TAL @ SF CHRONICLE: Administration “Discovers” More Separated Children — Have Others “Slipped Through The Cracks?”

New questions raised on Trump’s family separations as 14 children discovered

By Tal Kopan

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration failed to recognize that 14 children in its care for months had been separated from their families at the Mexican border, officials conceded in a court filing late Thursday.

The disclosure raises fresh questions about whether the administration neglected to account for additional children after separating them from their parents under its “zero tolerance” immigration policy this spring. Two recent government reports faulted the administration’s tracking efforts, and one said officials feel no obligation to find children who were released to other homes before a judge ordered an accounting of the youths, suggesting the total separated under the policy may never be known.

Seven of the 14 children’s parents have criminal histories that disqualify them from reunification, officials with the Health and Human Services Department told a federal judge in San Diego. The judge demanded in June that the administration account for every child separated under the enforcement strategy ordered by Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

All of the newly discovered children are 5 years old or older.

More:

https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/New-questions-raised-on-Trump-s-family-13338722.php

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While still picking up the pieces of their last border enforcement fiasco, the Administration is off and running on new policies that potentially will be found to be in violation of law.

PWS

10-26-18

POPULATION OF TENT CITIES IN TRUMP’S “KIDDIE GULAG” HAS INCREASED 5X – The Solution, According To Trump, Sessions, Nielsen, & Miller: Detain Even More Children & Families For Longer Periods Of Time!

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/amberjamieson/tornillo-tent-city?utm_term=.oolylVZRJr#.oolylVZRJr

Amber Jamieson reports for BuzzFeed News:

TORNILLO, Texas — Having immigrant teens live in the “tent city” in Tornillo, Texas, was always supposed to be a temporary solution, after the Trump administration’s policy of separating immigrant families at the border meant the government didn’t have enough beds in the shelter system.

It opened in June, and the contractor running the site had a 30-day contract. At that time, 326 children were being housed there.

But four months after its opening, the shelter 30 miles outside of El Paso has grown into a bustling town. It now holds nearly five times its initial population — roughly 1,500 teens — and its contract has been extended until at least Dec. 31.

The tent city’s purpose has changed as well. Officials at the Department of Health and Human Services, the federal agency responsible for the care of unaccompanied child immigrants, say none of the teens currently housed there were detained as a result of family separations. It now holds immigrant children who crossed the border without an adult, in theory as a last stage of their stay in the vast US shelter bureaucracy.

And as the shelter expands, administrative issues have cropped up concerning legal representation and FBI background checks — extending many teens’ stays longer than what HHS says is the average.

Tornillo now has a new football field, math and English classes, and more than 100 tent structures. Staffers zipped around in carts between dozens of portable offices offering mental health services, emergency medical care, legal services, and even a barber. A huge emergency tent has been turned into a sleeping hall for 300 teenage girls, decorated with paper chains and lanterns.

BuzzFeed News toured the Tornillo facility for the second time on Friday, as part of a group of reporters. Like the first and only other tour, instructions were strict. No photographs or recording devices were allowed, and reporters were not permitted to use the names of employees or speak with the teens living at the camp — though HHS was more lenient on the last rule during Friday’s tour. The only photos were provided by the government.

HHS

The facility in Tornillo, Texas.

“I frankly thought we were done here in July,” the facility’s incident commander, who works for the contractor BCFS, told reporters Friday. He spoke from a new command center that is nearly triple the size of the office he occupied in June.

Back then, the same incident commander, who is in charge of running the shelter, called the Trump administration’s family separation policy — which created the need for Tornillo — “an incredibly dumb, stupid decision.” With the rollback of that policy, he said he expected the camp to shut soon afterward.

“I’m still here, ’cause otherwise, where are these kids going?” the commander said.

Only children between ages 13 and 17 stay at the Tornillo facility, which is now the largest in the HHS’s nationwide system. Pregnant teens, and teens requiring behavioral medication, are not allowed — “we’re too big, too high-profile,” the incident commander explained.

Officials said the average length of time that teens spend at Tornillo is 25 days. Yet many of the teens living at the camp have spent weeks or even months in HHS shelters before arriving at Tornillo. In order to clear out those other facilities, teens are sent to the tent shelter to await final processing before they are released to a sponsor in the US.

“This is a last stop, if you will,” said Mark Weber, a spokesperson for HHS.

Ten teens in Tornillo BuzzFeed News encountered had spent between three to five months in government detention — significantly more than the 59 days that HHS says is the average stay for an unaccompanied immigrant minor in its care. That average is up from 48 days in 2017, and around 30 days during the Obama administration.

Christopher Smith / HHS Photo Christopher Smith

And even after arriving in Tornillo, the young occupants find themselves facing a fresh final set of administrative hurdles that threaten to complicate or delay their stay in the US shelter system.

One of the teens BuzzFeed News spoke with last week, a 16-year-old girl from Guatemala, told reporters that she’d been in Tornillo exactly one month on Saturday. Before being transferred to Texas, she had spent four months in an HHS shelter in Miami, meaning she’d already spent five months in HHS care. She was uncertain how much longer she’d remain there.

Her brother, who lives in Texas and had been in the US for a decade, is trying to sponsor her, which should secure her release. But he is undocumented, and he told her that her caseworker is not sure if he will be able to act as a sponsor.

She didn’t want to go back to Guatemala, where her parents are. “I suffered a lot in the journey [to the United States], and what, for nothing?” she said.

Another teenage girl standing next to her told reporters she’d also come to Tornillo from the Miami shelter at the same time, and that she’d crossed the border four months earlier.

The delays stem in part from a new requirement — that the FBI perform a fingerprint background check — imposed by the Trump administration on family members and other adults who wish to sponsor an unaccompanied immigrant minor.

Those changes are delaying how long kids are staying in care, and have created the ongoing need for Tornillo to operate as a temporary shelter to handle the overflow from permanent HHS shelters, said the incident commander. He added that more than half of the children at the Tornillo shelter are there because of FBI delays.

Christopher Smith / HHS Photo Christopher Smith

“It is the extra precaution that HHS has put in place for sponsors,” said the incident commander on Friday. “That is absolutely what has caused this, without any question whatsoever.”

While he applauded the extra care HHS has taken to ensure the safety of unaccompanied minors, the incident commander criticized the length of time the FBI takes to do fingerprint checks. On Friday, 826 of the kids in Tornillo were still awaiting the results of fingerprint checks, the final step needed before they are released, he said.

“I think it should be done quickly,” the incident commander said. “I don’t understand why it’s taking so long. It seems like a system issue. … That is frustrating to me.”

He noted that it takes time to do background checks, but said that HHS is “working through the process [with the FBI] and working to speed it up.” He did not provide further details.

Asked if the teens who end up in Tornillo spend longer than the average stay in the shelter system, Weber replied: “I don’t think that’s [true]. … These kids are very close to being released.”

