"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.
Sudhin Thanawala reports for the Associated Press in the Chicago Tribune:
“A federal judge on Monday permanently blocked President Donald Trump’s executive order to cut funding from cities that limit cooperation with U.S. immigration authorities.
U.S. District Court Judge William Orrick rejected the administration’s argument that the executive order applies only to a relatively small pot of money and said Trump cannot set new conditions on spending approved by Congress.
The judge had previously made the same arguments in a ruling that put a temporary hold on the executive order targeting so-called sanctuary cities. The Trump administration has appealed that decision to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
“The District Court exceeded its authority today when it barred the President from instructing his cabinet members to enforce existing law,” Department of Justice spokesman Devin O’Malley said in a statement late Monday. “The Justice Department will vindicate the President’s lawful authority to direct the executive branch.”
Orrick’s ruling came in lawsuits brought by two California counties, San Francisco and Santa Clara.
San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera said the ruling was “a victory for the American people and the rule of law.”
“President Trump might be able to tweet whatever comes to mind, but he can’t grant himself new authority because he feels like it,” he said in a statement.
A lawyer for the DOJ argued during a hearing before Orrick in April that the executive order applied to only a few grants that would affect less than $1 million for Santa Clara County and possibly no money for San Francisco.
Judge in Chicago refuses to change ruling on sanctuary cities
But the judge disagreed, saying in his rulings that the order was written broadly to “reach all federal grants” and potentially jeopardized hundreds of millions of dollars in funding to San Francisco and Santa Clara.
He cited comments by the president and Attorney General Jeff Sessions as evidence that the order was intended to target a wide array of federal funding. And he said the president himself had called it a “weapon” to use against recalcitrant cities.
The Trump administration separately has also moved to withhold one particular law enforcement grant from sanctuary cities, prompting a new round of lawsuits that are pending.”
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WORTHY OF NOTE:
Trump’s tweets and Sessions’s bombastic, anti-immigrant public agenda continue to haunt them in litigation.
Continuing a recent trend, Judge Orrick basically found the DOJ’s legal position “not credible.”
An Administration that (rather hollowly) claims to be interested in effective law enforcement refuses to work cooperatively with many major cities and threatens to withhold law enforcement funds.
Clearly, this case is headed “up the line,” probably eventually to the Supremes.
Pangea Legal Services (Pangea) is a non-profit organization based in San Francisco and Santa Clara County. Our vision is to live in a world where individuals can realize their fundamental right to move and resettle around the world with dignity and respect. We work toward this vision through legal representation of immigrants in deportation proceedings, community empowerment, and policy advocacy.
We are recruiting an attorney to join our legal team in Santa Clara County to increase our capacity to represent detained and non-detained immigrants in removal proceedings. The attorney will primarily engage in direct representation, using a litigation model that creates space for clients to become agents of change in their communities and places them at the center of their own defense and advocacy. The position is based in our South Bay office and will require occasional travel to the San Francisco office to attend court hearings, interviews, and team meetings (approx. 1x/week). If you are someone with a positive attitude, a passion for producing high-quality work, and a love for the community we serve, then please apply!
PRIMARY RESPONSIBILITIES
Provide direct legal representation to immigrants in removal proceedings
Coordinate advocacy, public campaigns, and community-led initiatives with family members of clients and grassroots partners
Work closely with partners to provide know your rights and self-defense education for the community
Help establish internal policies as our non-profit grows
DESIRED QUALIFICATIONS
Immigration or removal defense experience (including law school experience)
Proficiency in Spanish (required)
Ability to take on leadership in various projects, in addition to direct legal services responsibilities
Desire to invest in and grow with our organization
J.D. degree with membership in good standing with a State Bar
SALARY AND BENEFITS
Pangea is a collaborative, nonhierarchical organization, where salaries are equal among all staff after the first six months of employment at $52,000/year
Benefits include state bar dues, professional membership fees, medical and dental, preventative health benefits for general wellness, a socially responsible retirement package, and an annual right to move stipend
APPLICATION INSTRUCTIONS
The start date of this position is flexible (by December 2017) and applications will be accepted on a rolling basis. If you believe you might be a good fit, please submit a cover letter, resume, writing sample, copy of your law school transcript, and three references to welcome@pangealegal.org. In your cover letter, please include how the immigration struggle directly impacts you or your family, if applicable. Please indicate “South Bay Attorney Application” in the subject line of your email.
Pangea is an equal opportunity/affirmative action employer. We believe diversity makes us stronger and we welcome applicants diverse in race, religion, gender, nationality, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and other areas.
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I have helped Pangea with some legal issues and strategies. Wonderful team of folks, including some “Charter Members” of the New Due Process Army: Etan Newman, Director of Appellate Advocacy;Celine Dinhjanelle, Director of South Bay Programs (and wife of all-star former Arlington Immigration Court Attorney Advisor Anthony Dinh); Bianca Z. Santos, a Georgetown Law/ CALS Asylum Clinic alum who appeared before me in the Arlington Immigration Court; and their colleagues.
“So instead of fighting whether or not the feds can order cops to bust up the local Motel 6, cities can just hire some lawyers.
This is the lie of every talking head that praises building a wall but adds, with all faux sincerity, that they have “no problem with legal immigrants.” Almost half of the people shuttled through assembly line deportation hearings actually fit within legal immigration protections, but the complexity of the system — not to mention language barriers — make them victims of the bureaucracy.
If that projection is correct, NYIFUP cases result in immigrant victories 48 percent of the time. As Oren Root, director of the Vera Institute’s Center for Immigration and Justice, puts it, that means that of every 12 immigrants who are winning at Varick Street right now, 11 would have been deported without a lawyer.
That finding challenges a widely held assumption about immigration court: that most immigrants who go through it don’t qualify for the types of protection that Congress has laid out for particularly compelling cases. The Vera finding implies that, in fact, many immigrants do deserve relief as Congress and the executive branch have established it — but that hundreds of thousands of them have been deported without getting the chance to pursue those claims.
New York’s program has inspired 12 more cities to adopt the program. It’s put up or shut up time for the Department of Justice — if they’re really committed to proving some undocumented migrant is in violation of the law, then stand up and make that case in court.
Against a real attorney.
Unless they’re chicken.”
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Read the complete article at the link. I have previously reported on the VOX News Article and the Vera study.
I think Patrice has hit the nail on the head. Sessions, Miller, Bannon and the White Nationalist crowd are biased bullies picking on the most vulnerable and disadvantaged. Like all bullies, they have absolutely no desire to compete fairly on a level playing field.
The Vera report confirms what many of us involved in the field have been saying for years: a significant portion of those going through Immigration Court, probably 50% or more are entitled to be in the US. Without lawyers, such individuals have little or no chance of making and succeeding on claims that would allow them to stay. Since at least one-third of individuals (and a much higher percentage of detained individuals) are unrepresented, we are unlawfully removing tens of thousands of individuals each year, in violation of due process. And nothing aggravates this unfairness more than unnecessary detention (in other words, the majority of immigration detention which involves individuals who are not criminals, security threats, or threats to abscond if they are represented and understand the system).
A competent and conscientious Attoyney General would work cooperatively with private bar groups, NGOs, and localities to solve the representation crisis and drastically reduce the use of expensive and inhumane immigration detention. But, Sessions is moving in exactly the opposite direction, in violation of constitutional principles of due process, practical efficiency, and basic human decency.
“Despite the Trump administration’s repeated attempts to frame illegal immigration as a threat to public safety, the poll also found an overwhelming majority believe that people without legal residency help revitalize cities as opposed to increasing crime.
The survey results, poll analysts and policy experts said, reflect ongoing trends in California, where through the decades the public has tended to support immigrants in the country illegally, even when federal or state political leaders have stoked anti-immigrant sentiment to rally their bases.
“We have seen this in California forever,” said Jill Darling, the survey director for the Center for Economic and Social Research at USC. “People, including Republicans, have been more supportive of immigrants and reform, even to the point of supporting a path to citizenship, more so than Republican leadership.”
Most poll participants also expressed positive perceptions of people without legal residency in the country.
Nearly 63% of people surveyed said they believed immigrants without legal status strengthened the economy, as opposed to roughly 38% who said they took away jobs. Sixty-six percent said immigrants in the country illegally helped revitalize cities, and about 34% — including more than 72% of Republicans — believed they increased crime.
Policy experts said the poll results reflect the explosive growth of Latinos, Asians and other minority communities that tend to lean Democratic. California’s families are so diverse, they said, that nearly everyone knows someone who came to the country as an immigrant — legally or illegally.
It also reflects a shift away from the “us-versus-them” rhetoric that damaged the Republican brand in the 1990s, political consultants and immigration policy experts said. During that time, Gov. Pete Wilson was criticized for using footage of people running across the border to dramatize the problem of illegal immigration, and voters passed propositions to bar immigrants in the country illegally from public benefits, outlaw affirmative action programs and teach only English in schools.
That “no longer reflects our reality,” said Mindy Romero, director of the California Civic Engagement Project. “In a state like California, immigrants are us.”
Andrew Medina, state policy manager for Asian Americans Advancing Justice, said he wasn’t surprised by the results of the poll — or by the approval among California residents for the sanctuary state law. A study released in February by the Public Policy Institute of California found that a solid majority of Californians believe the state and local governments should make their own policies and take action to protect the rights of immigrants who are here illegally.
The final language of the sanctuary state law was the result of months of tough negotiations among Gov. Jerry Brown, Senate leader and bill author Kevin de León (D-Los Angeles), and law enforcement officials.
It will largely prohibit state and local law enforcement agencies from holding or sharing information about people with federal immigration agents unless those individuals have been convicted of one or more offenses from a list of 800 crimes outlined in a 2013 state law.
Federal immigration authorities still will be able to work with state corrections officials — a key concession Brown had demanded — and will be able to enter county jails to question immigrants. But the state attorney general’s office will be required to publish guidelines and training recommendations to limit immigration agents’ access to personal information.
“It is positive that these polls show that there is support for immigrant communities, and it is especially positive in this era,” Medina said.
