"The Voice of the New Due Process Army" ————– Musings on Events in U.S. Immigration Court, Immigration Law, Sports, and Other Random Topics by Retired United States Immigration Judge (Arlington, Virginia) and former Chairman of the Board of Immigration Appeals Paul Wickham Schmidt. To see my complete professional bio, just click on the link below.
When President Trump argues that the United States needs a wall along the southern border, he likes to point to San Diego’s success.
There, double and triple barriers fortify the westernmost stretch of the nearly 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexico border as U.S. Border Patrol agents drive SUVs along frontage roads and hover overhead in helicopters.
The militarized border touching the communities of Imperial Beach, San Ysidro and Otay Mesa contributed to a 75 percent decline in crossings in the years immediately after fencing was installed in the 1990s, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection data.
The decline mirrors a border-wide decrease.Apprehensions of those suspected of illegally crossing the entire Southwest border experienced an uptick in 2018 over 2017 to nearly 467,000 but remained at less than half their peak in the 1980s and 1990s, when the Border Patrol racked up 1 to 1.6 million apprehensions.
President Donald Trump, who’s in a protracted battle to secure congressional funding for his campaign promise to build a wall along the entire length of the Southern border, on Thursday pointed to San Diego’s Mexican neighbor, Tijuana, as an example of what can happen with and without a barrier.
Trump’s proposed wall, based on one of eight prototypes in San Diego, is yet to be authorized by Congress.
“If you go to Tijuana and you take down that wall, you will have so many people coming into our country that Nancy Pelosi will be begging for a wall,” he said from the Oval Office. “She will be begging for a wall. She will say, ‘Mr. President, please, please give us a wall.'”
While it seems unlikely the House speaker would ever beg for a wall, the president has a valid point about fencing’s impact on the border region. Although San Diego’s barrier may stem illegal crossings, its impact is more complicated than Trump’s statement that “walls work” suggests.
In the 1980s, about 40 percent of the Southwest’s illegal border crossings took place at San Diego, said Victor Clark-Alfaro of San Diego State University’s Center for Latin American Studies. The peak year for border apprehensions in the San Diego sector was 1986, when 628,000 migrants were nabbed.
“Tijuana was like a fiesta,” Clark-Alfaro said. “On a single day on a weekend at El Bordo you could find about 1,000 migrants ready to cross to the U.S. side. There was liquor, marijuana, human smugglers, street vendors.”
The defunct bureaucracy known as the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, since replaced by three agencies under the Department of Homeland Security, built fencing along the border at San Diego in 1990, but it was no match for desperate Mexicans.
The migrants created a huge wave of south-of-the-border crossings into the U.S. that was addressed by Republican Pete Wilson, a onetime San Diego mayor who won re-election as California governor in 1994 based on a Trump-like platform of deterring illegal immigration.
“Bill Clinton had to respond,” said David Shirk, director of the University of San Diego’s master’s program in international relations.
In 1994, President Bill Clinton initiated Operation Gatekeeper, a crackdown at the border, and Congress followed up two years later with 14 miles of “triple-layered fence,” according to congressional records. Some of those first fences were made from Vietnam War-era landing mats intended for makeshift helicopter airstrips.
In 2006, Congress authorized “double-layered fencing” along at least 700 miles of border. The full length has yet to be covered with fencing because of delays in acquiring private property, often through court battles. But the San Diego sector received fresh fencing in the mid-1990s and again in the late-2000s.
Experts, many critical of Trump’s overall stand on border security, acknowledge the San Diego barriers, now made of steel bollards and surplus military landing mats, have more or less done their job. The sector went from being the top location for border crossings to a relative ghost town with 26,086 apprehensions in fiscal year 2017, according to the Border Patrol.
A migrant from Honduras passes a child to her father after he jumped the border fence to get into the U.S. side to San Diego, Calif., from Tijuana, Mexico on Jan. 3, 2019.Daniel Ochoa de Olza / AP file
The hardened border, however, pushed migrants to remote areas that have few man-made impediments and are often just World War II-style vehicle barriers known as Normandy fencing, Clark-Alfaro said. Arizona has become a hotbed of crossings, but migrants often die of dehydration. The mountains east of San Diego have also become a crossing zone, where migrants have died from hypothermia.
Some migrants head for the cold Pacific and end up dead or arrested.
“Our beach was invaded by people on pangas, boogie boards,” said Imperial Beach Mayor Serge Dedina, adding that the fortified fencing “didn’t stop the tunnels” used by cartels to ship drugs into California and beyond.
The San Diego-area border security measures have also enticed cartels to dive deeper into smuggling because the barriers drive up prices for guides or coyotes, experts say. Prices have gone from as little as $75 in the 1990s to as much as $7,000 today, said San Diego State’s Clark-Alfaro.
“We’ve made it more profitable for human traffickers along the border,” added Shirk, of the University of San Diego.
However, narcotics continue to make it across the Southwest border, with seizures of heroin in the San Diego sector increasing 59 percentfrom 2016 to 2017, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.
The San Diego sector was the top target along the southwest border for heroin smuggling outside points of entry, the DEA said. Eighty-five percent of the synthetic opioid fentanyl that crossed in 2017 entered through the San Diego area, according to DEA data.
Experts argue that one of the biggest influences on border crossings has been the Mexican economy, which has improved enough that many workers would rather just stay home. In Tijuana, home to a booming appliance and TV manufacturing sector, thousands of jobs are up for grabs.
And many of the immigrants from that huge wave in the 1980s and 1990s settled in the United States rather than crossing back and forth for seasonal work, experts say. In effect, they were walled in by the increased border security and are now staying put.
The boosted federal presence along the border also includes an exponential increase in the number of Border Patrol agents since 1990 to more than 20,000 today. At least 85 percent are stationed along the border, according to Shirk’s research.
Much of that increase in personnel came in the years following 9/11, when the Department of Homeland Security was created and crossing the border legitimately became much less casual, Shirk said. Passports are now required for travel in both directions.
The new border-crossing population comes mostly from Central America, where migrants have formed caravans to travel north. People fleeing murderous gangs — some, like MS-13, were born in the U.S. — have mostly sought asylum in the United States legally, although the Border Patrol U.S. Customs and Border Protection says groups of Central Americans have recently tried to rush into the country illegally.
The bottom line on San Diego’s beefed up border, some of which is slated for replacement, is a mixed bag effective at deterring crowds of migrants that will ultimately be undeterred.
“It’s effective at re-routing people,” said John Fanestil, a Methodist minister who has offered communion on the United States side of the fence. “We made it harder to cross the border illegally — more deadly, more costly. But when circumstances are as extreme as they are in Central America, people will demonstrate great determination to cross the border.”
Dennis Romero
Dennis Romero writes for NBC News and is based in Los Angeles.
**************************************
As we used to say at the Arlington Immigration Court, “Desperate people do desperate things.” Or, as I have said on “Courtside,” “We can diminish ourselves as a nation, but it won’t stop human migration.”
What would actually help:
Technology, intelligence, undercover resources to combat drug smuggling;
More appropriate and generous application of our existing refugee and asylum laws at the border and in or near the Northern Triangle;
More resources for processing asylum applications at the Ports of Entry;
Expanded legal immigration opportunities, particularly for needed workers, that would more accurately reflect market forces driving today’s “extralegal immigration system;”
Working more closely with the UNHCR, Mexico, and other countries in the Hemisphere to solve the humanitarian problems driving refugee flows.
Why not “get smart” instead of continuing to “play dumb” on migration issues?
Hundreds of people overflow onto the sidewalk in a line snaking around the block outside a U.S. immigration office with numerous courtrooms Thursday, Jan. 31, 2019, in San Francisco. (AP Photo/Eric Risberg)
(CNN)More than 1,000 immigrants showed up at courts across the United States on Thursday for hearings they’d been told were scheduled but didn’t exist, a lawyers’ group said, as the Justice Department struggles with an overloaded immigration court system and the effects of the recently ended partial government shutdown.
Immigration attorneys reported that lines wrapped around the court building in San Francisco, a line stretched for blocks to get into the court in Los Angeles and hundreds of people waited outside the court in Newark, New Jersey.