Weber also argued that the need for the Tornillo facility is “driven by the number of kids crossing the border” — which this year, he said, is set to be the third highest on record. Around 50,000 unaccompanied minors are expected to cross the border this year.

Christopher Smith / HHS Photo Christopher Smith

On Thursday, BuzzFeed News visited the juvenile immigration proceedings in downtown El Paso. Eleven teenage boys from the Tornillo facility, aged between 15 and 17, had been given notice to appear in court on that day.

The boys were dressed in new, matching navy and white polo shirts, denim jeans or khakis, and black, braided leather belts. They had fresh haircuts.

The judge asked the boys if they had copies of their Notices to Appear, a charging document issued by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement informing them of removal proceedings, and read the date on which each NTA had been issued. Dates ranged from June 6 until July 1, meaning the teenagers had been in HHS care for a minimum of over three months — longer than the average stay.

None of the boys had legal representation at the court hearing — they were just accompanied to court by a BCFS employee. All of them asked the judge to delay their cases so they could find an immigration lawyer. They were given until late January to do so.

The HHS spokesperson said it’s just not his agency’s job. “Yes, children are appearing in court, but that is not part of HHS’s responsibility,” Weber told reporters on Friday. “Those legal options are pursued basically after they are released from us.”

Juveniles facing immigration proceedings do not have the right to a government-appointed lawyer. Weber said the children who appeared in court would absolutely have received legal help beforehand.

Everyone in HHS care receives a “Know Your Rights” training, Weber said, and upon arrival to Tornillo, the teenagers are again reminded that they are able to speak with a lawyer. Ten legal representatives — a combination of lawyers and social workers from different legal organizations — are on hand on weekdays in Tornillo to meet with children.

But those lawyers don’t formally represent them. They offer advice to the children.

And those representatives only meet with detainees if the teen specifically asks to see a lawyer, the incident commander said. He estimated that of the approximately 3,100 teens who have been housed at Tornillo since it opened, only about 400 had requested and received a meeting with a legal representative.

Christopher Smith / HHS Photo Christopher Smith

Moreover, to organize a meeting with the lawyers, the children must fill out a form — a difficult task for many of the children at Tornillo. The incident commander said most of the facility’s residents are at a fourth-grade learning level.

Asked how children in the care of HHS with very little education were supposed to be able to navigate the legal system alone, or even the process of arranging and interacting with a lawyer, Weber acknowledged that “negotiating the legal system is incredibly difficult.”

Although the incident commander is hopeful the facility will close on Dec. 31, Weber didn’t commit to that deadline. “It depends how many kids come,” he said.

The facility — its population peaked at 1,637 on Sept. 28 — has 1,400 beds on standby in two giant tents. This is in case the Homestead shelter in Florida — another temporary facility that opened during the family separation crisis — needs to evacuate due to a hurricane.

In immigration court Thursday, Judge Robert S. Hough, who oversees all juvenile immigration proceedings in El Paso, asked the BCFS employee assisting the children before him about Tornillo’s supposed Dec. 31 closing date.

“Hurry up and wrap it up before you get any bigger,” suggested the judge.

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Once the smokescreen of all the Trump lies and racism clears, how could we ever explain to future generations what we have done to the most vulnerable among us and to children, young people, and young families that are our world’s future? I guess it will go along with explaining how have we let Trump and his grifter buddies destroy, pollute, and poison the universe that also belongs to future generations.

PWS

10-15-18

HOW THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION’S LIES AND MISCONDUCT HAVE CREATED THE VERY “FAKE BORDER CRISIS” THAT THEY CLAIM TO DECRY (& Use To Attempt To Justify Even More Draconian Measures To Mask Their Illegal & Immoral Conduct)

https://www.texasobserver.org/u-s-and-mexican-officials-collaborating-to-stop-asylum-seekers-attorneys-allege/

Gus Bova reports for the Texas Observer:

Elsa, a Guatemalan living in Southern Mexico, knew something was wrong. Her husband began traveling a lot without explanation, and physically abusing her and their two kids. When she eventually figured out that he’d gone to work for a cartel, she left him. But in 2016, the gang came after her to collect on debts the ex-husband had skipped out on. She fled to other Mexican towns, but the cartel men tracked her down. Then she went back to Guatemala, but they found her there, too. Finally, in September, Elsa decided to gamble on Uncle Sam — but the foot of the Reynosa-Hidalgo bridge was as far as she would get.

The Trump administration has repeatedly insisted that asylum-seekers should follow the rules by turning themselves in at ports of entry. Elsa tried to do just that. As a legal Mexican resident, she even had proper documentation for herself and her two children. Still, a Mexican customs agent stopped her at the turnstile and told her she couldn’t pass. He yelled at her that they were abusing their Mexican status by seeking asylum in the United States, and he threatened to tear their papers to shreds. Scared, the family slunk back into narco-ravaged Reynosa, and into total uncertainty.

The story of Elsa, whose name the Observer has changed for her protection, was included in a petition filed last week with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, a 59-year-old organization based in Washington, D.C., that investigates abuses in the Americas and issues recommendations to offending nations. The petition, filed by immigration attorneys working in the Rio Grande Valley, describes a systematic conspiracy between U.S. and Mexican customs agents to prevent asylum-seekers from requesting protection. The attorneys are asking the commission to tell both nations to stop stonewalling the law-abiding migrants.

U.S. customs agents blocking entry at the international boundary line on the Gateway International Bridge, Brownsville, July 2. COURTESY/FILING WITH THE INTER-AMERICAN COMMISSION ON HUMAN RIGHTS

Since June, the lawyers allege, Mexican customs officials along the Texas-Mexico border have been doing something virtually unprecedented: stopping asylum-seekers from entering the bridge, and if the migrants lack proper Mexican travel documents, the Mexican agents detain and even deport them. If an asylum-seeker makes it onto the bridge, U.S. customs officials call their Mexican counterparts to retrieve them; the Observerdocumented this phenomenon in a June story cited in the petition. In Nuevo Laredo, according to sworn affidavits from two Central American asylum-seekers, Mexican agents have demanded bribes of $500 per person to get onto the bridge. And in September, in Reynosa, they also started rejecting people, like Elsa, with Mexican papers.

“This petition highlights the reality of the U.S. working hand in glove with the Mexicans to completely shut down bridges, in violation of a number of human rights prohibitions,” said Jennifer Harbury, a longtime Rio Grande Valley attorney. Harbury has spent months documenting problems at the bridges and provided the majority of the information in the filing. According to Harbury and an affidavit from longtime Brownsville activist Mike Seifert, the international collaboration began after public outcry over long lines of asylum-seekers baking in the sun for weeks on the U.S. side of the bridges.