Still, Romero advised caution.
“Discrimination against immigrants is very real and a danger,” she said, pointing to anti-immigrant rhetoric at the national level. “I think we can’t rest on a changing landscape in California and just assume that things will continue to be more receptive and open.”
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Read the complete article at the link.
The Trump-Sessions-Miller-Bannon bogus White Nationalist program of portraying bigotry and racism as “law enforcement” ultimately will fail. Truth will win out. But, that doesn’t mean that lots of damage won’t be inflicted along the way by restrictionists on vulnerable individuals, their defenders, our society, our economy, and our international leadership and reputation.
Resist the false messages with truth! Support truth with action!
In what I would consider a pleasant surprise, Attorney General Jeff Sessions appears to be appointing a more diverse and balanced group of U.S. Immigration Judges than his immediate predecessors.
As shown at the above link to the latest official announcement of judicial appointments, five of the seven newly appointed U.S. Immigration Judges reflect expertise developed outside the prosecutorial role. This is at least the second group of Sessions’s appointees to reflect such a diversity of backgrounds.
By contract, the Obama Administration drew nearly 90% of its appointees to the Immigration Bench from government prosecutorial backgrounds. Prosecutors of course should be a significant source of judicial appointments. But, they should not be the “sole source” as was the case prior to the creation of EOIR and a situation EOIR was returning to during the Bush and Obama Administrations.
A well-qualified, well-balanced, diverse Immigration Bench can only help the Immigration Courts in achieving Due Process. It also creates a positive and intellectually stimulating environment for the individual judges. I always learned something from my colleagues whose experiences and approaches differed from mine. Sometimes it spurred me to rethink an approach or position. Other times my reexamination convinced me I was on the right track. Either way, looking at other ways of analyzing common problems is good for sitting judges.
Congrats to all of the new Immigration Judges! And, congrats to Attorney General Sessions for looking beyond “the usual suspects” for folks who bring a variety of professional backgrounds and experiences to the Immigration Bench!
Huinan Lin v. Sessions, 9th Cir., 01-26-17, unpublished
PANEL: SCHROEDER, D.W. NELSON, and McKEOWN, Circuit Judges.
OPINION: PER CURIAM
KEY QUOTE:
“Finally, the BIA’s adverse credibility determination was not supported by substantial evidence because the BIA, in adopting the Immigration Judge’s (“IJ”) rationale, used omissions and discrepancies in Cao’s asylum application and testimony in his own immigration proceedings to find Lin not credible. See Bao v. Gonzalez, 460 F.3d 426, 431–32 (2d Cir. 2006) (finding that there was no basis for assuming Bao’s account was fabricated and her husband Zheng’s was the correct account of facts). The IJ found that nothing in Lin’s demeanor detracted from her credibility, yet rejected all of Lin’s explanations, even when she stood by her own version of events. We conclude that the overall reliance on Cao’s asylum application and prior testimony was arbitrary.
As Lin argues, the totality of the circumstances compel that she should be deemed credible. Because neither the BIA nor the IJ made an adverse credibility
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finding against Lin’s witness, Xiao Qin Lin (“Qin Lin”), we treat her factual allegations as true. See Aguilar-Ramos v. Holder, 594 F.3d 701, 704 (9th Cir. 2010). Qin Lin testified that she knew Lin was involuntarily taken by officials to have the abortion performed. Qin Lin stated that she took care of Lin two days after the abortion while she was crying, pale, and weak. See Shrestha v. Holder, 590 F.3d 1034, 1040–41 (9th Cir. 2010) (stating that the IJ should not ignore evidence that corroborates the alien’s claim). The 1999 Country Conditions Report notes that forced abortions and sterilizations occurred despite China’s official policy. Zhu v. Gonzales, 493 F.3d 588, 598 (5th Cir. 2007). Further, as part of the evidence in her case, Lin provided documentation from Jiangjing Town Hospital showing that she had an abortion on December 27, 2000. Lin also provided a notice addressed to her to report for IUD and pregnancy checks from the Cangxi Village Committee. The notice stated that if she did not report to the Family Planning Office, she “will be punished pursuant to relevant Family Planning Regulations.” A note from Dr. Gwendolyn P. Chung and Dr. Diana Y. Huang in Hawaii showed that Respondent’s second IUD was removed on September 15, 2008. The Government did not object to the submission of these copies and there was nothing in the record to “support a finding that the documents [were] not credible.” See Wang v. Ashcroft, 341 F.3d 1015, 1021 (9th Cir. 2003) (finding
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documentary support credible where “there was no opposition to the introduction or challenge to the authenticity of these documents by the INS,” even where the IJ found the documents unbelievable). Because the documentation and Qin Lin’s testimony are credible, they corroborate her past persecution claim, i.e., that she had a forced abortion and multiple IUD insertions. See Shrestha, 590 F.3d at 1040–41.
After a reversal of an adverse credibility determination, “[w]e must now decide whether we determine eligibility for asylum and withholding of removal or whether we remand for a determination by the BIA.” Wang, 341 F.3d at 1023. As set forth above, this Court finds credible Lin’s claim that she was forced to abort her pregnancy. See He v. Ashcroft, 328 F.3d 593, 604 (9th Cir. 2003). As a victim of forced abortion, Lin is therefore statutorily eligible for asylum and “entitled to withholding of removal as a matter of law.” Tang, 489 F.3d. at 992. Based on the totality of circumstances, there is no “reasonable prospect from the administrative record that there may be additional reasons upon which the IJ or BIA could rely” to find her claim not credible. Soto-Olarte v. Holder, 555 F.3d 1089, 1094-95 (9th Cir. 2009).
In sum, we grant the petition in part and hold that Lin is entitled to withholding of removal as a matter of law. In addition, since Lin is statutorily
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eligible for asylum, we remand to the BIA so that the Attorney General may exercise its discretion in granting asylum. See 8 U.S.C. § 1158(b)(1); Tang, 489 F.3d. at 992. We deny the petition in part as to the due process violation claim and challenge to the IJ’s finding of fear of future persecution.”
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You can read the full opinion at the link. Unfortunately, as with many Circuit Court opinions these days, it is “unpublished.” But, it is very instructive.
Yes, as a former BIA Chair and Appellate Judge, I “get it” that the BIA has lots of cases and nobody’s perfect. Certainly, I made my share of mistakes in my career. But, as I have noted before, these are hardly “major questions of law” on which divergence of opinion between the BIA and the Circuit Courts is understandable.
No, they are “failures of mechanics” — failure to correctly apply the everyday rules that Immigration Judges are supposed to be following in Immigration Courts across the country. And, although the legal issues might not be profound, the effects of such mistakes have a profound adverse effect on individuals’ lives.
This respondent was entitled to mandatory protection that the BIA was perfectly ready to ignore had the respondent not had the good fortune to have a persistent attorney to help her perfect an appeal to the Ninth Circuit. Many respondents in this system, however, do not have the good fortune to be so competently represented at their trial level and have no chance of winning an appeal without attorney assistance.
All of this points to the logical conclusion that the U.S. Immigration Courts, at both the trial and appellate levels are already running at “warp speed” where serious mistakes in the application of routine rules and precedents are all too common. To suggest, as Jeff “Gonzo Apocalyto” Sessions has, that the solution is to make the system go even faster, impose “production quotas,” and restrict the already limited rights of the individuals seeking justice from this system is totally absurd! Yet, he’s getting aways with it, at least so far.
We need an independent Article I U.S. Immigration Court where quality, fairness, Due Process, and “getting it right” are the driving considerations. Until we get such a court, we will be falling short of our Constitutional obligation to provide fair and impartial decisions to those coming before the U.S. immigration system.
“Preparation begins now. Tend to the basics: Get registered, get others registered, and get educated on how to vote because voter suppression is running amok, especially in the South. Get information about the elections and the candidates. And don’t pass up any contest.
State legislature and gubernatorial races are just as important as elected jobs in Washington. And don’t buy the argument that your vote doesn’t count if you happen to live in a voting area where your party is outnumbered.
Vote anyway, even if you cast a ballot for none of the above. That vote speaks volumes to the one who loses it.
Keep that thought in mind when entering the voting booth in state legislature contests and House and Senate races. Those GOP officeholders are key to Trump’s base. Through their votes and, at times, their inaction, they are keeping him in business and his agenda alive.
Upcoming elections should be a referendum on Trump.
Face it: Stripped and unadorned, House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) is, politically, a Donald Trump.
House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.)? Think Donald Trump.
Look no further than the likes of Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), Rep. Will Hurd (R-Tex.) and Rep. Barbara Comstock (R-Va.) to find a political likeness of Donald Trump on the ballot.
The December Alabama ballot doesn’t carry Trump’s name, but consider Senate GOP nominee Roy Moore as a stand-in for the president. That ought to be reason enough for the 26 percent of Alabama residents who are black to flock to the polls.
Likewise, a Trump proxy is running for Republican governor of Virginia this year under the name Ed Gillespie.
In the 2018 Senate races, Trump doubles can be found with Republicans Ted Cruz in Texas and Roger Wicker in Mississippi. The three, as opponents of progressive government policies, are closer than two pages in a book.
Want to speak back to Trump and tell him how you feel? Get out and vote in places such as Alabama, Virginia, California, Wisconsin, Texas and Mississippi, where Trump surrogates are on the ballot. Let the president know you are out there.
The midterm 2018 elections can be Judgment Day for Trump. And dress rehearsal for 2020.
Fume and fuss, talk back to the television, kick the can, call Trump names, vent to your heart’s content. All that changes nothing. Also probably ruins your health.
What can make a difference? The ballot. Vote, vote, vote.”
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Read the entire op-ed at the link.
The road back to national power begins at the local level!
“Judy London merges onto the freeway, heading northeast toward a high desert already baking under a recently risen sun. From West Los Angeles, she faces a two-hour, 100-mile drive to the Adelanto Detention Facility to meet a client who is being deported. The commute time can double if rush-hour traffic is particularly bad.