Thursday’s problems are the latest example of US immigration authorities issuing a large number of inaccurate notices ordering immigrants to appear at hearings that, it later turns out, had never been scheduled.
Lawyers first told CNN last year that they’d observed a wave of what they call “fake dates” pop up. For instance, lawyers reported examples of notices to appear issued for nonexistent dates, such as September 31, and for times of day when courts aren’t open, such as midnight.
“The immigration courts have reached a new crisis point,” said Laura Lynch, senior policy counsel for the American Immigration Lawyers Association. The group said it tracked over 1,000 people showing up in courts Thursday with inaccurate hearing notices.
In Los Angeles, immigrants who had “fake dates” were given paperwork acknowledging they’d appeared at the immigration court, according to attorney Jonathan Vallejo, who provided this redacted copy of one such form.
‘I’m afraid and nervous’
Inside a packed waiting room at the Arlington Immigration Court on Thursday, confused immigrants clutching paperwork asked lawyers for help. Some said they’d driven hours to get to court and had awakened at 3:30 a.m. to arrive on time.
“I’m left with a question mark. I’m wondering, ‘Why?'” said Bigail Alfaro, 39, who’s seeking asylum with her two children. “I’m afraid and nervous.”
As she prepared to head into court for a scheduled hearing, immigration attorney Eileen Blessinger found herself fielding questions and asking court officials to stamp paperwork to provide proof that immigrants had shown up.
“What happened?” one woman asked her.
“You don’t have court, because they made a mistake,” Blessinger said.
At an immigration court in Atlanta, a crowd of around 40 people were turned away, almost one by one, by a Spanish-speaking court employee telling people with notices that their hearings had been “postponed.”
Among those showing up for court were parents with small children, some dressed only with hooded sweatshirts and covering themselves with blankets, with the temperature in Atlanta in the mid-20s.
“They told us they would send us another citation by mail,” said a man named Jose who asked to be identified only by his first name. “But who knows when? And the hard part is they don’t let us know with enough time, enough time to prepare ourselves.”
In Los Angeles, immigration attorney Jonathan Vallejo said he saw 30-40 people ushered into a room where they were told they didn’t have hearings and given forms acknowledging they’d appeared at the court.
Problems were also seen in Dallas, Miami and San Diego, Lynch said.
The Executive Office for Immigration Review, the division of the Justice Department that runs the immigration courts, said the weather and government shutdown were partially to blame.
The office “was unable to proceed with hearings for some respondents who believed they had hearings scheduled,” the Justice Department said in a statement. “In some cases, the cases had been rescheduled to another date, but the lapse in appropriations prevented the immigration courts from issuing new hearing notices far enough in advance of the prior hearing date.”
An ongoing problem
President Donald Trump has repeatedly criticized the nation’s immigration system, specifically taking issue with the practice of releasing immigrants while they await their court dates. To remedy that, his administration has sought to hire more immigration judges in the hopes of unclogging the court.
But that has not happened — there are 409 immigration judges nationwide but nearly 80 vacancies — and the number of cases continues to grow.
For years, the number of pending cases has been slowly creeping up, as more are added to the docket than can be addressed at any given time. There are more than 800,000 cases pending, according to the Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.
Former Attorney General Jeff Sessions also created a quota system that requires judges to clear at least 700 cases a year in order to receive “satisfactory” performance evaluations. Between 2011 and 2016, judges completed 678 cases a year on average.
Judge Ashley Tabaddor, the president of the National Association of Immigration Judges, described judges in Los Angeles coming back this week to boxes filled to the rim with mail that had piled up over the course of the 35-day partial government shutdown.
“What this does is it adds greater delay to the cases. We were shortchanged five or four weeks of time,” Tabaddor told CNN. “Not only were we not able to hear cases that were previously cases that were scheduled, but it’s going to take time to regroup.”
Immigration attorneys say the instances of mistakenly scheduled hearings unfairly burden immigrants and create more pressure on a system that’s already suffering from a crushing backlog.
“Imagine the stress of facing potential deportation,” North Carolina immigration attorney Jeremy McKinney said on Twitter. “You’re told show up in court or be ordered deported in your absence. You drive hundreds of miles & wait in line only to be told the court date was not real. ‘Sorry for the minor logistical errors.’ “
Atlanta immigration attorney Rachel Effron Sharma says this is an example of a notice a client received, ordering the client to report to an immigration court at a time when the court was closed.
The US Supreme Court ruled in June that notices to appear — the charging documents that immigration authorities issue to send someone to immigration court who’s accused of being in the United States illegally — must specify the time and place of proceedings in order to be valid.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokeswoman Jennifer Elzea said officials have been working to comply with the court’s requirements for notices to appear, but the lapse in funding during the partial government shutdown had delayed those administrative efforts.
“All appropriate parties are working together to solve this issue going forward,” she said.
In its statement Thursday, the Executive Office for Immigration Review said it had issued policy guidance in December and modified its system so the Department of Homeland Security and its components can directly schedule hearings.
The agency said it “does not expect any further recurrence of this type of situation.”
One woman pulled her daughter out of school to make it to the courthouse on Montgomery Street. Another caught a ride from Fresno. A teenage girl and her ailing mother waited for hours, clutching documents that summoned the mother to Immigration Court Jan. 31.
But none of them got what they came for and expected: a hearing before a judge.
Dozens of people reported Thursday to hearings previously scheduled by the Department of Homeland Security at the federal San Francisco Immigration Court, only to find the appointments didn’t exist.
Unlimited Digital Access for 99¢
Read more articles like this by subscribing to the San Francisco Chronicle
Immigration attorneys described similar scenes in Chicago, Atlanta, Virginia, Miami and Texas, where long lines snaked around courthouses for hours.
Federal officials said Thursday’s problems resulted from the government shutdown delaying the process of rescheduling the hearings.
But attorneys representing immigrants called the court dates fake, and said Immigration and Customs Enforcement is sending immigrants notices to appear — charging documents instructing people accused of being in the country illegally to come to court — with court dates it knows are not real.
“Every city in every jurisdiction is doing this, obviously knowing that there really won’t be court on that date,” said Christable Lee, an immigration attorney in San Francisco. “These immigrants are standing with their kids outside with no direction. They’re afraid to stand outside on the sidewalk in front of the courthouse because there could be other immigration authorities there. It’s a really harrowing situation.”
A similar situation occurred in several cities nationwide Oct. 31 when dozens of people showed up for court hearings that didn’t exist. Since then, some have reported court dates scheduled on weekends or late at night.
In a prepared statement, ICE denied giving immigrants a fake court date, saying, “Due to the recent partial lapse in government appropriations, the administrative process to resolve this issue was delayed, resulting in an expected overflow of individuals with Notices to Appear listing immigration proceedings on January 31.”
Meanwhile, the Executive Office for Immigration Review, which oversees all immigration courts, said it was “unable to proceed” with hearings for some people who “believed they had hearings scheduled” Thursday.
“In some cases, the cases had been rescheduled to another date, but the lapse in appropriations prevented the immigration courts from issuing new hearing notices far enough in advance of the prior hearing date,” the agency said in a statement. “In other cases, EOIR did not receive the Notice to Appear (NTA) in a timely manner. Immigration proceedings do not commence until the Department of Homeland Security has filed an NTA with an immigration court.”
Attorneys with the American Immigration Lawyers Association said they’ve received more than 1,000 reports of immigrants who had notices to appear in court containing fake dates, though they said it’s extremely difficult to track.
Mothers with small children, families and confused couples clutching manila folders crowded the sidewalk in San Francisco Thursday while others filled nearby coffee shops and restaurants after being told to come back a different day. The news was particularly troubling for immigrants who traveled several hours to get to the courthouse, many relying on relatives and friends for rides.
More than a dozen people waiting outside the courthouse declined to be interviewed but told The Chronicle that staff informed them court wasn’t in session Thursday. Some people who showed up in the morning were asked to come back later in the day, though it’s unclear what happened once they returned.