Harbury says in the filings that numerous Mexican agents at the Reynosa bridge have privately told her that the two governments are working together, and they’ve expressed frustration at doing the United States’ “dirty work.” Two other witnesses — a journalist and an activist — wrote similar affidavits. But U.S. customs agents have told Harbury that the Mexicans are acting alone, and a September letter she sent to Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen has gone unanswered. The United States began pressuring Mexico to stop migration at its southern border in 2014, and last month, Trump signaled he would redirect $20 million in foreign aid to beef up Mexico’s deportations. Neither U.S. nor Mexican immigration officials responded to Observer requests for comment.

The United States is unlikely, Harbury said, to heed the eventual request from the human rights commission. For one, the U.S. government rejects the authority of the commission’s enforcement arm, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in San José, Costa Rica. (The same court recently ruled that many Latin American countries must recognize same-sex marriage.) But Harbury has higher hopes for Mexico, which is subject to the court and has an incoming leftist president in Andrés Manuel López Obrador. “I think the new president of Mexico is not going to want the commission saying they’re running dogs for Uncle Sam,” she said.

In turning the bridges into hostile territory for asylum-seekers, the Trump administration has made a mockery of its own stated immigration goals.

If Mexico stops its collaboration, then the United States would have to do its own “dirty work” of stopping asylum-seekers, and hold all liability for the potentially illegal actions. In California, a lawsuit was filed last year after border agents briefly turned away asylum-seekers all along the U.S.-Mexico border on the false premise that Trump’s inauguration had abolished asylum. That suit continues to play out.

In turning the bridges into hostile territory for asylum-seekers, the Trump administration has made a mockery of its own stated immigration goals. According to Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the point of the “zero tolerance” policy was to force families to use official ports of entry instead of crossing illegally. But U.S. customs agents started stonewalling asylum-seekers at the bridges. Now, with the threat of separation gone and the bridges still a dicey proposition, families have responded accordingly: More are crossing the river illegally to turn themselves in to Border Patrol. Immigration officials, in turn, are using this apparent spike to sound the alarm about another border crisis.

Meanwhile, many asylum-seekers from Central America, Africa and the Caribbean remain stranded, paralyzed by uncertainty in dangerous Mexican border towns where gangsters prey on refugees. In an affidavit, one would-be asylum-seeker wrote that she hears “shooting day and night” in Reynosa; another simply wrote, “many people die here.” As Harbury, the attorney, put it, “they’re like a snowball in Hell down there.”

Gus Bova reports on immigration, the U.S.-Mexico border and grassroots movements for the Observer. He formerly worked at a shelter for asylum-seekers and refugees. You can contact him at bova@texasobserver.org.

Get the latest Texas Observer news, analysis and investigations via Facebook, Twitter and our weekly newsletter.

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Jeff Sessions is a key part of this legal charade and scofflaw behavior. He disingenuously asserts that individuals should be using the legal system while doing everything in his power to make it impossible for individuals to present their asylum claims at ports of entry and have them fairly heard by fair and unbiased judges in Immigration Court.

The results of these shortsighted, cruel, illegal, and ultimately ineffective policies are to: 1) enrich smugglers, 2) make the trip more dangerous for asylum seekers, virtually insuring that more will die or be abused during the journey, and 3) to enlarge and promote the already robust “extralegal system” for immigrants and refugees. When orderly processing and the legal system for immigration are shut down or made less “user friendly,” the result is unlikely to be less overall immigration; just less immigration through legal channels and more “extralegal immigration” driven by Trump, Sessions, and their fellow White Nationalists.

Remember, we can diminish ourselves as a nation (and are doing so under Trump, Sessions, Nielsen, & Miller), but that won’t stop human migration!

Many thanks to Dan Kowalski over at LexisNexis Immigration Community for forwarding to me this timely and excellent reporting.

PWS

10-14-18

SOME ARTICLE III JUDGES “JUST SAY NO” TO SESSIONS’S “ZERO TOLERANCE” ABUSES OF CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/us-judges-balk-at-ice-detention-of-defendants-granted-bail-under-trump-zero-tolerance-push/2018/10/10/ccd42830-c4f7-11e8-b2b5-79270f9cce17_story.html

Spencer Hsu reports for WashPost:

Judges in the nation’s federal criminal courts increasingly are balking at what they call unlawful efforts by U.S. immigration authorities to continue to detain people charged with entering the country illegally, even after they have been granted bail.

The rulings complicate the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” crackdown on defendants who are charged with illegally crossing the border but whom judges have determined do not pose a flight or safety risk.

The decisions force prosecutors to make a choice — charge defendants with illegal entry or reentry and risk that a federal judge releases them pending trial, or keep suspects locked up in civil detention pending deportation proceedings and forgo criminal prosecution.

A recent ruling by a federal judge in Washington highlights the human and legal issues at stake, the case of a dishwasher from El Salvador who has a wife and two children in the District, where he returned after two deportations.

The surge in such criminal cases stems from an April 2017 announcement by U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions prioritizing Justice Department prosecutions of entry and reentry crimes. More than 60,000 people have faced such criminal charges since then, with twice as many new prosecutions this July, the most recent month for which data is available, compared with the same month in 2017, according to Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, which monitors cases.

Individuals caught without documents on a first offense can be charged with a misdemeanor, but anyone caught in the United States after a prior deportation can be charged with a felony and face more than a year in prison. Immigration-related prosecutions are now the majority of all federal criminal cases, stretching far beyond states bordering Mexico.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions early this month in Ohio. (Adam Cairns/Columbus Dispatch/AP)

Advocates for immigrants say the recent court rulings may limit the use of the criminal charges to pressure defendants to abandon efforts to stay in the United States. The impact on overall removal efforts remains to be seen, but courts appear to be pushing back at an expansion of authority by prosecutors and Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

In the District, one rejection of the tougher tactics came from U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth, a 1987 appointee of President Ronald Reagan. On Sept. 26. Lamberth said the government cannot have it both ways — asking federal courts to deny bail to defendants awaiting criminal trial and then, if a judge disagrees, holding them anyway in the immigration system.

The decision came in the case of Jaime Omar Vasquez-Benitez, 38, who court papers say was picking food up at a restaurant in July when D.C. police stopped him for suspected gang activity and turned him over to ICE. Federal public defenders say Vasquez-Benitez had quit a gang and fears for his life if he is deported.

He was charged in August with felony reentry despite deportation orders in 2008 and 2014.

A federal magistrate and district judge ruled Vasquez-Benitez should be released on bail, but U.S. marshals returned him to ICE custody. Defense attorneys moved to enforce the release order, and the case ended up in front of Lamberth after Vasquez-Benitez was indicted.

Lamberth ruled that a landmark 1966 U.S. bail statute specifically covers migrants and must “trump” more-general immigration laws, releasing Vasquez-Benitez into a high-intensity supervision program. He wrote that courts have long “upheld as sacrosanct” the principle that no one can act as prosecutor and judge at the same time, and that the Justice Department cannot ignore bail rulings any more than it can shrug off a defendant’s right to a speedy trial.