London arrives at the facility and walks up a concrete path flanked by gravel to the detention facility’s entrance. Once inside, rows of chairs and lockers greet her, as does a guard. She checks in but can’t meet her client yet — the facility is undergoing its daily head count, and she has to wait until it’s finished.
It can take another hour from this moment. London still has to be cleared through security and have a guard escort her client to her.
Finally, she has to wait for an interview room. Adelanto Detention Facility has an average daily population of 1,785, but only a handful of rooms designated for lawyer-client meetings. And once a room is available, she’ll have to take all her notes by hand. The facility prohibits the use of phones, laptops and other electronic devices.
London, like many immigration attorneys, spends a lot of time just trying to meet face-to-face with her clients. It’s a good day when she actually meets them. On bad days, she can spend hours traveling, only to be turned away.
The facility in recent months has refused entrance to attorneys for a variety of reasons, including a chickenpox outbreak and hunger strikes.
“Generally, it is far easier for me, as an attorney, to walk into a high-security local or federal prison unannounced to visit a client than it is to get into a detention facility to see someone. And that is odd,” said London, directing attorney for Public Counsel’s Immigrants’ Rights Project.
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Most immigrants detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement while their deportation cases are being considered don’t have an attorney.
Immigration detention is considered civil detention and, as a result, detainees do not have a right to counsel as they would in criminal cases.
Immigration attorneys say geography is a significant hurdle.
Many ICE facilities in the U.S. are located in smaller cities, hours from cities where most legal aid organizations operate. So even if the government makes legal aid resources available, they can be miles away.
About 30% of detained immigrants are held in facilities more than 100 miles from the nearest government-listed legal aid resource, according to a Times analysis of 70 ICE detention centers.
Of these, the median distance between the facilities and the nearest government-listed legal aid was 56 miles.
The farthest is Etowah County Detention Center in Gadsden, Ala. Alabama doesn’t have an immigration court, so immigrants detained there are referred to the Loyola Law Clinic — 408 miles away in New Orleans.
Immigrants facing deportation are provided with a list of available pro bono legal aid and services. The list is administered by the Justice Department’s Executive Office for Immigration Review, which calls it an “essential tool.”
Providers on the pro bono list — mostly nonprofits — aren’t required to offer free services to every detainee, according to the Justice Department, and only a lucky few get help from pro bono lawyers.
UCLA law professor Ingrid Eagly analyzed 1.2 million deportation cases between 2007 and 2012 and found that just 2% of immigration detainees had free legal representation. Most immigrant attorneys came from solo practitioners or small firms.
The location of detention facilities in remote locations can pose a logistical challenge to the court system as well as the attorneys. Court procedure can vary by jurisdiction. Some have judges at the facility. Some conduct business by teleconference. Some use a combination of the two.
. . . . .
ICE officials did not answer specific questions about why detained immigrants are significantly less likely to obtain counsel or allegations that systemic hurdles limit access to legal representation.
The agency has previously said that it is “very supportive and very accommodating” to detainees who wish to have a lawyer. ICE spokeswoman Jennifer D. Elzea said the department maintained that position.
“ICE is committed to allowing detainees access to visits, telephones, legal counsel and law library resources. Additionally, all facilities have notifications posted throughout providing information about pro bono legal services,” Elzea said in a statement.
No attorney or legal aid group interviewed for this report agreed with ICE’s position.
“The government is locking people up in remote jails and prisons hundreds of miles from attorneys, and arguing that having phones there that sometimes work is sufficient access to counsel,” National Immigrant Justice Center Executive Director Mary Meg McCarthy said in response to ICE’s statement.
“The government spends billions of dollars to sustain — and expand — a system that obstructs lawyers’ ability to defend their clients’ due process rights. We’ve been told by ICE that the agency does not consider availability or proximity of counsel as any part of its assessment of the suitability of a new detention center, and we have no reason to believe that it cares at all whether people in detention have lawyers,” she said.
Immigrant rights proponents see little chance of reform under President Trump.
The administration’s executive orders on immigration have reversed enforcement priorities. Arrests increased by 37.6% during Trump’s first 100 days in office compared with the same period in 2016, according to ICE data.
The fight for reform will take place in more liberal cities and states, and through the efforts of legal aid groups.
The Southern Poverty Law Center recently started the Southeast Immigrant Freedom Initiative. The goal is to provide counsel to every detained immigrant in the Southeast — a region with a high number of deportation cases.
But the program, said Dan Werner, who directs the initiative, was a stopgap measure built out of necessity.
“The real solution is systemic reform of immigration policy,” he said.
In March, New York became the first state to dedicate funding to providing pro bono legal services to every detained immigrant.
And in June, California lawmakers put $45 million in the state budget to expand legal services for immigrants.
Attorneys and advocates view such measures as incremental.
“In most cases, there won’t be accountability in the government,” London said, “so there’s no incentive for them to address it.”
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Read the complete article at the link.
Next time you hear Jeff “Gonzo Apocalyto” Sessions deliver one of his self-righteous, fact-free attacks on asylum seekers and their advocates, remember that the REAL FRAUDSTER HERE IS “GONZO” HIMSELF and his knowingly false narrative about asylum seekers that he uses to “cover up” the intentional abuses of legal and human rights being carried out by ICE and EOIR under his direction. Accountability, addressing the real need for reforms in the immigration enforcement and Immigration Court systems to insure Constitutional Due Process? Not going to happen on “Gonzo’s Watch.”
Mica Rosenberg, Read Levinson, & Ryan McNeill report:
“They fled danger at home to make a high-stakes bet on U.S. immigration courts
Threatened by gangs in Honduras, two women sought asylum in the United States. Their stories illustrate what a Reuters analysis of thousands of court decisions found: The difference between residency and deportation depends largely on who hears the case, and where.
OAKLAND, California – The two Honduran women told nearly identical stories to the immigration courts: Fear for their lives and for the lives of their children drove them to seek asylum in the United States.
They were elected in 2013 to the board of the parent-teacher association at their children’s school in the Honduran capital, Tegucigalpa. They hoped that mothers working together could oust the violent gangs that plagued the campus.
Instead, they became targets. Weeks apart, in the spring of 2014, each of the women was confronted by armed gang members who vowed to kill them and their children if they didn’t meet the thugs’ demands.
Unaware of each other’s plight, both fled with their children, making the dangerous trek across Mexico. Both were taken into custody near Hidalgo, Texas, and ended up finding each other in the same U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center in Artesia, New Mexico. There, they applied for asylum.
That’s when their fates diverged.
Sandra Gutierrez joined her husband in California, where her case was heard by a San Francisco immigration court judge. At the end of her asylum hearing in September 2016, she received a one-page form, with an “X” in the box next to “granted.” She was free to settle into life with her family in the United States.
The other woman, Ana, joined her daughter’s father in the southeastern United States, and her case was assigned to an immigration court in Charlotte, North Carolina. The judge denied her petition and ordered her deported. She is now awaiting a court date after new lawyers got her case reopened.
Ana declined to be interviewed for this article. Through her lawyers, she asked that her full name not be used because of her uncertain status and her fear that Honduran gangs could find her.
The women’s lawyers framed their respective cases with some important differences. However, the women said their reasons for seeking asylum were the same: Gangs had targeted them because of their involvement in the parent-teacher association, and for that, they and their families had been threatened.
SAFE AT HOME: Sandra Gutierrez fled from Honduras with her children after receiving death threats from gangs and was granted asylum by Judge Dalin Holyoak in 2016. She now lives in Oakland, California, where she takes English classes and works as a janitor. REUTERS/Stephen Lam
Taken together, the two cases – nearly indistinguishable in their outlines but with opposite outcomes – illustrate a troubling fact: An immigrant’s chance of being allowed to stay in the United States depends largely on who hears the case and where it is heard.
Judge Stuart Couch, who heard Ana’s case in Charlotte, orders immigrants deported 89 percent of the time, according to a Reuters analysis of more than 370,000 cases heard in all 58 U.S. immigration courts over the past 10 years. Judge Dalin Holyoak, who heard Gutierrez’s case in San Francisco, orders deportation in 43 percent of cases.
In Charlotte, immigrants are ordered deported in 84 percent of cases, more than twice the rate in San Francisco, where 36 percent of cases end in deportation.
Couch and Holyoak and their courts are not rare outliers, the analysis found. Variations among judges and courts are broad.
Judge Olivia Cassin in New York City allows immigrants to remain in the country in 93 percent of cases she hears. Judge Monique Harris in Houston allows immigrants to stay in just four percent of cases. In Atlanta, 89 percent of cases result in a deportation order. In New York City, 24 percent do.
The Reuters analysis used data from the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR), the U.S. Justice Department unit that oversees immigration courts. The count of deportations included cases in which judges allowed immigrants to leave the country voluntarily.
The analysis excluded immigrants who were in detention when their cases were heard because such cases are handled differently. It also excluded cases in which the immigrant did not appear in court, which nearly always end in a deportation order, and cases terminated without a decision or closed at the request of a prosecutor.
About half the cases in the analysis were filed by asylum seekers like the two Honduran women. The rest were requests for cancellation of deportation orders or other adjustments to immigration status.
“GROSS DISPARITIES”
Of course, other factors influence outcomes in immigration court. For example, U.S. government policy is more lenient toward people from some countries, less so for others.
Also, immigration judges are bound by precedents established in the federal appeals court that covers their location. Immigration courts in California and the Pacific Northwest fall under the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, and they rule in favor of immigrants far more often than courts in the 4th Circuit, which includes North and South Carolina, Maryland and Virginia, Reuters found.
Even so, the Reuters analysis determined that after controlling for such factors, who hears a case and where it is heard remain reliable predictors of how a case will be decided. An immigrant was still four times as likely to be granted asylum by Holyoak in San Francisco as by Couch in Charlotte.
The Reuters analysis also found that an immigration judge’s particular characteristics and situation can affect outcomes. Men are more likely than women to order deportation, as are judges who have worked as ICE prosecutors. The longer a judge has been serving, the more likely that judge is to grant asylum.
“These are life or death matters. … Whether you win or whether you lose shouldn’t depend on the roll of the dice of which judge gets your case.”