***************************************
As I’ve reported before on “Courtside,” contrary to the myths promoted by Trump, DOJ, and DHS, migrants generally appear for court when they get valid notice with real hearing dates and actually have the system explained to them (usually by an attorney); ironically, it’s often EOIR (“the lovable donkey”) that “Fails to Appear” (“FTA”) with an assist from their “partners in crime” over at ICE.
Would a “real court” let the “cops” run roughshod over them and their dockets as EOIR permits ICE to do? Would a “real President” shut down the Immigration Courts over a wall that will have NO, I repeat NO, “immediate impact” on migration while forcing tens of thousands of “ready to try removal cases” to the end of dockets that already stretch out four or more years in some locations?
Part of the problem is the continuing failure since the Clinton Administration of the DOJ to implement the statutory contempt of court authority granted to the Immigration Judges by Congress approximately two decades ago! A few contempt of court orders directed at ICE Agents and the ICE Chief Counsel who are failing to control their so-called “clients,” or perhaps at Secretary Nielsen herself, would bring these absurd, illegal, time-wasting practices that actually hurt real human beings and sow chaos in our justice system to a screeching halt!
That’s why an independent Article I Immigration Court is an essential priority in fixing our immigration system, including the procedures both for granting asylum and other relief promptly, fairly, and in accordance with due process, and issuing removal orders for those who don’t qualify. The current system does neither, for reasons largely beyond the control of the Immigration Judges (although some judges at both the trial and appellate level bear responsibility for failing to carry out in a fair and unbiased manner, consistent with due process, the generous, humanitarian statutes for the granting of asylum and implementing the legal mandates for other forms of protection from persecution and torture. That’s why a transparent, merit-based selection and reappointment system, with provision for public input is essential to an Article I system).
News from the “Journalism Carousel:” Star immigration reporter Priscilla Alvarez has moved to CNN from her prior birth over at The Atlantic. Congrats to Priscilla and to CNN!
Last week, retired Immigration Judge Nathan “Nate” Gordon passed away. At his funeral, dozens of immigration attorneys, judges and others shared their stories of this wonderful man.
Judge Gordon changed many people’s lives in a very positive way.
I have a lot of stories about Judge Gordon.
Let me share one of them with you.
Judge Gordon – Background
Judge Gordon was born on Christmas Day in 1926 in New Jersey to Jewish immigrant parents from Eastern Europe. He served in the US Army during World War II and graduated from New York Law School some years later.
He was employed by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) as an Attorney from 1962 to 1977. After that, he became an Immigration Judge, first in Newark, New Jersey, then in Los Angeles.
I first met Judge Gordon in the mid-1980s, after I had left the INS and entered private practice. The tremendous amount of compassion that he had for immigrants was truly impressive. It trumped all legal standards. If he believed that a person deserved to stay in the US, Judge Gordon would find a way to make it happen.
Honor Student Miguel Perez
I remember getting a phone call one day from Congressman Mervin Dymally’s office. It concerned a young man born in El Salvador. He had been brought over the U.S.-Mexican border by his mother when he was 14 years old in order to save him from the violence of the civil war which was raging in their native country. They were immediately arrested and taken into custody by the Border Patrol. Though they were later released on bail, the experience was so stressful for his mother that she died of a heart attack a few weeks later.
The young man, Miguel Perez, not knowing a single word of English, was placed under deportation proceedings. The process took years. Ultimately, his application for asylum was denied by an Immigration Judge. The Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) affirmed the Judge’s decision.
By this time, Miguel had not only mastered the English language, he had become an honor student at a local university. In his spare time, he tutored underprivileged children in South Central Los Angeles. After learning of the BIA’s decision, he packed his bags and got ready to book a flight to El Salvador. However, his professors and friends, horrified by the thought of what might happen to him if he returned to El Salvador, urged him to speak with his local Congressman.
The Congressman’s office arranged to have Miguel meet with me. The next day, his story appeared on the front page of the Los Angeles Times. We immediately appealed his case to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit which overturned his denial. Miguel was scheduled for a new hearing before an Immigration Judge.
Miguel had, by this time, lived in the U.S. for more than 7 years. Under a law which existed at that time, he could apply for a green card through “suspension of deportation”. He would need to show that he was a “person of good moral character” which he clearly was. He would also need to demonstrate that he would suffer “extreme hardship” if he were forced to return to El Salvador. This was a discretionary determination.
What he needed was a compassionate Immigration Judge.
Enter Immigration Judge Nathan Gordon, Supermensch
Fortunately, the Judge who had ordered Miguel deported had retired. By a great stroke of luck, Miguel’s case was transferred to Judge Gordon.
From my previous experiences with Judge Gordon, I was certain that he would find that Miguel would suffer extreme hardship if he were forced to return to El Salvador.
I scheduled a meeting with the INS District Director. I explained the facts of the case to him. Did the government want to look like bad guys eager to deport an honor student? Or would he consider having the government’s attorney tell Judge Gordon that they agree that Miguel’s application should be granted? The District Director agreed that Miguel should be granted suspension of deportation.
I told the District Director that there would be dozens of reporters and TV cameramen waiting outside the courtroom. At the hearing, we requested that Judge Gordon grant Miguel’s application for a green card. Judge Gordon then asked the government attorney what their position was. She told him that the government agreed that Miguel’s application should be granted. Judge Gordon smiled and proceeded to grant Miguel’s application.
Had Judge Gordon not been assigned to the case, I doubt that the government would have agreed prior to the hearing that Miguel’s application should be approved.
Fast Forward
Miguel went on to get a Ph.D and became a distinguished professor at a public university. He is married and is a great husband and father.
As I watched Judge Gordon’s casket being lowered into his grave last week, I thought about the thousands of immigrants like Miguel whose lives were altered in such a positive way by Judge Gordon.
Judge Nate Gordon was truly a Supermensch.
Carl Shusterman
Carl Shusterman served as an INS Trial Attorney (1976-82) before opening an 8 attorney firm specializing in immigration law. He is a Certified Specialist in Immigration Law who has testified as an expert witness before the Senate Immigration Subcommittee. Carl was featured in the February 2018 edition of SuperLawyers Magazine.
****************************************
Thanks, Carl, for a lovely and fitting tribute to a great jurist and a fine person! Judge Gordon actually took the bench shortly before I became the Deputy General Counsel at the “Legacy INS.” I became familiar with him and his work both during my time at the “Legacy INS” and during my time at the BIA. Indeed, Nate’s son, Attorney Louis Gordon, had an oral argument before a panel of the BIA sitting in Los Angeles. (Yes, there was a time, before Ashcroft, when the BIA was actually allowed to function largely along the lines of a real Federal Court and to decide to have arguments “on the road.” Now, the BIA is “confined to quarters” at Falls Church.)
Carl worked for me for a short time as a Trial Attorney at the Los Angeles Immigration Court when I was the DGC. But, he quickly found fame and fortune elsewhere.
Note how Immigration Court was once a more “user friendly” place, where there was mutual respect among the two parties and the Immigration Judge, and the objective was doing justice, not just cranking out more removal orders to keep the politicos at DOJ happy. Sadly, under Trump and his cronies at DOJ, the U.S. Immigration Court system is actually regressing in terms of expertise, professionalism, independence, and management — “stuck in reverse.”
Are sanctuary laws driving down immigration arrests in Northern California?
Tal Kopan Dec. 14, 2018
WASHINGTON —Immigration arrests fell in Northern California in the past year even as arrests nationally rose 11 percent, a trend that may be linked to tightening sanctuary laws that limit local cooperation with U.S. deportation agents.
But while fewer people in the region were arrested overall, arrests of noncriminal immigrants went up, according to data released Friday, reflecting Trump administration policies that anyone in the country without documentation is a target for enforcement.
The Immigration and Customs Enforcement office that oversees Northern California was one of only a handful nationally to see fewer arrests in the 2018 fiscal year — which ended Sept. 30 — than in 2017. The 14 percent drop in arrests was the steepest decline in the country.
The office, based in San Francisco, was also the only one in the country to post fewer arrests in 2018 than fiscal 2016, the last under President Barack Obama.
Under President Trump, arrests of undocumented immigrants, especially noncriminal ones, have been steadily climbing, as he has made immigration enforcement and border security his central pitches to voters.
