sense?”

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