AXIOS – immigrationcourtside.com

FINALLY, MATTIS SPEAKS OUT, RIPS TRUMP’S DISGRACEFUL REIGN: “Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people—does not even pretend to try. Instead he tries to divide us. We are witnessing the consequences of three years of this deliberate effort. We are witnessing the consequences of three years without mature leadership.”

https://www.axios.com/james-mattis-trump-protests-f325f239-17f1-4795-b6a4-0ab1587ad210.html?stream=top&utm_source=alert&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=alerts_all

Orion Rummler reports for AXIOS:

Former Secretary of Defense James Mattis condemned President Trump for making a “mockery of our Constitution” in a statement to The Atlantic on Wednesday, saying he was “appalled” at the president’s response to mass protests in the wake of George Floyd’s killing.

Why it matters: Trump’s former defense secretary had refrained from publicly criticizing his former boss since resigning in 2018.

Full statement:

“I have watched this week’s unfolding events, angry and appalled. The words “Equal Justice Under Law” are carved in the pediment of the United States Supreme Court. This is precisely what protesters are rightly demanding. It is a wholesome and unifying demand—one that all of us should be able to get behind. We must not be distracted by a small number of lawbreakers. The protests are defined by tens of thousands of people of conscience who are insisting that we live up to our values—our values as people and our values as a nation.

When I joined the military, some 50 years ago, I swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution. Never did I dream that troops taking that same oath would be ordered under any circumstance to violate the Constitutional rights of their fellow citizens—much less to provide a bizarre photo op for the elected commander-in-chief, with military leadership standing alongside.

We must reject any thinking of our cities as a “battlespace” that our uniformed military is called upon to “dominate.” At home, we should use our military only when requested to do so, on very rare occasions, by state governors. Militarizing our response, as we witnessed in Washington, D.C., sets up a conflict—a false conflict—between the military and civilian society. It erodes the moral ground that ensures a trusted bond between men and women in uniform and the society they are sworn to protect, and of which they themselves are a part. Keeping public order rests with civilian state and local leaders who best understand their communities and are answerable to them.

James Madison wrote in Federalist 14 that “America united with a handful of troops, or without a single soldier, exhibits a more forbidding posture to foreign ambition than America disunited, with a hundred thousand veterans ready for combat.” We do not need to militarize our response to protests. We need to unite around a common purpose. And it starts by guaranteeing that all of us are equal before the law.

Instructions given by the military departments to our troops before the Normandy invasion reminded soldiers that “The Nazi slogan for destroying us…was ‘Divide and Conquer.’ Our American answer is ‘In Union there is Strength.’” We must summon that unity to surmount this crisis—confident that we are better than our politics.

Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people—does not even pretend to try. Instead he tries to divide us. We are witnessing the consequences of three years of this deliberate effort. We are witnessing the consequences of three years without mature leadership. We can unite without him, drawing on the strengths inherent in our civil society. This will not be easy, as the past few days have shown, but we owe it to our fellow citizens; to past generations that bled to defend our promise; and to our children.

We can come through this trying time stronger, and with a renewed sense of purpose and respect for one another. The pandemic has shown us that it is not only our troops who are willing to offer the ultimate sacrifice for the safety of the community. Americans in hospitals, grocery stores, post offices, and elsewhere have put their lives on the line in order to serve their fellow citizens and their country. We know that we are better than the abuse of executive authority that we witnessed in Lafayette Square. We must reject and hold accountable those in office who would make a mockery of our Constitution. At the same time, we must remember Lincoln’s “better angels,” and listen to them, as we work to unite.

Only by adopting a new path—which means, in truth, returning to the original path of our founding ideals—will we again be a country admired and respected at home and abroad.”

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Better late than never. But, what if Mattis had spoken out earlier and helped lead the opposition to Trump. Would things be different now? Where was his leadership when the GOP was ignoring the evidence and failing to vote to convict and remove Trump for clear abuse of his office?