The findings underscore what academics and government watchdogs have long complained about U.S. immigration courts: Differences among judges and courts can render the system unfair and even inhumane.
“It is clearly troubling when you have these kinds of gross disparities,” said Karen Musalo, director of the Center for Gender & Refugee Studies at the University of California Hastings School of the Law in San Francisco. “These are life or death matters. … Whether you win or whether you lose shouldn’t depend on the roll of the dice of which judge gets your case.”
EOIR spokeswoman Kathryn Mattingly said the agency does not comment on external analyses of its data.
Devin O’Malley, a Department of Justice spokesman, challenged the Reuters analysis, citing “numerous conflicting statements, miscalculations, and other data errors,” but declined to elaborate further.
Immigration judges, appointed by the U.S. attorney general, are not authorized to speak on the record about cases.
Dana Marks, president of the National Association of Immigration Judges, said each case is like “a 1,000 piece puzzle.” While two cases might look identical on the surface, she said, each judge has to weigh the nuances of immigration law to allow someone to stay in the country, which could lead to different outcomes.
The question of equality of treatment among judges has gained urgency as the number of cases in immigration court has ballooned to record highs. Under President Barack Obama, the courts began efforts to hire more immigration judges to reduce the system’s burgeoning backlog, which now stands at more than 620,000 cases, nearly 100,000 of them added since last December.
The administration of President Donald Trump is continuing the effort. Attorney General Jeff Sessions said in April that the Justice Department planned to hire more than 50 judges this year and 75 in 2018, which would put the total number of sitting judges above 400.
Of the 28 immigration judges Sessions has appointed so far, 16 are former ICE prosecutors. That experience, the Reuters analysis found, makes them 23 percent more likely to order deportation. (Neither Holyoak nor Couch worked as an ICE prosecutor, according to their EOIR biographies.)
In a wish list of immigration proposals sent to Congress on Oct. 8, the White House said that “lax legal standards” had led to the immigration court backlog and that “misguided judicial decisions have prevented the removal of numerous criminal aliens, while also rendering those aliens eligible to apply for asylum.” Among the proposals offered in exchange for a deal with Congress on the roughly 800,000 “dreamers” – children brought to the country illegally by their parents – the Trump administration said it wanted to hire even more immigration judges and 1,000 ICE attorneys, while “establishing performance metrics for Immigration Judges.”
Video: High-stakes game of chance in U.S. immigration courts
CRISIS AT THE BORDER
In 2014, an unprecedented 68,000 parents and children, most of them fleeing violence and lawlessness in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, crossed into the United States from Mexico – a refugee crisis that has contributed to the bloated backlog of asylum petitions. Many of the migrants, including Gutierrez and Ana, convinced initial interviewers that they had a “credible fear” of returning home, the first step in filing an asylum claim.
Having come from a country with one of the highest murder rates in the world may have helped establish “credible fear.” But the two women were already at a disadvantage – precisely because they came from Honduras.
Country of origin is a big factor in determining who gets to stay in the United States because immigrants from some countries are afforded special protections. For example, courts ruled in favor of Chinese immigrants 75 percent of the time, the Reuters analysis found. A 1996 law expanded the definition of political refugees to include people who are forced to abort a child or undergo sterilization, allowing Chinese women to claim persecution under Beijing’s coercive birth-control policies.
Hondurans enjoy no special considerations. They were allowed to stay in the United States in just 16 percent of cases, the Reuters analysis found.
The mass exodus from Central America was under way when Gutierrez and Ana were elected to the board of the parent-teacher association at their children’s school in spring 2013.
Two rival gangs – the Barrio 18 and the Mara Salvatrucha, also known as MS-13 – were operating brazenly in the neighborhood. The year before, according to police records in Honduras, gang members killed a school security guard. Now, they were extorting teachers, selling drugs openly and assaulting or killing anyone who confronted them.
The new six-member association board set about trying to improve security at the school, which sits on a dirt road behind a high wall topped with razor wire.
“Before, no one wanted to say anything about the gangs,” Gutierrez said. “We were the brave ones. The previous president was a man, so we thought, ‘We are women, they won’t do anything to us.’ ”
The school’s principal, who asked that he and the school not be identified out of fear of retaliation, worked with the board. They had early success, he said, when they persuaded police to provide officers to guard the school. But the patrols left after a few weeks, probably intimidated by the gangs.
One evening in April 2014, Gutierrez was watching television at home with her two sons, ages 5 and 11, when she heard banging at the front door. Her older boy recognized the three armed and heavily tattooed young men on the stoop as the same ones who had thrown him to the ground earlier that day, telling him, not for the first time, that they wanted him to join their ranks. Now they had come to deliver a message to Gutierrez.
“They said they knew I was involved in the parents’ association,” Gutierrez said. “They said they would kill me and my children.
“I began to panic and shake,” she said. “I thought, ‘I have to go now. I am not going to risk my child’s life.’ ”
She quickly packed some backpacks for her and her children and called the only friend she knew who had a car. They drove all night to her friend’s mother’s house in another town.
“NO POLICE HERE”
Two months later, according to court documents, Ana was walking her 7-year-old daughter home from school when three members of a rival gang confronted them. Two of them grabbed Ana and her daughter, pinned their wrists behind their backs, and pointed a gun at the child’s head. The third pointed a gun at Ana’s head. They demanded that a payment of more than $5,000 be delivered in 24 hours, a huge sum for a woman who sold tortillas for a living.
Ana testified in her asylum hearing that she knew they were gang members “because they were dressed in baggy clothing and they also had ugly tattoos … all over their bodies and faces.”
Ana and her daughter ran home and then, fearing the gang would come after them, fled out the back door. “We had to jump over a wall, and I hurt my foot doing so,” she said in an affidavit. “I was desperate and knew that I had to leave – my daughter’s life and mine were in danger.”
The school principal said he understands why Gutierrez and Ana left Honduras. “Because there were no police here, (the gangs) did what they wanted,” he said. “They said, ‘We’re going to kill the members of the parent-teacher association to get them out of here.’ So the women fled.”
Gutierrez hid for two months at her friend’s mother’s house outside Tegucigalpa. She joined another woman and, with their children, they set out to cross Mexico. On the journey, they were kidnapped – common for Central American migrants – and held for a $3,500 ransom. Gutierrez contacted relatives who wired the money. The kidnappers released her and her two sons near the U.S. border.
There they piled with another group of migrants into an inflatable raft and crossed the Rio Grande, the border between Mexico and the United States. They landed near Hidalgo, Texas.
After walking for an hour and a half, lost and desperate, Gutierrez and her sons sat down in the middle of a dirt road and waited for someone to pass. Two officials in uniforms picked them up. They were eventually transferred to the ICE detention center in Artesia.
Ana fled with her daughter the night the gang members threatened them on the street. “We bought a bus pass to go to Guatemala and from Guatemala to Mexico and to the U.S.-Mexico border,” according to her court testimony. The journey took three weeks. In Mexico, she hired a coyote – a smuggler – to help them cross into the United States and then turned herself in to Border Patrol agents near Hidalgo. She arrived at the Artesia detention center just weeks after Gutierrez.
“The other women in the center told me that there was someone else from Honduras who I might know, but I wasn’t sure who they were talking about,” Gutierrez said. “And then one day we went to lunch, and there they were.”
Gutierrez said that was when she first learned that her fellow parent-teacher association board member had been threatened and had fled from home.
Volunteer lawyers helped the women prepare and submit their applications for asylum.
In late 2014, the two women were released on bond. Gutierrez moved with her boys to Oakland, California, to join her husband, and petitioned to have her case moved to San Francisco. Ana moved with her daughter to live with her daughter’s father and petitioned to have her case moved to Charlotte.
“ASYLUM FREE ZONES”
Many immigrants released on bond before their cases are heard have no idea that where they settle could make the difference between obtaining legal status and deportation.
People familiar with the system are well aware of the difference. When Theodore Murphy, a former ICE prosecutor who now represents immigrants, has a client in a jurisdiction with a high deportation rate but near one with a lower rate, “I tell them to move,” he said.
The Charlotte court that would hear Ana’s case was one of five jurisdictions labeled “asylum free zones” by a group of immigrant advocates in written testimony last December before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. The courts in Dallas, Houston, Las Vegas and Atlanta also received the designation.
The advocates testified that, while asylum is granted in nearly half of cases nationwide, Charlotte judges granted asylum in just 13 percent of cases in 2015. The Charlotte court was singled out for displaying a particular “bias against Central American gang and gender-related asylum claims.”
Couch is the toughest of Charlotte’s three immigration judges, according to the Reuters analysis.
The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a research organization at Syracuse University in New York, first sounded the alarm about disparities in immigration court decisions in 2006. The next year, researchers at Temple University and Georgetown Law School concluded in a study titled “Refugee Roulette” that “in many cases, the most important moment in an asylum case is the instant in which a clerk randomly assigns an application to a particular asylum officer or immigration judge.” In 2008, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) found similar disparities in its own study.
In response to the rising criticism, the Executive Office for Immigration Review began tracking decisions to identify judges with unusually high or low rates of granting asylum. Mattingly, the EOIR spokeswoman, said the agency held training sessions for judges to address the disparities in 2008 and 2009. It then created a system for the public to file complaints against immigration judges.
In a 2016 report, the GAO found that little had changed. EOIR held a two-day training session last year. There is no training on the 2017 calendar.
From 2012 to 2016, EOIR received 624 complaints against judges. The 138 complaints lodged in 2016 alone included allegations of bias, as well as concerns about due process and judges’ conduct within the courtroom. Of the 102 complaints that had been resolved when the data were published, only three resulted in discipline, defined as “reprimand” or “suspension” of the judge. “Corrective actions” such as counseling or training were taken in 39 cases. Close to half the complaints were dismissed.
The agency does not identify judges who were the subjects of complaints.
Mattingly, the EOIR spokeswoman, said the agency “takes seriously any claims of unjustified and significant anomalies in immigration judge decision-making and takes steps to evaluate disparities in immigration adjudications.”