The judge said prosecutors can pursue both criminal charges and civil removal cases against defendants but must abide by a judge’s decision to grant bail. Or they can forgo charges and keep defendants locked up in civil detention while pursuing deportation.

People detained without valid immigration documents may well be worse off if uncharged, “languishing” indefinitely without speedy trial or access to bail in ICE detention camps far from families or counsel, the judge noted.

“Nevertheless, the government can do that” under immigration law, Lamberth wrote. “But so long as the government invokes the jurisdiction of a federal court, the government must consent to the Court’s custodial dominion over the criminal defendants before it.”

A decision on whether to appeal is pending. Bill Miller, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office for the District, said the office was reviewing the ruling.

In a July 2017 Justice Department bulletin to 94 U.S. attorney offices nationwide, Oregon federal prosecutor Gregory R. Nyhus said that federal criminal statutes and civil immigration laws “are reconcilable” and that “courts should be encouraged to harmonize these statutes rather than focusing on [one] to the complete exclusion of the other.”

The government’s position — that it can hold Vasquez-Benitez strictly for deportation on a reinstated removal order, unrelated to his prosecution — has yet to be decided by an appeals court.

Rulings by trial judges in similar cases have varied.

Since July 2017, federal judges in Washington, Manhattan, Brooklyn, Detroit, Cleveland and Austin have rejected the government’s approach, drawing on a 2012 district court opinion in Oregon and a similar 2015 ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit that “the executive branch has a choice to make” between holding an undocumented person for deportation or prosecuting that person under criminal law and the Constitution.

Federal judges in Buffalo and Philadelphia have come down on the other side, saying that criminal and immigration laws can “coexist” on “parallel” tracks. Before the Trump administration, prosecutors would typically drop criminal charges to pursue civil removal if a previously deported defendant won bail.

Yihong “Julie” Mao, staff attorney with the National Immigration Project of the National Lawyers Guild, said the group was “heartened” by court rulings upholding undocumented immigrants’ right to bail and pretrial release based on family and community ties. She added: “This is fundamentally a separation-of-powers issue. The Department of Justice cannot be both judge and prosecutor.”

Mary Petras, an assistant federal public defender who is representing Vasquez-Benitez in the District, declined to comment.

[Trump’s ‘zero tolerance’ at the border is causing child shelters to fill up fast]

In court filings, Assistant U.S. Attorney Kenneth Clair Kohl argued that the defendant’s case is not covered by the 2012 ruling, because ICE is holding him solely to deport him, not to prosecute him.

The Salvadoran man was first arrested in 1997, falsely claimed Mexican citizenship and was allowed to go to Mexico, according to court papers. He was deported in 2008 after serving a three-year sentence for felony obstruction of justice in the District and again in 2014, before he was caught for a fourth time this July.

Prosecutors would have prosecuted Vasquez-Benitez even in past years because of what they said in court papers was his “threatening, violent behavior” and felony criminal conviction. Vasquez-Benitez was convicted of obstruction of justice for telling a woman in 2005 she would “pay the consequences” if she called the police, and a 2014 arrest warrant in El Salvador said he has been charged with extortion, prosecutors said.

“There may come a time . . . [when] immigration proceedings have concluded . . . forcing the United States to choose between physical removal and continuation of this criminal case. That time, however, has not yet come,” wrote Kohl and Assistant U.S. Attorney Elizabeth Dewar in an unsuccessful effort to detain the man.

Petras told the court the man is a longtime restaurant worker, and his wife works part time as a hotel housekeeper. Both have family nearby, and the couple’s 3-year-old daughter and 9-year-old son attended a recent court hearing.

Petras argued the man posed no flight risk, because he is seeking to halt his deportation after gang members in El Salvador sent him a message warning that he had “signed his death warrant” by quitting the gang and removing gang tattoos.

The lawyer said the fact that her client has lived in the Washington area for years and returned shows that he “wants to be here and that he has no intent or incentive to flee.”

Read more:

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Compare what is happening in DC and some other jurisdictions with the “go along to get along” approach by some U.S. District Judges and U.S. Magistrate Judges along the border whom I have criticized in prior posts. The latter have allowed Sessions, Nielsen, and co. to turn their courts into “assembly line justice” — the kind that Session is implementing in his “wholly owned” U.S. Immigration Courts.

It’s pretty clear from the published reports that almost none of those being railroaded through that system actually understand the full immigration implications of their guilty pleas, nor do they understand how they can apply for asylum and what other rights they might have under the “civil immigration system.” Indeed, accepting guilty pleas without insuring that those entering the pleas fully understand the civil immigration situation and implications, including the likelihood of indefinite civil immigration detention and possible denial of a chance for a full hearing before an Immigration Judge, is arguably a violation of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Padilla v. Kentucky.

I also have a “personal recollection” of Judge Royce Lamberth from decades ago when he was the Chief of the Civil Division at the U.S. Attorneys Office for DC and I was the Deputy General Counsel/Acting General Counsel at the “Legacy INS.” On several occasions I had to trek over from the “Central Office” in the “Chester Arthur Building” at 4th and Eye St., NW to the U.S. Courthouse complex on 5th Street to explain and justify the INS position to Royce.

He was known as a formidable individual, even in those days — a chief litigator who brooked no-nonsense from USG Agencies and who was concerned with maintaining the Government’s reputation for integrity and legal excellence before the U.S. Courts. That probably has much to do with how he got nominated and confirmed to be a U.S. District Judge and why he still brooks no-nonsense from the “Masters of Nonsense” in the Trump Administration.

PWS

10-13-18

MILLER & TRUMP ADMINISTRATION HATCHING ANOTHER ILLEGAL CHILD SEPARATION PROGRAM AS THEIR CRUEL & COUNTERPRODUCTIVE WHITE NATIONALIST ENFORCEMENT CONTINUES TO FAIL!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/immigration/trump-administration-weighs-new-family-separation-effort-at-border/2018/10/12/45895cce-cd7b-11e8-920f-dd52e1ae4570_story.html?utm_term=.e82d531c008e

Nick Miroff, Josh Dawsey, & Maria Sacchetti report for WashPost:

The White House is actively considering plans that could again separate parents and children at the U.S.-Mexico border, hoping to reverse soaring numbers of families attempting to cross illegally into the United States, according to several administration officials with direct knowledge of the effort.

One option under consideration is for the government to detain asylum-seeking families together for up to 20 days, then give parents a choice — stay in family detention with their child for months or years as their immigration case proceeds, or allow children to be taken to a government shelter so other relatives or guardians can seek custody.

That option — called “binary choice” — is one of several under consideration amid the president’s frustration over border security. Trump has been unable to fulfill key promises to build a border wall and end what he calls “catch and release,” a process that began under past administrations in which most detained families are quickly freed to await immigration hearings. The number of migrant family members arrested and charged with illegally crossing the border jumped 38 percent in August and is now at a record level, according to Department of Homeland Security officials.