Overall, ICE arrested nearly 160,000 immigrants last fiscal year, 34 percent of whom had no criminal convictions. That was an 11 percent increase in arrests overall, but was almost entirely driven by the surge in arrests of noncriminal immigrants. Arrests of those with a criminal conviction slightly trailed the year before.
The story was similar for deportations, which were up overall nationally but dipped slightly in Northern California.
Trump and his deputies have declared that no undocumented immigrant is exempt from the government’s grasp, a change from a policy adopted late in President Obama’s administration that focused ICE’s efforts and finite resources primarily on criminals.
The administration has focused particular ire toward sanctuary cities and has clashed repeatedly with Bay Area and California officials over their policies. The administration sued unsuccessfully to try to block California’s sanctuary law from going into effect after Gov. Jerry Brown signed it in late 2017, and engaged in a heated back-and-forth with Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf this year after she issued a preemptive public warning about a planned immigration sweep in the region.
It’s difficult to know why San Francisco lagged behind the rest of the country in arrests, but sanctuary laws could be a factor, especially those that limit cooperation between local jails and ICE officers who want to pick up undocumented inmates. ICE officials did not immediately respond Friday to a request for comment.
The data varied substantially by region. The San Diego sector saw among the biggest increases in arrests in the past year, up 32 percent overall with noncriminals representing more than half of those arrested, a jump that could be related to surges of migrants arriving at the border there.
The Los Angeles office, however, was more in line with San Francisco. There, ICE made 7 percent fewer arrests in fiscal 2018, though the agency also arrested a slightly higher number of noncriminal immigrants.
Former Obama administration ICE Director John Sandweg said regions rarely see varying numbers due to conscious decisions.
“It certainly isn’t, and almost never is a, ‘Hey guys, let’s do more or less in this area of responsibility.’ That’s just not the way it works,” Sandweg said.
His best guess to explain the discrepancy in Northern California was the limitation on ICE’s access to jails. Having to arrest more immigrants in the community takes more time and resources than the “efficient” handover of an immigrant in a jail, he said.
That could also explain why more noncriminal immigrants got caught up in the crosshairs, he added.
“This is an unintended consequence of sanctuary policies that I’m not sure is always thought through,” Sandweg said. “If you say no to picking up people in jail, there are going to be some dangerous people we feel compelled to get, so when you do that, you’re not just exposing those dangerous people to ICE but their family, their friends, their neighbors.”
Tal Kopan is The San Francisco Chronicle’s Washington correspondent. Email: tal.kopan@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @talkopan
Other possible explanations for the pattern of non-criminal arrests in Northern California:
Retaliation for “Sanctuary Cities” laws and for suits finding Sessions’s “Anti-Sanctuary Crusade” illegal;
Need to meet “arrest quotas” for annual bonuses (just like U.S. Immigration Judges, except they are ineligible for bonuses — but the Director and other “Managers” in Falls Church can pocket some extra cash by revving up removals to please the DOJ politicos).
I also wouldn’t put too much store on the so-called “criminal arrest” numbers put out by DHS either. DHS tends to jack up numbers by concentrating on relatively minor offenders rather than hunting down the real “bad guys” which tends to produce lower numbers.
Indeed, in the Federal bureaucracy the “quantity” that produces budget increases is almost always in tension with “quality” which is harder to quantify and certainly harder for Congressional staff to comprehend and “sell” and for individual legislators to take credit. For example, Session’s wasteful program of prosecuting first time border jumpers for misdemeanors probably produced lots of bogus “criminal removals” and perhaps some “criminal arrests” without actually accomplishing anything useful. Indeed most evidence suggests that while wasting time on Sessions’s “racist follies,” Federal prosecutors actually reduced investigation and prosecution of real crimes (e.g. serious felonies) in Federal Courts. https://www.pogo.org/analysis/2018/08/as-zero-tolerance-cases-skyrocket-other-prosecutions-slow/
Indeed, I surmise that an objective study of DHS’s civil, non-criminal enforcement activities would actually show little if any net benefit from leaving U.S. families without one or both parents, taking productive workers out of their jobs, and spreading fear and distrust of local police in ethnic communities. Just how that benefits anyone in the U.S. except Trump and his White Nationalist cronies isn’t apparent to me.
We also should throw in all of the legal time and court time wasted by the DOJ and other Federal prosecutors in tying up the Federal Courts with semi-frivolous litigation to advance their often illegal White Nationalist agenda. If those resources were instead dedicated to getting individuals in Immigration Court represented and improving the quality of Due Process and independence in Immigration Court, we’d be on the way to solving at least one phase of the immigration mess created largely by Congress and the last three Administrations.
For the last two years, DHS Enforcement has been operating largely without any rational enforcement objectives or professional supervision in a Department where management failure, fraud, waste, and abuse are endemic. Some meaningful oversight by the House and some requirement for rational planning, prudent use of taxpayers’ money, and accountability would be most welcome.
ICE arrested undocumented adults who sought to take in immigrant children
By Tal Kopan
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration has arrested 170 undocumented immigrants who came forward to try to take migrant children out of government custody, including more than 100 with no criminal record, federal officials said Monday.
The new totals were released as the number of undocumented immigrant children in government custody has reached record highs, with no signs of slowing down.
According to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokesman, the agency arrested 170 immigrants from July through November on the basis of information the government learned about them when they applied to take an immigrant child out of custody. Of that group, nearly two-thirds, or 109, had no criminal record.
ICE had confirmed 41 such arrests in September, prompting Democrats to propose legislation to block the practice. California Sen. Kamala Harris has joined onto a bill in the Senate, which has a bipartisan House counterpart, that would bar ICE from arresting an adult seeking to take in a child on the basis of information uncovered in a background check.
Golly gee, and some folks wonder why the “Abolish ICE” Movement continues to gather steam! Yes, ICE performs important law enforcement functions. But, lots of their “mission” isn’t really essential to good law enforcement, and some is actually quite counterproductive and wasteful.
Clearly, there is a case for Congress at least re-examining the amount of funding, priority, and effectiveness of some of which ICE is doing on the “civil side” these days. And, what would be the purpose of jamming more folks into a court system already crumbling under a largely artificially created 1.1 million case backlog? Not much that I can see, unless these folks being “lured” are really “bad actors,” which the majority of them don’t seem to be.
I resigned from the Department of Justice because of Trump’s campaign against immigration judges
Gianfranco De Girolamo November 26, 2018, 3:05 AM
One of the proudest days of my life was Dec. 16, 2015, when I became a naturalized citizen of the United States.
I shed tears of joy as I swore allegiance to the United States at the Los Angeles Convention Center, along with more than 3,000 other new Americans. I was celebrating a country that had welcomed me with open arms, treated me as one of its own and opened doors I hadn’t known existed. Just a few years before, in the remote village in southern Italy where I grew up, this would have been unimaginable.
Another of my proudest moments came just a year later, when I was awarded a coveted position in the U.S. Department of Justice. This happened in late November 2016, a few weeks after President Trump was elected.
Like many, I harbored reservations about Trump. But I did not waver in my enthusiasm for the job. In law school, l had learned about the role of civil servants as nonpolitical government employees who work across administrations — faithfully, loyally and diligently serving the United States under both Republicans and Democrats.
I was designated an attorney-advisor and assigned to the Los Angeles immigration court. There, I assisted immigration judges with legal research, weighed in on the strengths and weaknesses of parties’ arguments and often wrote the first drafts of judges’ opinions.
Soon enough, however, the work changed. In March 2018, James McHenry, the Justice Department official who oversees the immigration courts as head of the Executive Office for Immigration Review, announced a mandate imposing individual quotas on all the judges. Each judge would be required to decide 700 cases per year, he said.
With these new quotas, which went into effect on Oct. 1, immigration judges must now decide between three and four cases a day — while also reviewing dozens of motions daily and keeping up with all their administrative duties — or their jobs will be at risk.
The announcement of the quotas in March was the first in a series of demoralizing attacks on immigration judges this year. In May, Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions, since fired by Trump, personally issued a decision that placed limits on the ability of immigration judges to use a practice known as administrative closure, which allows judges to put cases on indefinite hold, and which, in immigration cases, can be a tool for delaying deportation orders.