HEADING NORTH: Many Central Americans who sought safety in the United States during the 2014 migrant crisis caught a ride through Mexico on the freight train nicknamed “The Beast,” shown here chugging through Oaxaca state. REUTERS/Jose de Jesus Cortes
DAY IN COURT
Asylum applicants cannot gain legal U.S. residency because they fled their countries in mortal fear of civil strife or rampant crime or a natural disaster. They must convince the court that they have well-founded fears of persecution in their country because of their race, religion, nationality, political opinions or membership in a particular social group. The definition of a “particular social group” has been subject to conflicting interpretations in the courts, but in general, such a group comprises people who share basic beliefs or traits that can’t or shouldn’t have to be changed.
In the San Francisco court, Gutierrez’s lawyers argued that she qualified for asylum because as a leader of the parent-teacher association, she was at risk for her political opinion – her stand against gangs – and for belonging to a particular social group of Hondurans opposed to gang violence and recruitment in schools. The lawyers also argued that she was part of another particular social group as the family member of someone under threat, since the gangs had terrorized her son in trying to recruit him.
Holyoak was convinced. Gutierrez told Reuters that during her final hearing, the judge apologized for asking so many questions about what had been a painful time in her life, explaining that he had needed to establish her credibility.
In the Charlotte court, Ana’s lawyer focused more narrowly on her political opinion, arguing that she was at risk of persecution for her opposition to gangs in her position on the parent-teacher association board.
After hearing Ana’s case, Couch concluded in his written opinion that Ana was not eligible for asylum because she had “not demonstrated a well-founded fear of future persecution on account of a statutorily protected ground.” He wasn’t convinced that she risked persecution in Honduras because of her political opinion.
Well-established law recognizes family as a protected social group, according to the Center for Gender & Refugee Studies. Cases that claim opposition to gangs as a protected political opinion, the center says, have generated fewer precedent-setting decisions, making that argument a more difficult one to win in court, though it has prevailed in some cases.
Ana’s response to Couch’s extensive questioning played a part in the decision. In immigration court, the asylum seeker is typically the only witness. As a result, “credibility is really the key factor. Persecutors don’t give affidavits,” said Andrew Arthur, a former immigration judge who now works at the Center for Immigration Studies, a nonprofit organization that supports lower levels of immigration.
Couch wrote in his opinion that Ana’s difficulty recounting the names of the women on the association board weighed against her credibility. He noted that she testified about her fears of the gang “with a flat affect and little emotion,” displaying a “poor demeanor” that “did not support her credibility.”
The judge also questioned why, in an early interview with an asylum officer, Ana never mentioned threats to the parent-teacher association, and instead said she thought the gangs were targeting her for the money her daughter’s father was sending from the United States to build a house in Honduras.
Ana’s assertion that she learned from Gutierrez in detention about gang threats to the parent-teacher association was not “persuasive,” Couch wrote. “The evidence indicates this is a case of criminal extortion that the respondent attempts to fashion into an imputed political opinion claim.”
“SOMEONE WANTS TO KILL THEM”
Gutierrez said Ana told her in one of their occasional phone conversations that she felt intimidated by the intense questioning of the ICE attorney. Gutierrez also said her friend “is very forgetful. … It’s not that she is lying. It’s just that she forgets things.”
Lisa Knox, the lawyer who represented Gutierrez, said judges where she practices tend to give applicants the benefit of the doubt. “They have more understanding of trauma survivors and the difficulty they might have in recounting certain details and little discrepancies,” she said.
Further, Knox said, asylum seekers aren’t thinking about the finer points of U.S. asylum law when they are fleeing persecution. “People show up in our office (and) they have no idea why someone wants to kill them. They just know someone wants to kill them.”
Ana’s lawyer appealed her case to the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA), the first step in the appellate process. This time, her lawyer included arguments about her membership in a particular social group. She lost. In a three-page ruling, one board member said Ana’s lawyer could not introduce a new argument on appeal and agreed with Couch that Ana hadn’t proved a political motive behind the gang members’ attack.
Ana missed the deadline to appeal the BIA decision to the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals because her lawyer confused the deadline. She petitioned the BIA through new lawyers to reopen her case and send it back to the immigration court to allow her to present new evidence of her persecution. The new lawyers argued that her previous representation had been ineffective.
In July, the BIA granted Ana the right to a rehearing in immigration court, sending her case back to Charlotte, where it could be heard again by Couch.
Gutierrez can live and work legally in the United States and will ultimately be able to apply for citizenship. The 43-year-old, who worked as a nurse in Honduras, lives in a small one-bedroom apartment with her husband, her two sons – now 15 and 8 – her adult daughter and her grandson. She works as an office janitor and is taking English classes. Her boys are in school. The older one, once threatened by gangs in Honduras, likes studying history and math and is learning to play the cello.
Ana, 31, has had a baby since arriving in the United States and has been granted work authorization while she awaits a final decision on her case. She and her lawyers declined to share more detailed information about her situation because she remains fearful of the gangs in Honduras.
“I am very worried about her,” Gutierrez said. “The situation in our country is getting worse and worse.”
Last February, a 50-year-old woman and her 29-year-old son who were selling food at the school Gutierrez and Ana’s children attended were kidnapped from their home and decapitated, according to police records.
The head of the son was placed on the body of the mother and the head of the mother was placed on the body of the son. The murders, like more than 93 percent of crimes in Honduras, remain unsolved.
MEAN STREETS: Gang graffiti covers buildings in Tegucigalpa, the Honduran capital, where rampant violence has prompted thousands of people in recent years to seek asylum in the United States. REUTERS/Jorge Cabrera
Additional reporting by Gustavo Palencia and Kristina Cooke
A not-quite-independent judiciary
U.S. immigration courts are administrative courts within the Department of Justice’s Executive Office for Immigration Review. Unlike federal court judges, whose authority stems from the U.S. Constitution’s establishment of an independent judicial branch, immigration judges fall under the executive branch and thus are hired, and can be fired, by the attorney general.
More than 300 judges are spread among 58 U.S. immigration courts in 27 states, Puerto Rico and the Northern Mariana Islands. Cases are assigned to an immigration court based on where the immigrant lives. Within each court, cases are assigned to judges on a random, rotational basis.
The courts handle cases to determine whether an individual should be deported. Possible outcomes include asylum; adjustments of status; stay of deportation; and deportation. Decisions can be appealed to the Board of Immigration Appeals, an administrative body within the Department of Justice. From there, cases can be appealed to federal appeals court.
The Federal Bar Association and the National Association of Immigration Judges have endorsed the idea of creating an immigration court system independent of the executive branch. The Government Accountability Office studied some proposals for reform in 2017, without endorsing any particular model.
Reade Levinson
Heavy Odds
By Mica Rosenberg in Oakland, California, and Reade Levinson and Ryan McNeill in New York, with additional reporting by Gustavo Palencia in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, and Kristina Cooke in San Francisco
Data: Reade Levinson and Ryan McNeill
Graphics: Ashlyn Still
Photo editing: Steve McKinley and Barbara Adhiya
Video: Zachary Goelman
Design: Jeff Magness
Edited by Sue Horton, Janet Roberts and John Blanton”
Go to the link at the beginning to get the full benefit of the “interactive” features of this report on Reuters.
Also, here is an interactive presentation on the Trump Administration’s overall immigration policies:
Interesting to note that the Arlington Immigration Court, where I sat for 13 years, has one of the most consistent “grant rates” in the country, ranging from approximately 54% to 60% grants. Compare that with the Charlotte Immigration Court at 11% to 28% grants within the same judicial circuit (the Fourth Circuit). Something is seriously wrong here. And, Jeff Sessions has absolutely no intent of solving it except by pushing for 100% denials everywhere! That’s the very definition of a “Kangaroo Court!”
It’s time for an Article I Court. But, not sure it will happen any time soon. Meanwhile Sessions is making a mockery out of justice in the Immigration Courts just as he has in many other parts of the U.S. Justice system.
In encourage you to go over to The Hill at the above link and read Nolan’s complete article. As always, whether you agree with Nolan or not, his articles are always thought-provoking and timely. Nolan is definitely a “player” in the immigration dialogue! (And, frankly, by going over to The Hill, Nolan gets a few more “hits” which give him a few more “hard-earned nickels” in his pockets. Gotta help out my fellow retirees!)
I can agree with Nolan’s bottom line:
“It would be better to help undocumented aliens by working on comprehensive immigration reform legislation that meets essential political needs of both parties.”
The challenge will be figuring out what those points might be. So far, the GOP “Wish List” is basically an “incendiary White Nationalist screed” drafted by notorious racist xenophobe Stephen Miller (probably with backing from Sessions and certainly incorporating parts of Steve Bannon’s alt-right White Nationalist world view) that contains virtually nothing that any Democrat, or indeed any decent person, could agree with. Indeed, the very involvement of Miller in the legislative process is a “gut punch” to Democrats and whatever “moderate GOP” legislators remain.
What are some “smart enforcement” moves that Democrats could agree with: more funding for DHS/ICE technology; improvements in hiring and training for DHS enforcement personnel; U.S. Immigration Court reforms; more attorneys and support (including paralegal support) for the ICE Legal Program; more funding for “Know Your Rights” presentations in Detention Centers.
But more agents for “gonzo enforcement,” more money for immigration prisons (a/k/a the “American Gulag”), and, most disgustingly, picking on and targeting scared, vulnerable kids seeking protection from harm in Central America by stripping them of their already meager due process protections: NO WAY!
Although “The Wall” is a money wasting folly with lots of negative racial and foreign policy implications, it probably comes down to a “victory” that Democrats could give to Trump and the GOP without actually hurting any human beings, violating any overriding principles of human rights law, or diminishing Constitutional Due process. It also inflicts less long-term damage on America than a racially-oriented “point system” or a totally disastrous and wrong-headed decrease in legal immigration when the country needs the total opposite, a significant increase in legal immigration opportunities, including those for so-called “unskilled labor.”