PWS

06-04-20

EOIR’S LATEST RIPOFF: As “Justice” In Immigration Court Becomes A “Clown Show,” The Price Of A Ticket to “The Big Top” Will Rise By Nearly 1000%!🤡🤡

https://www.axios.com/trump-immigrant-fee-fight-deportation-02cfcff7-147b-479f-88e8-6eaa4dbc29ba.html

Steph W. Kight — Steff W. Kight
Politics Reporter
AXIOS

Stef W. Kight reports for AXIOS:

The Justice Department wants to dramatically increase fees for immigrants trying to fight deportation— including nearly $1,000 to appeal an immigration judge decision, according to a proposed Executive Office for Immigration Review rule.

Between the lines: It currently costs around $100 for immigrants to begin to legally fight deportation orders. If implemented, the new rule would raise fees to at least $305 and as much as $975, depending on the appeal.

By the numbers: In the rule, the administration argues that the discrepancy between fees collected and the processing costs “has become more of a burden on the immigration adjudication system as aliens overall have begun filing more of these fee-based forms and motions.”

They estimate that immigrants appealing deportation orders given by an immigration judge cost taxpayers $27.6 million in FY 2018. The rule proposes that fees be raised so that immigrants cover the total cost, which is how the $975 fee came about.

What they’re saying: When hearings are set two or three years in advance, immigrants have time to save for the fees. But with many new immigration judges and a rise in fast-track cases, that may no longer possible, immigration lawyer Jeffrey Chase, a former judge and senior legal advisor at the Board of Immigration Appeals, told Axios

Former immigration judge Paul Schmidt, who retired in 2016, told Axios in an email the proposed rule is “outrageous.”
He said correcting errors through the appeals process is one of the most important government functions. “That’s particularly true when the public segment ‘served’ is generally limited income individuals and getting results correct could be ‘life determining.’”

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Here’s my complete commentary on EOIR’s latest shady maneuver:

In a single word, “outrageous.”

As set forth in the notice, EOIR is an “appropriated agency.” It was never supposed to recoup its costs, nor does it need to.

Correcting errors on appeal is probably one of the most important functions the Government performs. That’s particularly true when the public segment “served” is generally limited income individuals and the getting results correct could be “life determining.”

Applications, as opposed to “appeals,” also serve a critical public function in insuring that those who qualify under our laws to remain in the U.S. are permitted to do so. That’s a “winner” for everyone.

The astronomical proposed fee increase is particularly absurd in the current context. EOIR is actually cutting corners and has reduced the quality and accuracy of its work product. Why should the public pay nearly 10X more for a rapidly deteriorating product?

Moreover, given the “captive” nature of the courts and the illegal and unethical interference in their operations by the Attorney General and other political operatives at the DOJ, the only chance at fair and impartial “justice” for many individuals is to petition the Article III Courts. That requires going through EOIR, even when EOIR’s biased and unfair adjudication procedures make the results inevitable. It’s called “required exhaustion of administrative remedies.”

Sure, folks can continue to seek “fee waivers.” But, I’ll bet that the procedures for those will become more bureaucratic and unduly restrictive, and that many will be improperly denied. How does someone with no money appeal a wrongful denial of a fee waiver? He or she can’t. They are denied justice!

That gets us to the real point here. In an era and an area of the law where “access to justice” is everything, this is another blatant attempt by the White Nationalist regime to restrict access to justice. In real world terms, the claimed cost savings (and we should never accept the regime’s often flawed and manipulated calculations) here are peanuts compared with the human interests at stake. The regime wastes more than this every week on unneeded and unauthorized walls that blow down in the wind and overpriced golf security for Trump.

As I said at the beginning, it’s outrageous.