The Justice Department enforced the decision in July by stripping an immigration judge in Philadelphia of his authority in scores of cases for continuing to use administrative closure.
All this was in addition to a barrage of disparaging comments made directly by the president. In June, Trump tweeted that there is no reason to provide judges to immigrants. He also rejected calls to hire more immigration judges, saying that “we have to have a real border, not judges” and asking rhetorically, “Who are these people?”
The demoralizing effect on immigration judges was palpable. Morale was at an all-time low. I was new to civil service, but these judges, some of whom have served continuously since the Reagan administration, made clear that this was an unprecedented attack on the justice system.
I’ve long admired the independence and legitimacy that the judiciary enjoys in the United States, so I found the attacks on judges deeply disturbing and troubling. They reminded me of Trump’s Italian alter-ego, Silvio Berlusconi, who spent most of his tenure as Italy’s prime minister fighting off lawsuits by delegitimizing and attacking the judiciary, calling it “a cancer of democracy” and accusing judges of being communist.
I voiced my concerns to my supervisors and directly to Director McHenry in a letter. Seeing no opportunity to make a positive difference and unwilling to continue to lend credence to this compromised system, I submitted my resignation in July, explaining my reasons in a letter.
This was not how I wanted to end my career in government. I had hoped to serve this country for the long haul. But I couldn’t stand by, or be complicit in, a mean-spirited and unscrupulous campaign to undermine the everyday work of the Justice Department and the judges who serve in our immigration courts — a campaign that hurts many of my fellow immigrants in the process.
Gianfranco De Girolamo was an attorney at the Department of Justice from 2017 to 2018.
Thanks for speaking out Gianfranco! I published an earlier, at that time “anonymous,” letter from Gianfranco at the time of his resignation. I’m sure there are many others at EOIR who feel the same way. But, they are “gagged” by the DOJ — threatened with job loss if they “tell the truth” about the ongoing legal farce and parody of justice within our Immigration Courts.
It’s a “closed system” at war with the public it serves, the dedicated attorneys who represent migrants, the essential NGOs who are propping up what’s left of justice in this system, and the very civil servants who are supposed to be carrying out the courts’ mission. What a horrible way to “(not) run the railroad.”
Someday, historians will dig out the whole truth about the “Sessions Era” at the DOJ and his perversion of justice in the U.S. Immigration Courts. I’m sure it will be even worse than we can imagine. But, for now, thanks to Gianfranco for shedding at least some light on one of the darkest and most dysfunctional corners of our Government!
Adolfo Flores, Hamed Aleaziz, & Karla Zabludovsky for BuzzFeed News:
TIJUANA, Mexico — For Trump administration officials, an unprecedented confrontation at the US-Mexico border on Sunday invited an assessment that their policies have only exacerbated the problems of an overwhelmed immigration system whose court backlog has grown larger since Trump’s inauguration 22 months ago.
León Rodriguez, who headed the US Citizenship and Immigration Services agency from 2014 to 2016, didn’t want to comment on the events on the ground, but said what happened at the border seemed to be “a foreseeable result of the US policy of placing every conceivable obstacle in the way of orderly legal migration and of not having a policy that [recognizes] the desperate circumstances driving migration.”
Mexican officials shared that negative assessment. Héctor Gandini, who will take over as spokesperson for Mexico’s Interior Ministry when Mexico swears in a new president on Saturday, said that the US use of tear gas on migrants attempting to cross illegally into the country was “not correct. We don’t want them to hound migrants.”
“You have to respect migrants’ human rights,” Gandini added.
For Josué Rosales, one of the migrants who took part in the ill-fated march to the border, what began as a journey of hope had turned into one of despair, one that promised weeks of more nights inside the tent he’s now sharing with his girlfriend on the grounds of the Benito Juarez stadium, where the caravan has been camped for days. He said he’s not ready to give up.
“I’m waiting to see if Trump comes to some type of agreement that allows us to cross,” Rosales said. “If he says no we’ll figure out another way to cross.”
The Trump administration faces a situation its best efforts have failed to control.
Administration officials have imposed a number of policies to discourage migrants from seeking to enter the United States. Then Attorney General Jeff Sessions personally rewrote key immigration court decisions to eliminate domestic violence and fear of gang violence as reasons for asylum to be granted. The administration imposed a controversial family separation policy that was intended to discourage parents from crossing the border with their children. Trump dispatched 5,800 US active-duty soldiers to the border in a show of force that many critics also claim was a blatant political ploy ahead of the midterm elections earlier this month.
Kim Kyung-hoon / Reuter
And yet border apprehensions are at the highest level yet of the Trump administration (though still at historically low levels), family detentions are at record levels, and the number of people granted asylum actually rose in the fiscal year that just ended, to the highest level in two decades.
In Tijuana, where the number of would-be asylum seekers is growing by the day, immigration attorneys and advocates describe a bottleneck system that makes asylum seekers wait weeks before they can seek to enter the US for refuge. That’s created an enormous backlog.
And the situation promises only to get worse as more people seeking to reach the US arrive in Baja California, the Mexican state that abuts California. Mexico’s interior ministry said there are 8,247 people now in Mexico who are traveling as part of so-called caravans from Central America. The vast majority of migrants — 7,417 — are in the cities of Mexicali and Tijuana. The other 424 are in a Mexico City shelter, 253 are in the Mexican state of Sinaloa, and another 153 are making their way north on their own. It’s unclear how many of them will ask for asylum.
Caring for the migrants is costing about $27,000 daily — money Tijuana’s mayor says the city does not have.
Sunday’s march to the border was intended to be peaceful, but it devolved into a frantic rush toward the border fence after the group, which numbered about 500, according to the Mexican interior ministry, was blocked from reaching the San Ysidro port of entry by a line of Mexican federal police.
The crowd skirted the police line and rushed across the Tijuana River’s small stream that runs next to the walkway leading to the port of entry.
Then after being blocked on the street in front of the Chaparral border crossing by metal barriers and another line of federal police with shields, a group walked to a train border crossing a few minutes away.
Several members of the group told BuzzFeed News they wanted to negotiate some type of agreement with the Trump administration that would let them enter the United States. Others said they hoped to be able to cross into the US as a group.
Instead, US border officers met them with tear gas and pepper balls, according to a statement from Customs and Border Protection, the agency responsible for border law enforcement.
CBP said its officers deployed the tear gas and pepper balls after some members of the group threw objects, including rocks, at agents while others tried to enter the United States illegally, some through a gap in the metal barrier along the railroad tracks.
Kim Kyung-hoon / Reuters
But not all immigration officers were willing to defend the US actions. One US asylum officer, who could not talk about policy publicly, said the confrontation likely was the result of the US’s inability or unwillingness to process asylum claims at the border daily. The officer said USCIS recently had told staff to be on standby to be sent to San Diego to help hear asylum claims.
“I’m just glad nothing worse happened,” the officer said. “I think it’s illegal that they closed the border. We cannot decide when we can close the border if there’s no state of emergency. For a couple dozen asylum seekers? That was not an emergency that should justify closing the border. I’m just relieved it wasn’t worse.”
Another government official, who works on the issue but does not make policy, blamed the Trump administration for the tensions at the border.
“Trump has broken the law by not having people at the border processed for months and months and creating a bottleneck there,” the official said. “Tear gassing children because maybe they’ll get into the US? Heaven forbid.”
Mexican authorities late Sunday were contemplating what to do next. In a press release, the interior ministry said Mexican police had retaken control of the area leading to the San Ysidro port of entry and that Mexican troops would not be deployed “despite the magnitude of the situation.”
A government official who requested anonymity because they were not allowed to talk to reporters told BuzzFeed News that 30 migrants had breached the border and were promptly detained by CBP. The National Migration Institute said that it planned to deport as many as 500 others who attempted to cross into the US illegally but were unsuccessful. Since the first caravan entered Mexico on October 19, 11,000 migrants from Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua have been deported.
The escalation at the border comes at a complicated time — the country’s embattled president, Enrique Peña Nieto, will conclude his mandate in less than a week.