Senior administration officials say they are not planning to revive the chaotic forced separations carried out by the Trump administration in May and June that spawned an enormous political backlash and led to a court order to reunite families.

But they feel compelled to do something, and officials say senior White House adviser Stephen Miller is advocating for tougher measures because he believes the springtime separations worked as an effective deterrent to illegal crossings.

At least 2,500 children were taken from their parents over a period of six weeks. Crossings by families declined slightly in May, June and July before surging again in August. September numbers are expected to be even higher.

While some migrants worried about separations, others felt seeking asylum was worth the risk

For some seeking asylum, family separations were worth the risk: ‘Whatever it took, we had to get to this country’ (Zoeann Murphy, Jorge Ribas/The Washington Post)

While some inside the White House and DHS are concerned about the “optics” and political blowback of renewed separations, Miller and others are determined to act, according to officials briefed on the deliberations. There have been several high-level meetings in the White House in recent weeks about the issue. The “binary choice” option is seen as one that could be tried out fairly quickly.

“Career law enforcement professionals in the U.S. government are working to analyze and evaluate options that would protect the American people, prevent the horrific actions of child smuggling, and stop drug cartels from pouring into our communities,” deputy White House press secretary Hogan Gidley said in an emailed statement.

Any effort to expand family detentions and resume separations would face multiple logistical and legal hurdles.

It would require overcoming the communication and data management failures that plagued the first effort, when Border Patrol agents, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials and Department of Health and Human Services caseworkers struggled to keep track of separated parents and children.

The Trump administration believes it is on solid legal ground, according to two officials, in part because U.S. District Judge Dana M. Sabraw, who ordered the government to reunite separated families in June, approved the binary-choice approach in one of his rulings. But a Congressional Research Service report last month said “practical and legal barriers” remain to using that approach in the future and said releasing families together in the United States is “the only clearly viable option under current law.”

‘Administration officials said the CRS report cited earlier legal rulings. But the American Civil Liberties Union, which launched the separations lawsuit, disputed that interpretation and said it would oppose any attempt at expanded family detentions or separations.

“The government need not, and legally may not, indiscriminately detain families who present no flight risk or danger,” ACLU attorney Lee Gelernt said in an email. “It is deeply troubling that this Administration continues to look for ways to cause harm to small children.”

Another hurdle is that the government does not have detention space for a large number of additional families. ICE has three “family residential centers” with a combined capacity of roughly 3,000 parents and children. With more than four times that many arriving each month, it is unclear where the government would hold all the parents who would opt to remain with their children.

But Trump said in his June 20 executive order halting family separations that the administration’s policy is to keep parents and children together, “including by detaining” them. In recent weeks, federal officials have taken steps to expand their ability to do that.

In addition to considering “binary choice” and other options, officials have proposed new rules that would allow them to withdraw from a 1997 federal court agreement that bars ICE from keeping children in custody for more than 20 days.

The rules would give ICE greater flexibility to expand family detention centers and potentially hold parents and children longer, though lawyers say this would be likely to end up in court.

Officials have also imposed production quotas on immigration judges and are searching for more ways to speed up the calendar in its courts to adjudicate cases more quickly.

Federal officials arguing for the tougher measures say the rising number of family crossings is a sign of asylum fraud. DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen has blasted smugglers for charging migrants thousands of dollars to ferry them into the United States, knowing that “legal loopholes” will force the administration to release them pending a court hearing. Federal officials say released families are rarely deported.

Advocates for immigrants counter that asylum seekers are fleeing violence and acute poverty, mainly in Central America, and deserve to have a full hearing before an immigration judge.

“There is currently a crisis at our southern border,” DHS spokeswoman Katie Waldman said in a statement, adding, “DHS will continue to enforce the law humanely, and will continue to examine a range of options to secure our nation’s borders.”

In southern Arizona, so many families have crossed in the past 10 days that the government has been releasing them en masse to shelters and charities. A lack of available bus tickets has stranded hundreds of parents and children in Tucson, where they sleep on Red Cross cots in a church gymnasium.

At a Senate hearing Wednesday, Sen. John Kyl (R-Ariz.) told Nielsen that migrants were “flooding into the community” and that authorities there had “no ability to do anything about it.”

Nielsen said lawmakers needs to give DHS more latitude to hold families with children in detention until their cases can be fully adjudicated — a process that can take months or years because of huge court backlogs.

DHS officials have seen the biggest increase this year in families arriving from Guatemala, where smugglers called “coyotes” tell migrants they can avoid detention and deportation by bringing a child, according to some community leaders in that country.

On Friday, Nielsen called for a regional effort to combat smuggling and violence in the region and to “heighten our penalties for traffickers.”

“I think there’s more that we can do to hold them responsible, particularly those who traffic in children,” she said in a speech in Washington at the second Conference on Prosperity and Security in Central America.

More than 90,000 adults with children were caught at the southwest border in the first 11 months of fiscal 2018. The previous high for a single year was 77,600 in 2016

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My recollection is that 1) the DOJ conceded in court that a policy of intentionally separating families is unconstitutional; and 2) Federal Courts have held that detention of individuals who are neither security risks nor likely to abscond for the primary purpose of “deterrence” is illegal.

So, if this facially illegal program is put into action, why shouldn’t Stephen Miller go to jail and be held personally liable for all the damages he causes with his scofflaw racist policies? Why shouldn’t Nielsen, Sessions, and others who are part of the Miller White Nationalist scheme also be held personally liable?

More cruelty, more wasting of taxpayer resources, more abuse of the judicial process by the Trump Administration.

Oh, and by the way. although today’s out of control U.S. Immigration Court backlogs began with “Aimless Docket Reshuffling” during the Bush II and Obama Administrations, Sessions and the Trump Administration have pushed them to astounding new levels with their incompetence and anti-asylum bias. Don’t blame the victims for the Government’s irresponsible actions!

If folks who believe in human decency and the rule of law don’t get out and vote, these abuses and degradations of our national values will continue.

PWS

10-12-18

BIASED COURTS: EL PASO’S “HANGING JUDGES” ARE DEATH TO ASYLUM CLAIMS, EVEN THOSE THAT ARE BEING GRANTED IN MANY OTHER IMMIGRATION COURTS – The Due Process Problems In The U.S. Immigration Courts Go Much Deeper Than Jeff Sessions’s Outrageous White Nationalist Policies! — Author Justine van der Leun Presents A Meticulously Researched, Moving Report Of Unfairness That “Scotches” All Of The DOJ/EOIR “Bogus Excuses” & Exposes The Deep, Unacceptable Bias That Makes Our Immigration Courts A National Disgrace!

https://www.vqronline.org/reporting-articles/2018/10/culture-no

Here’s an excerpt from Justine van der Luen’s much longer article “A Culture of No,” published in the Fall 2018 issue of VQR (quoting me, among many others).

. . . .