While this GOP Congress will never agree to such an increase — and therefore workable “Immigration Reform” will continue to elude them — the Democrats need to “hold the line” at current levels until such time as Americans can use the ballot box to achieve a Congress more cognizant of the actual long-term needs of the majority of Americans.
“The woman on the other end of the line said her husband had been beating her for years, even while she was pregnant.
She was in danger and wanted help, but was in the country illegally — and was convinced she would be deported if she called authorities. Fearful her husband would gain custody of her children, she wanted nothing to do with the legal system.
It is a story that Jocelyn Maya, program supervisor at the domestic violence shelter Su Casa in Long Beach, has heard often this year.
In the first six months of 2017, reports of domestic violence have declined among Latino residents in some of California’s largest cities, a retreat that crisis professionals say is driven by a fear that interacting with police or entering a courthouse could make immigrants easy targets for deportation.
President Trump’s aggressive stance on illegal immigration, executive orders greatly expanding the number of people who can be targeted for deportation and news reports of U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement agents making arrests at courthouses have contributed to the downturn, according to civil liberties and immigrant rights advocates.
In Los Angeles, Latinos reported 3.5% fewer instances of spousal abuse in the first six months of the year compared with 2016, while reporting among non-Latino victims was virtually unchanged, records show. That pattern extends beyond Los Angeles to cities such as San Francisco and San Diego, which recorded even steeper declines of 18% and 13%, respectively.
Domestic violence is traditionally an under-reported crime. Some police officials and advocates now say immigrants without legal status also may become targets for other crimes because of their reluctance to contact law enforcement.
The Long Beach abuse victim, fearing she had no other recourse, sent her oldest children back to Mexico to live with relatives.
“We’re supposed to be that assurance that they don’t have. That safety net,” Maya said. “But it’s getting harder for us to have a positive word for them and say: ‘It’s going to be OK. You can go into a courtroom. You can call the police.’ ”
Los Angeles County sheriff’s Deputy Marino Gonzalez said he addresses such apprehension frequently as he patrols the streets of East L.A. — even though his department doesn’t question people about their immigration status.
“They’re afraid of us. And the reason they’re afraid of us is because they think we’re going to deport them. They don’t know that we don’t deport them; we don’t ask for their immigration status,” he said. “They just gotta go based on what they see on social media and what they hear from other people.”
On a warm afternoon, Gonzalez pulled his cruiser to a stop near a row of apartments in Cudahy, ahead of a community meeting in a predominantly Spanish-speaking neighborhood. There was a lone woman waiting for Gonzalez and a few other deputies, offering lemonade to passersby.
Gonzalez spoke calmly to the assembly of several dozen people sipping from Styrofoam cups.
“We’re not here to ask you where you’re from,” he said in Spanish, drawing thankful nods.
Gonzalez, who came to the U.S. from Mexico as a child, said he knows why people are scared, but hopes face-to-face conversations will persuade more victims to come forward.
“The community here, they don’t know, and they won’t know, unless we reach out,” he said.
ICE officials also said they do not target crime victims for deportation and, in fact, often extend visas to those who report violent crime and sexual abuse.
Officials in the agency’s Los Angeles office declined to be interviewed. ICE issued a statement dismissing links between immigration enforcement and a decline in crime reporting among immigrants as “speculative and irresponsible.”
The drop in reporting could result from an overall decrease in domestic violence crimes, the agency said. But police statistics reviewed by The Times suggest that statement is inaccurate. The decline in domestic violence reports among Latinos in several cities is far steeper than overall declines in reporting of those crimes.
In Los Angeles and San Diego, reporting of domestic violence crimes remained unchanged among non-Latinos. The decline among Latinos in San Diego was more than double the overall citywide decrease, records show. In San Francisco, the reporting decline among Latinos was nearly triple the citywide decrease.
The pattern extends outside California.
In April, Houston police Chief Art Acevedo said the number of Latino victims reporting sexual assault had dropped 42% in his city. In Denver, at least nine women abandoned pursuit of restraining orders against their abusers after immigration enforcement agents were filmed making an arrest in a city courthouse earlier this year, according to City Atty. Kristi Bronson.
Claude Arnold, who oversaw ICE operations in Southern California from 2010 to 2015, said misconceptions about the agency may be driving the downswing. Crime victims are far more likely to receive a visa application than a removal order by reporting an attack, he said.
“ICE still has a policy that we don’t pursue removal proceedings against victims or witnesses of crime, and I haven’t seen any documented instances where that actually happened,” he said. “To a great degree, we facilitate those people having legal status in the U.S.”
Nationwide, the number of arrests made by ICE agents for violations of immigration law surged by 37% in the first half of 2017. In Southern California, those arrests increased by 4.5%.
Arnold said some immigrants’ rights activists have helped facilitate a climate of fear by spreading inaccurate information about ICE sweeps that either didn’t happen, or were in line with the Obama administration’s policies.
But professionals who deal with domestic violence victims say the perception of hardcore enforcement tactics under Trump has led to widespread panic.
Adam Dodge, legal director at an Orange County domestic violence shelter called Laura’s House, said that before February, nearly half of the center’s client base were immigrants in the country illegally. That month, ICE agents in Texas entered a courthouse to arrest a woman without legal status who was seeking a restraining order against an abuser.
“We went from half our clients being undocumented, to zero undocumented clients,” he said.
A video recording earlier this year of a father being arrested by ICE agents moments after dropping his daughter off at a Lincoln Heights school had a similar effect on abuse victims in neighboring Boyle Heights, said Rebeca Melendez, director of wellness programs for the East L.A. Women’s Center.
“They instilled the ultimate fear into our community,” she said. “They know they can trust us, but they are not trusting very many people past us.”
Even when victims come forward, defense attorneys sometimes use the specter of ICE as a weapon against them, to the frustration of prosecutors.
In the Bay Area, a Daly City man was facing battery charges earlier this year after flashing a knife and striking the mother of his girlfriend, according to court records. The man’s defense attorney raised the fact that the victim was in the country illegally during pretrial hearings, although a judge eventually ruled that evidence was irrelevant and inadmissible at trial, records show.
The case ended in a hung jury. But when prosecutors sought a retrial, the victim said she would not cooperate, in part, because her immigration status was raised during the trial, said Max Szabo, a spokesman for the San Francisco district attorney’s office.
San Francisco Dist. Atty. George Gascon said the case was one of several where his prosecutors felt defense attorneys sought to leverage heightened fears of deportation against victims. He believes that tactic, combined with ICE’s expanded priorities and presence in courthouses, is driving down domestic violence reporting among immigrants in the city’s sprawling Latino and Asian communities.
Gascon described the situation as a “replay” of the fear he saw in the immigrant community while he was the police chief in Mesa, Ariz., during notorious Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s crusade against people without legal status, which led to accusations of racial profiling.
Stephanie Penrod, managing attorney for the Family Violence Law Center in Oakland, also said the number of immigrants without legal status willing to seek aid from law enforcement has dwindled.
Abusers frequently will threaten to call immigration enforcement agents on their victims, a threat Penrod believes has more teeth now given ICE’s increased presence in courthouses.
“The biggest difference for us now is those threats are legitimate,” she said. “Previously we used to advise them we couldn’t prevent an abuser from calling ICE, but that it was unlikely ICE would do anything.”
If the problem persists, Gascon fears the consequences could be deadly.
“The level of violence increases,” he said. “It could, in some cases, lead to severe injury or homicide.”
***************************************
ICE, of course, denies this is happening. But, as shown by this article, the denials simply are refuted by the facts (as shown in the above charts) and by the officers and social services agencies who actually deal with the community. We simply can’t trust any statement on immigration emanating from the Trump Administration. They lack credibility. Something that is going to be a long term problem for ICE once immigration enforcement is finally “normalized.” Once lost, trust is unlikely to be regained any time soon. “Gonzo” enforcement does long-term irreparable damage. That’s why so many communities are resisting the Trump Administration program.
“This week the Supreme Court heard arguments in two cases that pose the question of whether noncitizens should be afforded at least some of the due process of law that Americans take for granted. The answer in both cases should be a resounding yes.
On Monday, the justices considered whether a Filipino legal immigrant convicted of two home burglaries in California could be deported even if the wording of the federal law used to determine whether he could be removed from the U.S. was so unconstitutionally vague that it could not be enforced in a criminal court. On Tuesday, lawyers for a group of noncitizens detained by immigration authorities asked the court to rule that detainees are entitled to a bond hearing after six months of confinement.
Although the circumstances and legal issues in the two cases differ, the common denominator is the importance of affording due process to noncitizens.
James Garcia Dimaya, who was admitted to the U.S. as a lawful permanent resident at the age of 13, pleaded no contest in 2007 and 2009 to two charges of residential burglary. Concluding that one of the convictions was an “aggravated felony,” the Board of Immigration Appeals agreed with the Homeland Security Department that Dimaya should be deported.
The United States is often called “a nation of immigrants.” But too often immigrants haven’t received fair treatment from the courts.
But the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals overturned that decision. It said the definition of “aggravated felony” in immigration law incorporated a definition of “crime of violence” that was similar to language in a different law the Supreme Court had concluded in 2015 was too vague to be constitutional.
At Monday’s oral argument, Deputy Solicitor General Edwin S. Kneedler said the law at issue in Dimaya’s case didn’t suffer from the same vagueness problem. But even if it did, Kneedler told the court, “immigration is distinctive” and deportation “is not punishment for [a] past offense.” In other words, even if the law was too vague to be used for the purposes of criminal punishment, it could still be used for the purposes of deportation.
This brought a devastating rejoinder from Justice Neil Gorsuch. “I can easily imagine a misdemeanant who may be convicted of a crime for which the sentence is six months in jail or a $100 fine, and he wouldn’t trade places in the world for someone who is deported,” Gorsuch said. He questioned the soundness of the “line that we’ve drawn in the past” between criminal punishment and civil penalties such as deportation.
We agree. If the court decides that the wording of the law that triggered Dimaya’s removal order was unconstitutionally vague, he should be entitled to relief. A law that is too vague to justify a criminal sentence shouldn’t be a good enough reason to expel someone from the country.