PWS

02-28-20

STEFF W. KIGHT @ AXIOS: How Mindlessly Expanded Detention & “Aimless Docket Reshuffling” Contributes To Skyrocketing Backlogs In Immigration Court!

https://www.axios.com/immigration-legal-courts-judges-backlog-border-crisis-92525141-66f5-41c1-a9e1-a60edba4ee74.html

Steff W. Kight reports for AXIOS:

It’s taking longer and longer to become a legal immigrant

The number of immigrants waiting on a judge to decide whether they can stay in the U.S. keeps climbing, according to Justice Department data.

Why it matters: Immigration-court backlogs “are basically crippling the whole system,” Georgetown Law professor and former immigration judge Paul Schmidt told Axios.

By the numbers: On average, immigrants are waiting 727 days for decisions on their court cases — roughly twice as long as immigrants had to wait two decades ago, according to Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) which gathered millions of court records.

The big picture: The long waits have resulted in many Central American families being released after crossing the border illegally, because it is nearly impossible for their cases to be decided on within the 20 day detention limit for children.

The backlog also incentivizes migration. Migrants can expect at least a few months in the U.S. before they have to show up to court, immigration experts said.

The Trump administration cited the growing backlog as a reason for new rules all but cutting off Central Americans from gaining asylum.

Migrants who are disqualified for asylum under the new rule will still have the chance to fight deportation in front of an immigration judge.

And many of the administration’s actions — such as increasing ICE arrests and limiting judges’ ability to dismiss low-priority cases — have made the problem worse, according to Schmidt.

How it works: There are 431 DOJ-appointed judges handling immigration cases, up from 289 in FY 2016, according to Justice Department data. The Trump administration has ramped up hiring for immigration judges and put pressure on them to work faster.

While they wait for their court date, asylum seekers, green-card applicants, immigrants arrested by ICE and others are either held in an ICE detention center, asked to pay bail or released, sometimes with an ankle bracelet or other monitoring device.

IMMIGRATION

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Go to Steff’s original article at the above link for the accompanying graph.

Here’s how it works (or in this case, doesn’t). As ICE steps up the amount of detention and Immigration Judges are pushed by the DHS and the Department of Justice to set higher bonds (or stripped altogether of their bond setting authority, as AG Bill Barr has tried to do in a large class of asylum cases, only to be thwarted for the time being by the “real” Federal Courts) the number of detained individuals awaiting immigration hearings grows.

That, in turn, causes a largely self-inflicted “emergency” on the Immigration Courts’ detained docket. To deal with this very predictable, self-created “emergency,” Immigration Judges are detailed from already totally saturated “non-detained dockets” to the detained docket.

That results in regularly scheduled non-detained cases, many of which have been pending for years and have already been reset several times to accommodate the Government’s ever-shifting “priorities,” being reset yet again, often without advance notice to the respondents and their attorneys. Because most dockets are already full for years, these “reset” cases normally go to the “end of the line,” as far out as 2023 in some courts.

Also, the non-detained cases are usually represented by counsel and “ready to try.” By contrast, many cases on the detained docket do not have lawyers or are not yet prepared because of the Government-caused difficulties of preparing and documenting a complex asylum case from a detention center in the middle of nowhere (don’t worry, these days the “detailed judges” mostly appear by TV, from far away locations, so they don’t have to experience the same discomforts and dislocation of the detention centers as inflicted by the Government on respondents and their lawyers — if any).

I call the above process “Aimless Docket Reshuffling.” Cases are “churned,” causing huge amounts of additional work for respondents’ attorneys and court staff, and generating workload statistics, without ever being completed. Then, confronted with its own incompetence and intentional mismanagement, the Government tries to shift the blame to the victims, the respondents and their lawyers, by making it harder to get legitimate continuances and stripping respondents of what few rights they have.

So the next time you hear Trump, Barr, McAleenan, or some other unqualified GOP politico complaining about Immigration Court backlogs remember the truth — while Immigration Court backlogs are the product of years of negligence and mismanagement by the Department of Justice, today’s “totally out of control backlogs” are largely caused, and certainly aggravated, by the Trump Administration’s own “malicious incompetence.”

PWS

07-16-19

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