“Here in the US, there is democracy, but we still have fear,” he said. “I got asylum but if they want to make a problem, they can do it.” He was terrified that the smallest misstep, no matter how apparently meaningless, how accidental or random, could signal the difference between freedom and imprisonment—and from there, between life and death.

To beat the extreme odds in El Paso, Isaac had spent fifteen months in detention and paid thousands of dollars in legal fees to an elite lawyer who then worked dozens of pro bono hours on his appeal. This feat required an enormous amount of translated and notarized evidence discretely sent overseas by family members in Syria, the emotional and financial support of his brother and his lawyer, and the wherewithal to withstand a complex, taxing, humiliating process. How many asylum seekers could or should have to endure such an ordeal in order to gain internationally recognized rights meant to protect the persecuted?

As Isaac started over in America, other asylum seekers I had been tracking were less fortunate. Jesus Rodriguez Mendoza, the Venezuelan, had been transferred to a notorious detention center in Miami, which his legal team believed was punishment for his public protests; he remained on the El Paso docket, but now was physically separated from his lawyers, his fourth parole request denied. Berta Arias, the Honduran grandmother whose relief Judge Abbott had granted and then quickly rescinded, lost her appeal and was deported without the granddaughter she had raised. The Central American man whose brother, with an identical case, had won protection in New York City, remained in the Camp. It wasn’t only those from the Americas who were out of luck. Cambodians, Cameroonians, Guineans, and Kenyans I’d followed all had their claims denied; they had since been deported or were waiting on appeals.

One young Central American woman who had been repeatedly raped had managed to win relief, but only after her lawyer, unable to bear the thought of her client being sent home to be violated yet again, paid over $2,000 from her own pocket to fly two expert witnesses into Texas to clinch the case.

“I think in El Paso, they want to see that people died,” a young Salvadoran asylum seeker told me. He was an Evangelical Christian, who preached to local kids. Members of MS-13 had shot at him with a machine gun, killing a pedestrian who happened to be standing nearby, and kidnapped and murdered his fifteen-year-old friend who had joined him in proselytizing. The young man, his mother, and his brother made their way to the US. Despite having a devoted pro bono lawyer, he lost his asylum case, as well as his appeal, on the grounds of credibility (the judge believed he was simply an economic migrant who had invented the threats); his mother also struggled to find legal relief in El Paso.

“Maybe if I died, and then my mom asked for asylum, maybe then she can get protection,” he told me calmly. “They tried to kill me, but I didn’t die, so it’s not good enough for them.”

Justine van der Leun

Justine van der Leun is the author of several books, including We Are Not Such Things (Random House, 2016), a New York Times Editors’ Choice and Spectator Book of the Year. Her work has appeared in theNew York Times, Harper’s, the Guardian, and Oprah Magazine. She is an International Women’s Media Foundation reporting fellow and a grantee of the Investigative Fund at the Nation Institute.

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

I encourage you to read the full article at the above link, which is accompanied by some great original illustrations by Alan Vest!

Justine highlights the real role of attorneys in our asylum system. Many of them are working on a pro bono or low fee basis or actually paying out of their own pockets! They persist under horrible working conditions and often rude, insensitive, and unprofessional treatment from judges and other government officials that would persuade most other professionals to take up another line of work. The cases are complicated and (unnecessarily) fact intensive, often requiring not only extensive research and legal knowledge, but also skilled use of expert testimony and sources translated from foreign languages.

In courts like El Paso, getting a fair result in an asylum case too often depends on making the record below and then taking an appeal — the latter itself a time-consuming “hit or miss” proposition depending on the BIA “panel” (it could be a single judge) or the Circuit in which the case arose (sadly, the 5th Circuit is notorious for taking a cavalier and tone-deaf attitude toward the law and fundamental fairness in immigration matters).

Indeed, conscientious, dedicated attorneys are far more interested in making the system function in a fair and efficient manner consistent with our Constitution than the DOJ politicos who run today’s broken court system.

Compare the reality with the intentionally false and totally disingenuous picture painted by our White Nationalist Attorney General Jeff Sessions. He refers to “dirty lawyers” who are “gaming” the system.

Apparently, Sessions’s view of “gaming” means providing vigorous and effective representation and forcing him and some of the anti-asylum judges working for him to comply with asylum law!

It’s also painfully clear that no unrepresented asylum applicant would have any chance whatsoever of receiving fairness and Due Process in El Paso.

But, instead of working with the private bar to facilitate representation and repair the damage to the Immigration Courts, Sessions has gone to great lengths to prevent effective representation of asylum seekers. He has arranged for the detention of asylum seekers in horrible conditions in obscure places where there are no lawyers; he has “speeded up” the system to make it more difficult for lawyers to effectively represent their clients; he has used unconstitutional intentional family separation to duress individuals with valid claims into abandoning them; he has made pejorative remarks about asylum seekers and their lawyers in front of Immigration Judges; and he has manipulated the substantive law against bona fide asylum seekers.

Yes, many, many Immigration Judges “buck the odds” to honor their oaths of office and guarantee fairness and Due Process for asylum seekers and other respondents. Justine points out how results differ dramatically in Immigration Courts where judges apply the law and treat respondents and their lawyers in a fair and impartial manner.

So, how can I be such a strong advocate for independence of a system that I know is badly flawed? Those of us who have actually worked in the system know that it can’t be fixed overnight.

But, getting the system out of the hands of Sessions and the DOJ politicos is an absolutely essential first step. With the advent of a true merit judicial hiring system, such as that recommended by Professor Andy Schoenholtz and others, and the establishment of a more diverse and representative Appellate Division that acts like an independent Federal Court to rein in those judges who are unfairly treating asylum applicants and force them to correctly and fairly apply the law, there will be a return of meaningful judicial dialogue and deliberation which leads to progress over time.

Notably, in Isaac’s case, the system actually worked! After many months of expensive, wasteful, and unnecessary detention and an incorrect decision below, the BIA summarily corrected the Immigration Judge’s clearly erroneous denial of Isaac’s asylum case. But corrective action by the BIA to bring anti-asylum judicial “outliers” under control is exactly what Sessions has disabled in his decision in Matter of A-B-. He basically encourages “worst practices” and enables biased Immigration Judges while criticizing the BIA’s modest attempts to bring legality and order to an out of control system. What an outrageous perversion of justice and Due Process by someone who constantly makes bogus claims to be “enforcing the rule of law!”

Additionally, by returning control over dockets and court administration to sitting judges, rather than non-judicial DOJ politicos and their agency subordinates, an independent Immigration Court can make progress toward reducing backlogs while promoting, rather than “demoting,” Due Process.

The current Immigration Court System is a farce that should outrage and disgust every fair-minded American! It will continue to malfunction and deny Due Process until we have an independent Immigration Court where all judges are required to respect the Constitution and the individual rights of those coming before them.

Join the “New Due Process Army” and force the Immigration Courts and the Article IIIs to live up to their unfilled promise of “guaranteeing fairness and Due Process for all!”