BuzzFeed News revealed earlier this month that the Trump administration was attempting to broker a deal that would force people to wait in Mexico while their asylum cases were processed. The Washington Post reported that incoming Mexican president Andres Manuel López Obrador’s transition team had agreed to this plan, but that report was disputed by the same officials it cited; they pointed out that López Obrador’s government would not take office for several more days. “There is no agreement of any sort between the future government of Mexico and the US government,” said a press release from López Obrador’s transition team.
Immigration promises to be a major challenge for López Obrador, who has pledged to give work permits and offer jobs to Central American migrants in Mexico. Detentions and deportations of migrants have increased steadily since 2014, when the government launched the Southern Border Program, shortly after a large wave of unaccompanied minors surged across the US-Mexico border.
Lucy Nicholson / Reuters
Sunday’s events were much different from the results of a spring caravan that arrived in Tijuana in late April with hundreds of asylum seekers. The group camped out on the grounds of the Chaparral border crossing for days after being turned away by CBP agents because the port of entry was at capacity. Over several days, small groups of asylum seekers were allowed into the US to make their claim, 93% of whom passed what’s known as a credible fear interview, a crucial first step in the asylum application process.
But that caravan was much smaller, at most 1,500 at its start in southern Mexico, than the thousands now waiting in Tijuana, and its members had been vetted by the NGO that led it, Pueblo Sin Fronteras, to weed out those whose asylum claims were likely to be found without merit by the time it reached the border. In the end, only 228 people sought asylum in a process that took just five days. Separately, other members of the caravan asked for asylum before and after those five days, putting the total number of asylum seekers at 401.
This time around, asylum seekers have been told they would likely have to wait weeks in Tijuana before they could ask the US for refuge because of a backlog at the border. The current expected wait to begin the process is now up to six weeks.
Delay at the border for requesting asylum is nothing new, but it’s been getting worse under Trump. The Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general found recently that US immigration authorities’ inability to handle the number of people seeking asylum at ports of entry had forced migrants to cross illegally. But there’s little sign that US officials are planning to take steps to improve the wait times.
And the likelihood is great that those who must wait in Tijuana will find only that their frustration will grow in the coming months.
“It’s difficult because we came as one peaceful caravan and now we’re just waiting here without any results,” Rosales, the march participant, told BuzzFeed News. “We’re sitting in the sun, thirsty, hungry, with no resolution to our situation.”
************************************************
The Trump Administration created this artificial mess. The solution is hardly “rocket science:”
More USCIS Asylum Officers;
More pro bono private attorneys;
More U.S. Immigration Judges and staff;
Restoring authority to Immigration Judges to work with both parties before their courts to close and remove hundreds of thousands of “low priority” cases from the courts’ dockets, thus freeing up judicial time to work on asylum cases of more recent arrivals;
Restoring precedents that would allow refugees with documented cases of persecution on the basis for domestic violence and family relationships to be expeditiously granted, thus freeing up docket space for other types of cases.
No chance that the Trump Administration will do this voluntarily. But, there might be an opening for House Democrats to condition further immigration enforcement funding on improvements in the foregoing areas and an end to the Trump-created “border backups.”
Donald Trump has never had a particularly good track record when it comes to Puerto Rico. After Hurricane Maria ravaged the island in September 2017, the president took nearly a week to even mention the catastrophe, and when he did, it was to scold the U.S. territory for owing Wall Street money. A short time later, he deemed it appropriate to publicly trashthe mayor of San Juan, for the crime of requesting more relief funds. When he finally saw fit to visit the disaster zone, he told the locals that their hurricane wasn’t “a real catastrophe like Katrina.” In September, to commemorate Maria’s one-year anniversary, he smeared 3,000 dead Puerto Ricans by claiming that the death count was a hoax cooked up by Democrats to make him look bad. And now, he’s reportedly decided to really cement his legacy in the territory by trying to end relief funding, despite the fact that the situation remains dire.
Axios reports that Trump told senior White House officials last month that he wants to “claw back” some of the federal money Congress has set aside for Puerto Rico’s recovery, claiming that the local government has been “mismanaging” it. The basis for such a claim? Apparently Baby Huey read an article in The Wall Street Journal noting that “Puerto Rico bond prices soared . . . after the federal oversight board that runs the U.S. territory’s finances released a revised fiscal plan that raises expectations for disaster funding and economic growth,” and got it in his head, sans any evidence, that Puerto Rico has been using disaster funds to pay down its debt. That naturally lead to an utterly baseless tweet about “inept politicians . . . trying to use the massive and ridiculously high amounts of hurricane/disaster funding to pay off other obligations,” and a threat to cut off funding. Shortly thereafter, the perennial bankruptcy artist reportedly let it be known that he didn’t want to include any additional money for Puerto Rico in future spending bills and wanted to try and take back funding that had already been allocated by Congress.
Luckily, despite Trump’s wishes, he can’t actually take away disaster funds that have already been approved by Congress. But he could refuse to sign future spending bills that include more money for Puerto Rico’s recovery. To put that possibility into perspective, the federal government has thus far spent more than $6 billion on relief funding for Puerto Rico, which is a drop in the bucket compared to relief for the post-Katrina Gulf Coast, which received $10 billion four days after the hurricane hit, another $50 billion six days later, and, more than a decade later, is still receiving monetary assistance. But in Trump’s mind, Puerto Rico has already received too much money. Cutting off funding to—what is, as a reminder!—a U.S. territory now would be a slap in the face regardless, but particularly so given that it’s based on our not-very-bright commander in chief’s poor reading comprehension. As Axios points out, not only is there zero evidence of Puerto Rico’s officials funneling disaster funds toward debt repayment, but Congress put steps in place “to keep disaster relief funds from being used to pay down the island’s debt.” As Bloomberg reported in 2017, “neither the island’s leaders—nor the board installed by the U.S. to oversee its budget—are proposing using disaster recovery aid to directly pay off bondholders or other lenders.” But Trump has “always been pissed off by Puerto Rico,” so here we are.
And now California—where 31 people are dead, 228 are missing, 6,453 homes have been destroyed, and only 25 percent of the fire has been contained thus far—is getting a taste of the fun, too:
[Tweet Omitted]
Of course, out here in reality, the compelling evidence is that a little thing called climate change contributed to bothdisasters, but that’s something Trump would rather not discuss.
********************************
Bess really has Trump “pegged.” His stunning lack of humanity, knowledge, compassion, and any qualifications for the position he holds continue to amaze!
There are natural disasters and then there are man-made disasters like the Trump kakistocracy.
Trump’s vile and ignorant attack on American victims of natural disaster earns him a “Five Clowns.”
In a case that the ACLU says could affect thousands of immigrants, the Supreme Court on Wednesday considered when the government has the right to detain a class of immigrants without a bail hearing.
Under a 1996 law, the federal government is allowed to detain immigrants whose criminal conviction or involvement in terrorism-related activities would make them inadmissible or deportable. The law says the government “shall” take any of those immigrants into custody “when the alien is released” from criminal custody. The question before the justices is: What happens if the Department of Homeland Security doesn’t do so immediately?
The arguments on Wednesday focused on the technicalities of the 1996 law, rules of grammar, and timelines — not the sort of fiery rhetoric usually favored by President Donald Trump or Attorney General Jeff Sessions when talking about immigrants.
And while the case was granted to resolve the question of whether the statute still applied if DHS does not act immediately — whether there is any time restriction — the arguments shifted to a question of what limitation would be reasonable.
After a back-and-forth with Justice Sonia Sotomayor and a question from Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Justice Neil Gorsuch spoke up early in the Wednesday arguments, asking, “[D]oes the government have any view about if ever the obligation [to take an immigrant into custody] lapses? Could it be 30 years? … Thirty years, and the government was aware of him the entire time and chose not to act. … Is there any limit on the government’s power?”
The government lawyer, Zachary Tripp from the Solicitor General’s Office, said the law created “a continuing obligation” that “does not lapse.”
Later, when Justice Stephen Breyer raised a similar question and Tripp began answering about when certain underlying crimes would be covered under the detention provision, Gorsuch interjected, said that back-and-forth was “quibbling,” and redirected Tripp to the larger question: “Justice Breyer’s question is my question, and I really wish you’d answer it.”