In the case argued Tuesday, a class-action lawsuit, noncitizens detained by immigration authorities asked the court to rule that they should receive bond hearings if their detention lasts for six months. The lead plaintiff is Alejandro Rodriguez, who grew up in Los Angeles as a lawful permanent resident. After Rodriguez was sentenced to five years’ probation on a misdemeanor drug possession conviction, he was detained and targeted for deportation to Mexico, the country he had left as a baby two decades earlier. He remained locked up as his legal battle dragged on for years.
The 9th Circuit ruled not only that detainees were entitled to bond hearings but also that they should be released unless the government could demonstrate by clear and convincing evidence that they were dangerous or a flight risk. But on Tuesday Deputy Solicitor General Malcolm Stewart told the court that detainees “have no such right.” He later said that insofar as foreigners arriving in the U.S. are concerned, the Supreme Court has made it clear that “whatever process Congress chooses to give is due process.”
Yet in recent years the court has recognized not only that noncitizens have constitutional rights but that deportation can be a catastrophic experience. In June, the court overturned the guilty plea of an immigrant from South Korea because his lawyer wrongly told him he wouldn’t be deported as a consequence of a plea bargain.
The United States is often called “a nation of immigrants.” But too often immigrants haven’t received fair treatment from the courts. The cases argued this week offer the Supreme Court an opportunity to rectify that injustice.”
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”Mouthing” due process for migrants is easy; the BIA does it all the time — so does EOIR. But, actually providing due process for migrants is something totally different. Most courts, and particulately the BIA, routinely sign off on unfair procedures and interpretations that would never be considered “Due Process” in any other context.
I’m “cautiously heartened” by Justice Gorsuch’s apparent realization of the potentially catastrophic real human consequences of removal (often blithely ignored or downplayed by the BIA, Sessions, restrictionists, and Federal Courts) and recognition that the “civil-criminal” distinction is totally bogus — designed to sweep Constitutional violations under the rug — and needs to be eliminated.
As an Immigration Judge, when I was assigned to the “Detained Docket” in Arlington, I had case after case of green card holders who had minor crimes for which they paid fines or got suspended sentences — in other words, hadn’t spent a day in jail — “mandatorily detained” for months, sometimes years, pending resolution of their “civil” immigration cases. In plain language, they were sentenced to indefinite imprisonment but without the protections that a criminal defendant would receive! They, their families, and their employers were incredulous that this could be happening in the United States of America. I simply could not explain it in a way that made sense.
Talk is one thing, action quote another. But, if Justice Gorsuch folllows through on his apparent inclination to make Due Process protections for migrants “a reality” rather than a “false promise,” Constitutional protections will be enhanced for every American! We are no better than how we treat the least among us.
Ultimately, full delivery on the promise of Constitutional Due Process for everyone in America, including migrants, will require the creation of an independent Article I U.S. Immigraton Court. The current “captive system” — unwilling and unable to stand up for true Due Process for migrants — is a facade behind which routine denials of Constitutional Due Process take place. As Americans, we should demand better for the most vulnerable among us.
“US Attorney General Jeff Sessions has reversed a federal government policy that said transgender workers were protected from discrimination under a 1964 civil rights law, according to a memo on Wednesday sent to agency heads and US attorneys.
Sessions’ directive, obtained by BuzzFeed News, says, “Title VII’s prohibition on sex discrimination encompasses discrimination between men and women but does not encompass discrimination based on gender identity per se, including transgender status.”
It adds that the government will take this position in pending and future matters, which could have far-reaching implications across the federal government and may result in the Justice Department fighting against transgender workers in court.
“Although federal law, including Title VII, provides various protections to transgender individuals, Title VII does not prohibit discrimination based on gender identity per se,” Sessions writes. “This is a conclusion of law, not policy. As a law enforcement agency, the Department of Justice must interpret Title VII as written by Congress.”
But Sharon McGowan, a former lawyer in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division and now an attorney for the LGBT group Lambda Legal, countered that Sessions’ is ignoring a widespread trend in federal courts.
“It’s ironic for them to say this is law, and not policy,” McGowan told BuzzFeed News. “The memo is devoid of discussion of the way case law has been developing in this area for the last few years. It demonstrates that this memo is not actually a reflection of the law as it is — it’s a reflection of what the DOJ wishes the law were.”
“The sessions DOJ is trying to roll back the clock and pretend that the progress of the last decade hasnt’ happened,” she added. “The Justice Department is actually getting back in the business of making anti-transgender law in court.”
“The Justice Department is actually getting back in the business of making anti-transgender law in court.”
The memo reflects the Justice Department’s aggression toward LGBT rights under President Trump and Sessions, who reversed an Obama-era policy that protects transgender students after a few weeks in office. Last month, Sessions filed a brief at the Supreme Court in favor of a Christian baker who refused a wedding cake to a gay couple. And last week, the department argued in court that Title VII doesn’t protect a gay worker from discrimination, showing that Sessions will take his view on Title VII into private employment disputes.
At issue in the latest policy is how broadly the government interprets Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which does not address LGBT rights directly. Rather, it prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex.
But the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, an independent agency that enforces civil rights law in the workplace, and a growing body of federal court decisions have found sex discrimination does include discrimination on the basis of gender identity and sex stereotyping — and that Title VII therefore bans anti-transgender discrimination as well.
Embracing that trend, former attorney general Eric Holder under President Obama announced the Justice Department would take that position as well, issuing a memo in 2014 that said, “I have determined that the best reading of Title VII’s prohibition of sex discrimination is that it encompasses discrimination based on gender identity, including transgender status. The most straightforward reading of Title VII is that discrimination ‘because of … sex’ includes discrimination because an employee’s gender identification is as a member of a particular sex, or because the employee is transitioning, or has transitioned, to another sex.”
But Sessions said in his latest policy that he “withdraws the December 15, 2014, memorandum,” and adds his narrower view that the law only covers discrimination between “men and women.”
“The Department of Justice will take that position in all pending and future matters (except where controlling lower-court precedent dictates otherwise, in which event the issue should be preserved for potential future review),” Sessions writes.
Sessions adds: “The Justice Department must and will continue to affirm the dignity of all people, including transgender individuals. Nothing in this memorandum should be construed to condone mistreatment on the basis of gender identity, or to express a policy view on whether Congress should amend Title VII to provide different or additional protections.”
Devin O’Malley, a spokesperson for the Justice Department, explained the decision to issue the memo, telling BuzzFeed News, “The Department of Justice cannot expand the law beyond what Congress has provided. Unfortunately, the last administration abandoned that fundamental principle, which necessitated today’s action. This Department remains committed to protecting the civil and constitutional rights of all individuals, and will continue to enforce the numerous laws that Congress has enacted that prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.”
McGowan, from Lambda Legal, counters, “The memo is so weak that analysis is so thin, that it will courts will recognize it for what it is — a raw political document and not sound legal analysis that should be given any weight by them.”
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Virulent homophobia has always been a key element of the “Gonzo Apocalypto Agenda.” Check out this report from Mark Joseph Stern at Slate about how when serving as Alabama’s Attorney General Gonzo attempted to use an Alabama statute that had been ruled unconstitutional by a Federal Judge to both publicly demean LGBTQ students and stomp on their First Amendment rights. (So much for the disingenuous BS speech that Gonzo delivered on Free Speech at Georgetown Law last week.) Here’s what happened:
“Attorney General Jeff Sessions delivered a speech at Georgetown University Law Center in which he argued that “freedom of thought and speech on the American campus are under attack.” As my colleague Dahlia Lithwick explained, the attorney general said this in “a room full of prescreened students who asked him prescreened questions while political demonstrators outside were penned off in ‘free speech zones.’ ” Ensconced in a safe space of his own, Sessions blasted the notion that speech can be “hurtful,” criticizing administrators and students for their “crackdown” on “speech they may have disagreed with.”
Mark Joseph Stern
MARK JOSEPH STERN
Mark Joseph Stern is a writer for Slate. He covers the law and LGBTQ issues.
Sessions’ hypocrisy on speech issues is not a new development. In 1996, the then–attorney general of Alabama used the full power of his office to try to shut down an LGBTQ conference at the University of Alabama. Sessions took his battle to court, asking a federal judge to let him block the conference altogether—or, at the very least, silence students who wished to discuss LGBTQ issues. He ultimately failed, but his campaign reveals a great deal about his highly selective view of free expression. Sessions claims to support freedom for “offensive” speech, but when speech offends him, he is all too happy to play the censor.
When Sessions served as Alabama attorney general, the state still criminalized sodomy. A 1992 law, Alabama Education Code Section 16-1-28, also barred public universities from funding, recognizing, or supporting any group “that fosters or promotes a lifestyle or actions prohibited by” the sodomy statute, either “directly or indirectly.” The law also forbade schools from allowing such organizations to use public facilities. Sessions’ predecessor, Jimmy Evans, had interpreted the statute to effectively outlaw the discussion or promotion of gay rights on public campuses, with that prohibition even extending to AIDS awareness campaigns.
In 1995, the University of South Alabama’s Gay Lesbian Bisexual Alliance sued in federal court to block Section 16-1-28. That summer, the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled that, under the First Amendment, public universities may not deny access to facilities or funding for student organizations on the basis of their viewpoints. This decision, the GLBA asserted, rendered Section 16-1-28 unconstitutional. U.S. District Judge Myron H. Thompson agreed, holding the law to be invalid in a January 1996 ruling.
This decision was excellent news for the Gay Lesbian Bisexual Alliance at the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa. The GLBA had planned to host the Fifth Annual Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual College Conference of the Southeastern United States in February 1996. Sessions, by now attorney general, was trying his hardest to shut it down.
“University officials say they’re going to try to obey the law,” Sessions said at the time, as CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski reported in December of last year. “I don’t see how it can be done without canceling this conference. I remain hopeful that if the administration does not act, the board of trustees will.” Sessions didn’t give up even after Judge Thompson struck down the law. “I intend to do everything I can to stop that conference,” he said.