PWS

10-09-18

GONZO’S WORLD: DHS IG REPORT SLAMS GONZO’S “KIDDIE GULAG” WHILE CRITICISM OF INTENTIONAL CHILD ABUSE BY HIM AND OTHERS IN THE ADMINISTRATION CONTINUES TO MOUNT — Will The Article IIIs Eventually Draw The Line Between Incompetence & Intentional, Malicious Violations Of Constitutional Rights & Hold Gonzo & His Collaborators in DHS & ORR Personally Liable Under “Bivens?”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/trumps-family-separation-policy-was-flawed-from-the-start-watchdog-review-says/2018/10/01/c7134d86-c5ba-11e8-9b1c-a90f1daae309_story.html

By Nick Miroff , Maria Sacchetti and Seung Min Kim

October 1 at 7:44 PM

The Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” crackdown at the border this spring was troubled from the outset by planning shortfalls, widespread communication failures and administrative indifference to the separation of small children from their parents, according to an unpublished report by the Department of Homeland Security’s internal watchdog.

The report, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Post, is the government’s first attempt to autopsy the chaos produced between May 5 and June 20, when President Trump abruptly halted the separations under mounting pressure from his party and members of his family.

The DHS Office of Inspector General’s review found at least 860 migrant children were left in Border Patrol holding cells longer than the 72-hour limit mandated by U.S. courts, with one minor confined for 12 days and another for 25.

Many of those children were put in chain-link holding pens in the Rio Grande Valley of southern Texas. The facilities were designed as short-term way stations, lacking beds and showers, while the children awaited transfer to shelters run by the Department of Health and Human Services.

U.S. border officials in the Rio Grande Valley sector, the busiest for illegal crossings along the nearly 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexico border, held at least 564 children longer than they were supposed to, according to the report. Officials in the El Paso sector held 297 children over the legal limit.

The investigators describe a poorly coordinated interagency process that left distraught parents with little or no knowledge of their children’s whereabouts. In other instances, U.S. officials were forced to share minors’ files on Microsoft Word documents sent as email attachments because the government’s internal systems couldn’t communicate.

“Each step of this manual process is vulnerable to human error, increasing the risk that a child could become lost in the system,” the report found.

Based on observations conducted by DHS inspectors at multiple facilities along the border in late June, agents separated children too young to talk from their parents in a way that courted disaster, the report says.

“Border Patrol does not provide pre-verbal children with wrist bracelets or other means of identification, nor does Border Patrol fingerprint or photograph most children during processing to ensure that they can be easily linked with the proper file,” the report said.

“It is a priority of our agency to process and transfer all individuals in our custody to the appropriate longer-term detention agency as soon as possible,” U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which includes Border Patrol, said in a statement. “The safety and well-being of unaccompanied alien children . . . is our highest responsibility, and we work closely with the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Office of Refugee Resettlement to ensure the timely and secure transfer of all unaccompanied minors in our custody as soon as placement is available from HHS.”

In its Sept. 14 response to the inspector general’s report, DHS acknowledged the “lack of information technology integration” across the key immigration systems and “sometimes” holding children beyond the 72-hour limit.

Jim Crumpacker, the DHS official who responded to the report, said the agency held children longer mainly because HHS shelter space was unavailable. But he said transferring children to less-restrictive settings is a priority.

[‘Deleted families: What went wrong with Trump’s family separation effort]

On June 23, three days after the executive order halting the separations, DHS announced it had developed a “central database” with HHS containing location information for separated parents and minors that both departments could access to reunite families. The inspector general found no evidence of such a database, the report said.

“The OIG team asked several [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] employees, including those involved with DHS’ reunification efforts at ICE Headquarters, if they knew of such a database, and they did not,” it states. “DHS has since acknowledged to the OIG that there is no ‘direct electronic interface’ between DHS and HHS tracking systems.”

Inspectors said they continue to have doubts about the accuracy and reliability of information provided by DHS about the scope of the family separations.

In late June, a federal judge ordered the government to reunite more than 2,500 children taken from their parents, but three months later, more than 100 of those minors remain in federal custody.

The inspector general’s report also found that U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) restricted the flow of asylum seekers at legal ports of entry and may have inadvertently prompted them to cross illegally. One woman said an officer had turned her away three times, so she crossed illegally.

At one border crossing, the inspection team saw CBP attempt to increase its detention space by “converting former offices into makeshift hold rooms.”

The observations were made by teams of lawyers, inspectors and criminal investigators sent to the border amid concerns raised by members of Congress and the public. They made unannounced visits to CBP and ICE facilities in the border cities of El Paso and McAllen, Tex.

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Meanwhile, over at Vanity Fair, Isobel Thompson give us the “skinny” on how the self-created “Kiddie Gulag” that Sessions, Stevie Miller, and Nielsen love so much has turned into total chaos, with the most vulnerable kids among us as its victims. We’ll be feeling the effects of these cruel, inhuman, and unconstitutional policies for generations!

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/10/donald-trump-child-detention-crisis-is-getting-worse

Three months after Donald Trump gave in to global opprobrium and discontinued his administration’s policy of separating children from their parents at the Mexican border, the stark impact of his zero-tolerance directive continues to unfold, with reports emerging that, in the space of a year, the number of migrant children detained by the U.S. government has spiked from 2,400 to over 13,000—despite the number of monthly border crossings remaining relatively unchanged. The increase, along with the fact that the average detainment period has jumped from 34 to 59 days, has resulted in an accommodation crisis. As a result, hundreds of children—some wearing belts inscribed with their emergency-contact information—have been packed onto buses, transported for hours, and deposited at a tented city in a stretch of desert in Tornillo, West Texas. According to The New York Times, these journeys typically occur in the middle of the night and on short notice, to prevent children from fleeing.

The optics of the child-separation crisis have been some of the worst in history for the Trump administration, and the tent city in Tornillo is no exception. The facility is reportedly run according to “guidelines” provided by the Department of Health and Human Services, but access to legal aid is limited, and children—who sleep in bunks divided by gender into blocks of 20—are given academic workbooks, but no formal teaching. In theory, the hundreds of children being sent to Tornillo every week should be held for just a short period of time; the center first opened in June as a temporary space for about 400. Since then, however, it has been expanded to accommodate 3,800 occupants for an indefinite period.

Again, the lag time is largely thanks to the White House. Typically, children labeled “unaccompanied minors” are held in federal custody until they can be paired with sponsors, who house them as their immigration case filters through the courts. But thanks to the harsh rhetoric embraced by the White House, such sponsors are now in short supply. They’re often undocumented immigrants themselves, which means that in this environment, claiming a child would put them at risk for deportation. In June, that risk became even more acute when authorities announced that potential sponsors would have to submit their fingerprints, as well as those of any adults living in their household: data that would then be passed to immigration authorities. Matthew Albence, who works for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, unwittingly illustrated the problem when he testified before Congress last week that I.C.E. had arrested multiple people who had applied to sponsor unaccompanied minors. Almost three-quarters had no criminal record.