Breyer then stated his question more directly: “Is the government’s position that this paragraph, which says shall be arrested upon release, applies to a person who has been released 50 years before?”
Tripp, not giving in at all, said the government’s position is “absolutely that this applies regardless of the time” that’s passed.
. . . .
********************************
Read the complete article at the link.
I had predicted the possibility that Justice Gorsuch’s past jurisprudence questioning the extent of and deference to Executive Power could make him an “honest broker” in some immigration cases.
I’d like to believe Justice Kavanaugh’s testimony that he will approach cases in a fair and impartial manner. But, neither his partisan outburst during his conformation nor his fawning performance during the unnecessary “formal swearing in” that became a Trump campaign rally were very encouraging from a fairness and impartiality standpoint.
Both his reputation and the country would be better served if he filled the “open minded conservative” role played by his predecessor and mentor Justice Kennedy rather than the “bought and paid for partisan vote” that all the Senators and Trump expect him to be.
Indeed, the one unifying theme of the Senate confirmation process was that all believed that he would perform as a totally predictable right-wing partisan vote. If he doesn’t live up to this expectation, the Dems will be (pleasantly) shocked and the GOP outraged at his “betrayal.” That’s why he would do well to at least occasionally listen carefully to the analysis of some of his more “liberal leaning” colleagues.
A federal district court judge has ruled Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ conditions on grant funding to force so-called sanctuary cities to cooperate with immigration enforcement efforts as unconstitutional
Judge William Orrick, of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, sided with the state of California and city of San Francisco in their lawsuit challenging the requirements in granting their request for summary judgment Friday.
The conditions Sessions set in 2017 require sanctuary cities to give immigration officials access to their jails, notify U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials of the planned release of a detainee, and follow a law that prohibits state and local governments from restricting how much information is shared with the Department of Homeland Security.
Orrick’s decision was in agreement with every court that has looked at these issues.
The judge said that the challenged conditions violate the separation of power and that the information-sharing law is unconstitutional.
Orrick said he is following the lead of the district court in a similar challenge brought by the city of Chicago and is issuing a nationwide injunction to block the Justice Department from enforcing its requirement and the law. But he said he is putting that stay on hold until the Ninth Circuit addresses the issue on appeal.
“Today’s ruling is a victory in our fight to protect the people of California,” California Attorney General Xavier Becerra said in a statement Friday afternoon.
“We will continue to stand up to the Trump administration’s attempts to force our law enforcement into changing its policies and practices in ways that that would make us less safe.”
Becerra’s office noted that the ruling marks the attorney general’s twenty-second legal victory against the Trump administration.
****************************
When will he ever learn, when will he ever learn? And, how much of our tax money and Federal Court time will he waste with this counterproductive, semi-frivolous, and vindictive litigation.
Given Gonzo’s record of disregarding the law and mocking common sense, California might “top the century mark” in legal wins before the end of this Administration!
Matter of VELASQUEZ-RIOS, 27 I&N Dec. 470 (BIA 2018)
BIA HEADNOTE:
The amendment to section 18.5 of the California Penal Code, which retroactively lowered the maximum possible sentence that could have been imposed for an alien’s State offense from 365 days to 364 days, does not affect the applicability of section 237(a)(2)(A)(i)(II) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, 8 U.S.C. § 1227(a)(2)(A)(i)(II) (2012), to a past conviction for a crime involving moral turpitude “for which a sentence of one year or longer may be imposed.”
PANEL: BIA APPELLATE IMMIGRATION JUDGES GUENDELSBERGER, MALPHRUS, and LIEBOWITZ
OPINION BY: Judge John Guendelsberger
**************************************
Criminal lawyers take note: This Respondent received a sentence of only 12 days in jail! A great deal, right? Not if you look at the immigration consequences! Also, given the change of removability, he would be subject to “mandatory detention.” Therefore, I’m sure that he spent far more than 12 days in ICE custody awaiting this unfavorable result.
Amid huge backlog, L.A. will get more immigration judges
Head of national jurist group says they’re ‘being used … as a political tool.’
By Andrea Castillo
Los Angeles has the nation’s second-largest immigration court backlog, with 29 judges handling 72,000 pending cases.
That’s including four judges who started within the last few months. An additional 10 were expected to be sworn in this week, according to Judge Ashley Tabaddor, who leads the National Assn. of Immigration Judges.
But she says that won’t fix the problem.
“We’re just transparently being used as an extension of the executive branch’s law-enforcement policies, and as a political tool,” she said.
U.S. Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions welcomed 44 new judges earlier this month, addressing them at a kickoff for their training with the Executive Office for Immigration Review. He said the administration’s goal is to double the number of judges active when President Trump took office.
“As you take on this critically important role, I hope that you will be imaginative and inventive in order to manage a high-volume caseload,” Sessions told them. “I do not apologize for expecting you to perform, at a high level, efficiently and effectively.”
There are 351 judges in about 60 courts around the country — up from 273 judges in 2016. These judges manage a backlog of nearly 750,000 cases,a figure that has grown from a low of less than 125,000 in 1999. Last year, Sessions introduced a “streamlined hiring plan” that cut the hiring timefor immigration judge candidates by more than half.
The EOIR has the funding for 484 judges by the end of the year, spokeswoman Kathryn Mattingly said.
Tabaddor said the impending quotas and production deadlines, which take effect next month, have caused severe anxiety among judges. Justice Department directives that were announced in April outlined a quota system tied to performance evaluations under which judges will be expected to complete 700 cases a year to receive a “satisfactory” rating.
Hiring more judges won’t be enough to alleviate the pressure they’re all under, Tabaddor said.
“It’s pitting the judges’ livelihood against their oath of office, which is to be impartial decision-makers,” she said, calling it an “assembly-line formula.”
Tabaddor said there also isn’t enough space for new judges, so some might not start right away. She described the downtown L.A. offices as cramped, with law clerks sharing offices or cubicles. And she said additional support staff members have yet to be hired.
Yup! As long as the Immigration Courts are under DOJ, and particularly under the rule of “Gonzo Apocalypto,” it will be an exercise in “throwing good money after bad.” As I’ve said before (perhaps in the LA Times?), what Sessions is doing is like “taking an assembly line that is producing defective cars and making it run faster so that it will produce even more defective cars.” More or less the definition of insanity, or at least “fraud, waste, and abuse” of Government resources. But, accountability went out the window as soon as Trump took over and the GOP controlled both the Executive and Congress.
For a glimpse of what Immigration Court will look like under the new “Gonzo Quotas,” check out this great video:
ICE official stands by comparing detention centers to ‘summer camp,’ won’t say if he’d send his kids to one
By Tal Kopan, CNN
A senior Trump administration official on Tuesday stood by his controversial comments comparing the detention centers for immigrant families to “summer camp,” but declined to answer whether he’d send his own children there.
The remarks came at a congressional hearing where immigration and border security officials struggled to answer foundational questions from senators about the administration’s push to expand the detention of immigrant families and children.
Democratic Sen. Kamala Harris of California asked Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s chief of arrests and deportations, Matthew Albence, if he stood by his comments earlier this summer that family detention centers are like “summer camp.”
“Absolutely I do,” he said.
But he demurred when asked whether he’d send his own children, or those of people he is close to, to the centers.
“Would you send your children to one of these detention centers?” she asked.
“That question’s not applicable,” he said.
Albence did say the standards for family centers are “very safe” and “humane,” and that at one he had visited, families had access to TVs, food and video games and other activities.
“The point is, the parent made the illegal entry,” Albence said when pressed further. “The parent put themselves in this position.”
The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing topic was ostensibly a court settlement that governs how immigrant children can be treated by the US, including limiting the length of time a family can be involuntarily detained to 20 days. The administration is seeking to nullify that settlement and allow itself to detain far more immigrant families for far longer.
Harris’ line of questioning was one of a series from Democrats, who pressed the officials on why they’d want to expand family detention and child detention despite widely held beliefs among medical professionals that even short periods of detention can inflict permanent and devastating trauma on children. Though the hearing did not include the Department of Health and Human Services, which runs the government’s program for immigrant children who are in the US on their own, senators also asked about the ongoing fallout over family separations and unaccompanied child detention.