In a last-ditch effort, Sessions returned to Thompson’s court and asked permission to ban the conference. “The State of Alabama,” he explained in court filings, “will experience irreparable harm by funding a conference and activities in violation of state law.” Failing a total ban, Sessions implored Thompson to let him censor any discussion of “safe sex and the prevention of sexually transmitted diseases.” Sessions claimed that, by talking about LGBTQ issues, conference attendees were essentially conspiring to promote criminal activity, and Alabama should not be obligated to support their criminality. Predictably, Thompson rejected Sessions’ arguments, writing that the attorney general was endeavoring to violate students’ free speech rights. Sessions then appealed to the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which unanimously ruled against Alabama. The conference went on as planned.
Cathy Lopez Wessell, a lead organizer and spokeswoman for the conference, told me Sessions’ intervention “was incredibly stressful. We got threatening phone calls. We were attacked from all sides.” She continued, “We were the abomination of the month. I didn’t feel safe in the world for a while. I started to internalize some of the judgment leveled at our group. I thought, there must be something deeply wrong with you if you need to be silenced.”
Lopez Wessell explained that Sessions’ campaign against the conference registered as a broader attack on LGBTQ students.
“If we can’t talk, do we have a right to exist?” Lopez Wessell asked. “If our speech is so dangerous that it needs to be stopped, then are we dangerous? We weren’t promoting any particular activity; we just wanted to talk—about our experiences, about our existence.”
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Denying the humanity as well as the human rights of those he is biased against is a staple of the Gonzo Apocalypto agenda. Just look at his constant attempts to tie all members of the Hispanic ethnic community to crime, drugs, and gangs (even though all credible studies show that immigrants or all types have markedly lower crime rates than native-born U.S. citizens) and his false and gratuitous attempts to tie “Dreamers” to crime, terrorism, and loss of jobs!
There is no more certain way of knowing that a DOJ “legal” memo is all policy and no law than the statement: “This is a conclusion of law, not policy.“ In other words, “Don’t you dare accuse me of doing what I’m actually doing!”
Since assuming the office of Attorney General for which he is so spectacularly unqualified, here’s a list of the folks whose rights or humanity Sessions has attacked or disparaged:
Hispanics
African Americans
LGBTQ Individuals
Dreamers
Immigrants
Refugees
Asylum Seekers
Poor People
Undocumented Migrants
Women
Muslims
Civil Rights Protesters
Black Athletes
City Officials Seeking To Foster Community Law Enforcement
Prisoners
Immigration Detainees
Forensic Scientists
State Governors Who Disagree With Him
Federal Judges Who Find Trump Policies Illegal
State & Federal Judges Who Object To Migrants Being Arrested At Their Courts
Convicts
Liberal Students & College Administrators
Anti-Facists
Anti-Hate-Group Activists
Reporters
Unaccompanied Migrant Children
President Obama
Whistleblowers (a/k/a “Leakers” in “Gonzopeak”)
DOJ Career Attorneys
I’m sure I’ve left a few out. Feel free to send me additions. The list just keeps getting longer all the time.
The only group that appears to be “A-OK” with Gonzo is “White straight Christian male Republican ultra rightists.”
The ACLU bloghas an interesting post on Jennings v. Rodriguez, the immigrant detention case argued in the Supreme Court today.
How A Bond Hearing Saved Me From Deportation By Mark Hwang
Today the Supreme Court will hear Jennings v. Rodriguez, a case that will decide the fate of thousands of men and women locked up in immigration prisons across the country. The federal government is challenging a 2015 Ninth Circuit ruling, in which the American Civil Liberties Union secured the right to a bond hearing for people in deportation proceedings after six months of detention.
Bond hearings allow people to go before a judge so that he or she can decide if imprisonment is necessary, weighing factors like public safety and flight risk. It’s basic due process. Bond hearings are a vital check on our country’s rapidly-expanding immigration system. I’ve seen their power firsthand, because not too long ago, I was one of the people locked up.
In February 2013, I was driving with my one-year-old son when we were stopped by an immigration officer. He said that I hadn’t used my turn signal when changing lanes and asked to see my identification. When he came back to the car, he asked if I had ever been convicted of a crime.
I answered truthfully. More than a decade ago, when I was in my early 20s, I was convicted of marijuana possession with intent to sell. I had served a short sentence and had remained out of trouble since. Still the officers said that I needed to go with them and that I would have to explain “my situation” to a judge. I was shackled and put in the back of the car while one of the officers got into my car to drive my son home.
I thought there had to be some kind of mistake. Around two weeks earlier, my wife Sarah had given birth to our identical twin daughters. My life at the time was full, growing, and completely rooted in the United States.
I was processed in Los Angeles and then transferred to the Adelanto Detention Facility in Adelanto, California, where I learned that the U.S. government wanted to deport me even though I was a legal permanent resident. My family moved to the United States from South Korea when I was six years old. I grew up in Buena Park, California and went to local public schools. For college, I studied information technology in Newport Beach, where I met Sarah through mutual friends. We got married, started a family, and ran a shipping and logistics business together. I went from having a routine day to being locked up, fighting for my right to stay in the country that I knew as mine, within a matter of hours.
When I was booked into custody, an officer told me that my drug conviction meant that my detention was “mandatory.” Nobody had ever told me that pleading guilty on a drug charge could have implications for my immigration status. I petitioned a court to vacate the marijuana conviction, but because I was locked up, I couldn’t appear at the hearing. The request was denied and I had no idea for how long I would be locked up, leaving my wife to run our business and care for our children alone. When my family came to visit me in detention, I wasn’t allowed any physical contact, so I couldn’t hold my newborn daughters or my son.
I was at a breaking point, and nearly ready to sign deportation papers when – after being locked up for six months — I finally received a bond hearing as result of the court decision in Jennings. I was granted bond and released, allowing me to return to my family. With the help of an attorney, I was able to vacate my marijuana conviction because I had never been apprised of the immigration consequences to pleading guilty. As a result, ICE no longer had a reason to try to deport me.
Before Jennings, people fighting deportation could be detained indefinitely while they defend their rights to remain in the United States. This includes lawful permanent residents like me; asylum seekers and survivors of torture; the parents of young children who are citizens; and even citizens who are wrongly classified as immigrants. Many go on to win their deportation cases, which means their detention was completely unnecessary.
Even worse, a lot of people simply give up their cases because they can’t endure the hardship of being locked up. Detention almost broke me and I could have lost my life in the only country I’ve known since I was six years old. Instead, I’m here to share my story. Through this experience, I found my faith and am now deeply involved in my church and community. My son is six years old and my twins are five. My wife and I still run our business and I thank her all the time for being a pillar of strength while I was locked up. I hope the justices make the right choice — it can make all the difference.
KJ
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We’re in “Catch 22” territory here! Thisrespondent was locked up by DHS in “mandatory detention” because he was wrongfully convicted in state court. But, he couldn’t successfully challenge his state court conviction because he was locked up by DHS. Once he got a bond hearing, after six months, he was released, his conviction was vacated, and he and his family could go back to living their lives and being productive Americans.
But, without the intervention of the 9th Circuit in Jennings, this individual likely would have been coerced into “voluntarily” relinquishing his Constitutional rights and accepting removal to a country where he hadn’t been since he was six years old. I can guarantee you that in jurisdictions where the Article III Courts have not intervened in a manner similar to Jennings, individuals are coerced into abandoning their Constitutional rights and foregoing potentially winning Immigration Court cases on a daily basis.
And, just think of the absurd waste of taxpayer money in detaining this harmless individual for months and forcing the legal system to intervene, rather than having both Congress and the DHS use some common sense and human decency. Few Americans fully contemplate just how broken our current immigration system is, and how we are trashing our Constitution with inane statutes enacted by Congress and poor judgment by the officials charged with administering them.
Easy to “blow off” until it’s you, a relative, or a friend whose Constitutional rights are being mocked and life ruined. But, by then, it will be too late! Stand up for Due Process and human decency now!
Torres v. DHS, SDCA, 09-29-17, Hon. Torres v. DHS United States District Judge
KEY QUOTE FROM JUDGE MILLER’S OPINION:
“Defendants broadly argue that the DHS possesses such broad prosecutorial discretion that they need not follow the DACA SOP in terminating the status of DAC recipients. The court categorically rejects this proposition. While Defendants are granted broad discretion to commence, adjudicate, and execute removal orders, a fundamental principle of federal law is that a federal agency must follow its own procedures. Morton v. Ruiz, 415 U.S. 199, 233-35 (1974) (“[W]here the rights of individuals are affected, it is incumbent upon agencies to follow their own procedures.”); Nicholas v. INS, 590 F.2d 802, 809 (9th Cir.1979) (holding that INS violated its own regulation in processing a non-citizen’s request for immigration records); United States v. Heffner, 420 F.2d 809 (4th Cir. 1969) (courts must overturn agency actions which do not scrupulously follow the regulations and procedures promulgated by the agency itself). In Accardi, 347 U.S. 260, the petitioner alleged that the Board of Immigration Appeals (“BIA”) failed to exercise its discretion in determining his application for suspension of deportation. Id. at 261. Petitioner alleged that the BIA deferred to the decision of the Attorney General and, therefore, did not exercise its own regulatory discretion in determining his application. The BIA denied petitioner’s application allegedly because petitioner’s name was on a list of immigrants the Attorney General wanted deported. The regulatory scheme required the BIA to exercise its own judgment when considering immigration appeals, and not to rely upon the Attorney General’s determinations. The Supreme Court reversed the BIA’s denial of the application and remanded for further proceedings because the BIA allegedly failed to exercise its own discretion as required by its own relevant regulations.”
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Read the complete decision at the link.
Judge Miller found that the DHS “acted arbitrarily, capriciously, and abused their discretion.” Sadly, arbitrary, capricious, and abusive actions that sow fear and uncertainty in migrant communities are at the heart of the Trump-Sessions “Gonzo Enforcement Program.” But, they don’t always manifest themselves in ways so easy to prove to an Article III Judge.
Still, there is some good language here on the limits of DH/S prosecutorial discretion.That issue is likely to be tested over and over again in the Article III Courts.