Members of both parties pressed as to why the agencies were not pursuing other measures with bipartisan support that could streamline the immigration court system over an expensive effort to vastly expand family detention.
A federal appeals court decided Wednesday that the Trump administration may not withhold federal funds from California’s immigrant-friendly “sanctuary” cities and counties.
The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, in a 2-1 decision, upheld a district judge’s ruling in favor of San Francisco and Santa Clara County, which sued over the administration’s threats to withhold money to jurisdictions that have passed laws limiting local law enforcement cooperation with federal immigration authorities.
The ruling was a blow to the Trump administration’s efforts to punish cities and states that fail to help enforce federal immigration law, a goal President Trump announced shortly after he was sworn in.
The administration did not comment on whether it intended to appeal the decision.
But the 9th Circuit handed Trump one victory. It removed a nationwide injunction against his directive, concluding there was not enough evidence presented in the case so far to support blocking it beyond California.
Devin O’Malley, a spokesman for the U.S. Department of Justice, called the ruling a “a victory for criminal aliens in California, who can continue to commit crimes knowing that the state’s leadership will protect them from federal immigration officers.”
O’Malley also declared that the removal of the nationwide injunction amounted to “another major victory for the rule of law.”
The case stemmed from an executive order issued by Trump shortly after taking office. He directed his administration to withhold federal funds from sanctuary jurisdictions.
The 9th Circuit said Trump exceeded his authority because only Congress can put conditions on federal funds.
“The United States Constitution exclusively grants the power of the purse to Congress, not the President,” wrote Chief 9th Circuit Judge Sidney R. Thomas, a Clinton appointee.
The administration argued that the order was “all bluster and no bite, representing a perfectly legitimate use of the presidential ‘bully pulpit,’ without any real meaning — ‘gesture without motion,’ as T.S. Eliot put it,” Thomas wrote.
But that explanation “strains credulity,” Thomas said.
The ruling quoted Trump expressing his opposition to sanctuary cities in a television interview after issuing his order.
“If we have to defund, we give tremendous amounts of money to California…. California in many ways is out of control,” the court quoted Trump as saying.
The Justice Department later issued a memorandum interpreting Trump’s order as affecting only three law enforcement grants historically conditioned on compliance with immigration law.
But the 9th Circuit said that interpretation was unreasonable and inconsistent with the executive order.
The court left the injunction in place for California because it found there was sufficient evidence that the counties and the state were “particular targets.”
But there was little to no evidence presented on the impact of the executive order outside California, the 9th Circuit said.
“The record as presently developed does not justify a nationwide injunction,” the court said.
Unless the Trump administration appeals, which legal analysts believe is likely, the case will return to the district court, where evidence could be presented to support a nationwide injunction.
Ninth Circuit Judge Ferdinand F. Fernandez, appointed by former President George H.W. Bush, dissented.
He argued the case was not “ripe” for a decision, in part because no action has been taken against the counties.
“While the counties may be convinced that the Executive Order loosed a fearsome chimera upon them, that does not mean that the courts should take up arms to vanquish the imagined beast by slaying the executive order itself,” Fernandez said.
Wednesday’s decision was the latest among several to block Trump from punishing sanctuary jurisdictions.
Last month, a federal judge in Sacramento largely rejected a challenge by the Trump administration of three statewide California sanctuary laws.
In April, a federal judge in Los Angeles sided with the city in a ruling that said the administration could not consider sanctuary policies in parsing out police grants.
Chicago and Philadelphia also won court challenges of the administration’s authority to yank law enforcement grants based on sanctuary policies. The U.S. 7th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the decision in the Chicago case.
The U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, though, has allowed a Texas law requiring police chiefs and sheriffs to cooperate with federal immigration officials to go into effect. Texas lawmakers passed the requirement in response to the sanctuary city movement.
The U.S. Supreme Court has not yet weighed in on the sanctuary policies or on the legality of the administration’s effort to end protections from deportation for immigrants who came to the U.S. when they were young.
The high court decided 5 to 4 in June to uphold Trump’s travel ban, which was a revision of an executive order the president issued shortly after taking office.
The order bans foreign visitors and immigrants from several mostly Muslim-majority nations. Lower courts had struck down the ban.
Santa Clara County Counsel James Williams called Wednesday’s decision “great news.”
He said all the courts that have examined lawsuits involving sanctuary polices have concluded that Congress, not the executive branch, controls federal spending.
“This opinion today is a huge reaffirmation of that very core bedrock principle of separation of powers,” Williams said.
Kent Scheidegger, legal director of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, described the majority ruling as “deeply dishonest.” The foundation sided with the Trump administration in the case.
Scheidegger noted that Trump’s order asked for compliance “consistent with law,” which limited it to only a few grants, not all federal spending.
“This case is headed for rehearing by a larger 11-judge panel, at least, and probably to the Supreme Court,” he said.
San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera praised the ruling for blocking an unconstitutional “power grab” by Trump.
“San Francisco’s sanctuary policies make our city safer by encouraging anyone who has been a victim or witness to a crime to tell police,” Herrera said. “We are a safer community when people aren’t afraid to call the Fire Department in an emergency.”
*************************************************
Fairly predictable. Just think of the incredible amount of attorney and court resources, and the potential for goodwill and cooperation the Trump Administration has wasted in pursuing its White Nationalist agenda to actually make America less safe!
If the same amount of energy, effort, and resources were put on working with the private bar and the Immigration Judges to 1) get all asylum applicants competently represented, and 2) remove the 75% or so of the cases of individuals who should eventually be legalized or otherwise allowed to stay from already overcrowded Immigration Court dockets, the backlog resulting from “Aimless Docket Reshuffling” by DOJ politicos could largely be eliminated. The system then would be able to adjudicate new cases, particularly those of recently arrived asylum seekers, fairly, within a reasonable period of time, and in conformity with Constitutional Due Process.
A federal judge in Los Angeles will appoint an independent auditor to oversee the treatment of children in immigrant detention facilities.
The Friday ruling came a day after the court-imposed deadline for the Trump administration to reunite families separated at the border under its zero-tolerance policy. As of Friday, hundreds of children remained isolated from their parents.
A monitor is expected to be appointed within a few weeks.
Peter Schey, lead counsel and director of the Los Angeles-based Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law, said the monitor will oversee all three family detention centers run by Immigration and Customs Enforcement — two in Texas and one in Pennsylvania — as well as Border Patrol facilities in the Rio Grande sector along the Texas border.
Schey’s group filed a motion seeking an independent monitor for the Rio Grande sector after lawyers observed inhumane conditions there. He said his team will discuss in the coming weeks whether to file another motion asking that the monitor also oversee all other Border Patrol facilities along the border.
The group filed a scathing report last week including testimony from more than 200 parents and children held in California, Texas and other states who described cramped cells without enough bedding to sleep, cold or frozen food and a lack of basic hygiene products.
A Mexican woman said her daughter had wet herself on their first night because there were so many people sleeping in the room that she couldn’t get to the toilet. A Guatemalan boy told attorneys that he had no soap, towels or a toothbrush.
“These are problems that appear to be pervasive,” Schey said Friday. “We’re hoping that that has a salutary effect on Border Patrol operations throughout the southern border. Hopefully they won’t wait until we bring a new motion to expand the special monitor before they will learn from this and correct their ways.”
The interviews were done through a 1997 court settlement called the Flores agreement that governs how long migrant children may be held in custody and under what conditions. The settlement allows attorneys to periodically inspect detention facilities that children are held in.
This month, U.S. District Judge Dolly Gee rejected the federal government’s request to renegotiate the terms of the Flores agreement to hold children for longer than 20 days.
She ruled in 2015 that the government had breached the agreement by allowing rooms that were cold and overcrowded as well as inadequate nutrition and hygiene.
**********************************
Great idea!
It’s also time for some Federal Judge (or Judges) to appoint an “Independent Auditor” or “Special Master” to run the U.S. Immigration Court system in accordance with the laws and our Constituton until Congress establishes a new independent system.