Over time, the number of detained children is only expected to increase. According to The Washington Post, the flood of Central American immigrants moving north, driven by “hunger, joblessness, and the gravitational pull of the American economy,” shows no sign of abating. The number of men who cross the border with children has reportedly risen from 7,896 in 2016 to 16,667 this year, while instances of migrants falsely claiming children as their own have reportedly increased “threefold.” “Economic opportunity and governance play much larger roles in affecting the decision for migrants to take the trip north to the United States,” Kevin McAleenan, a border-security official, told the Post, adding that “a sustained campaign that addresses both push and pull factors” is “the only solution to this crisis.”

Given the attitude of the current administration, such a campaign seems unlikely to materialize. With Congress poorly positioned to pass comprehensive immigration reform, and a suddenly swamped detention system draining money and resources and damaging the mental health of thousands of children, the escalating crisis seems poised to become an ever more serious self-inflicted thorn in the president’s side. Although the White House is confident that, as hard-liner Stephen Miller boasts, it can’t lose on immigration, it will at some point be forced to acknowledge that its draconian strategy has morphed into chaos.

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

Wonder if any of these evil dudes who along with Sessions helped plan and implement the “Kiddie Gulag” knowing that it was likely in violation of the Constitution (in Federal court, DOJ lawyers didn’t even contest that a policy of intentional child separation would be unconstitutional) took out the “Bivens Insurance” offered to USG employees at relatively low-cost (I sure did!).

The only good news is that they are likely to be tied up in law suits seeking damages against them in their personal capacities for the rest of their lives!

So, perhaps there will eventually be some justice! But, that’s still won’t help traumatized kids whose lives have been screwed up forever as an illegal, immoral, and bogus, “deterrent” by a racist White Nationalist regime.

PWS

10-02-18

JOIN THE NEW DUE PROCESS ARMY (“NDPA”) & FIGHT AGAINST JEFF SESSIONS & HIS WHITE NATIONALIST ATTACK ON DUE PROCESS IN OUR IMMIGRATION COURTS! — Attend This Free Panel @ GW Law Tomorrow, Tuesday, Oct. 2 @ 3 PM

Immigration, Family Separation, Detention and Beyond: Where is the US Heading?
Alberto M. Benitez
Professor of Clinical Law Director of Immigration Clinic, GW Law
Michelle Brane
Director, Migrant Rights and Justice Program, Women’s Refugee Commission
Royce B. Murray
Policy Director American Immigration Council
This panel will discuss current issues related to the enforcement of immigration laws in the United States. The panelists will shed light on recent matters that have attracted significant media coverage, such as family separation policies, the practice of detaining families seeking asylum, and the plan advanced by the Trump Administration affecting immigrants seeking welfare benefits. The panel will discuss the domestic law implications of these issues, as well as their international law repercussions.
Closing Remarks: Paulina Vera, Supervisory Attorney, Immigration Law Clinic, GW Law Moderator: Rosa Celorio, Associate Dean, International & Comparative Legal Studies, GW Law
Tuesday, October 2, 2018 3:00-4:30 p.m.
Jacob Burns Moot Court Room [Lerner 101] Light Refreshments

TAL @ CNN: Misogyny, Racism, White Nationalism, Intentional Child Abuse @ Heart of Trump/Sessions Ugly Restrictionist Immigration Policies!

Trump’s immigration policies have especially affected women and domestic violence victims

By: Tal Kopan, CNN

The Salvadoran woman could not escape her ex-husband’s abuse. Even after their divorce, he tracked her down in a town two hours away, raped her, and separately had a friend and his police officer brother threaten her directly. So she snuck into the US and applied for asylum.

Then Attorney General Jeff Sessions used her case to make it extremely difficult for her and women like her to get those protections.

The identity of the woman in the case remains anonymous. But her story is too familiar for the advocates and attorneys who work with thousands of immigrant women and immigrant women victims seeking the right to stay in the country.

Despite their stated objectives of cracking down on criminals and fraud, many of the Trump administration’s immigration policies have especially impacted the vulnerable and victims.

One policy change that could deter women victims from reporting their crimes takes effect Monday as the Senate deliberates whether to confirm Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh amid assault allegations against him, which he has vehemently denied.

Some of the changes were barely noticed. Others, like Sessions’ overhaul of asylum law, have generated numerous headlines.

But the sum total of those policies could put an already particularly vulnerable population even at risk, advocates who work with women say. And that could empower abusers and predators even further, they add, making everyone less safe.

The policies

A policy takes effect on Monday that could increase the risk of deportation for undocumented immigrant victims or witnesses of crimes. The agency that considers visa applications will begin to refer immigrants for deportation proceedings in far more cases, including when a person fails to qualify for a visa. The policy would also constrain officers’ discretion.

The new US Citizenship and Immigration Services policy specifically applies to visas designed to protect victims of violent crime and trafficking, including some created under the Violence Against Women Act. Those visas will give legal status to victims who report or testify about crimes.

The result: Victims who apply for the special visas but fall short, including for reasons like incomplete paperwork or missing a deadline, could end up in deportation proceedings. Previously, there was no guidance to refer all visa applicants who fall short to immigration court for possible deportation. Under the new policy, it’ll be the presumption. Advocates for immigrants worry the risk will be too great for immigrants on the fence about reporting their crimes.

In the Salvadoran woman’s case, Sessions ruled in June that gang and domestic violence victims generally don’t qualify for asylum, and the Department of Homeland Security applied those rules to all asylum seekers at the border and refugees applying from abroad.

Other policies that especially impact women and victims include:

More: http://www.cnn.com/2018/09/30/politics/trump-immigration-women-victims/index.html

‘I wouldn’t wish it even on my worst enemy’: Reunited immigrant moms write letters from detention

By Tal Kopan, CNN

The women say they were treated like dogs and told that their children would be given up for adoption. They lied awake at night, wondering if their kids were safe.

But even after being reunited with their children, they say their nightmare has not ended.

Their anguish is conveyed in a collection of letters written from one of the few immigrant family detention centers in the country, where some moms and children who were separated at the border this summer are now being held together while they await their fate. The mothers’ writings reflect a mix of despair, bewilderment and hope as they remain in government custody and legal limbo, weeks after they were reunited.

“My children were far from me and I didn’t know if they were okay, if they were eating or sleeping. I have suffered a lot,” wrote a mother identified as Elena. “ICE harmed us a lot psychologically. We can’t sleep well because my little girl thinks they are going to separate us again. … I wouldn’t want this to happen to anyone.”

The letters reflect the scars inflicted at the height of family separations this summer, when thousands of families were broken up at the border and kept apart for weeks to months at a time. They also reflect the ongoing uncertainty and emotional recovery for the families that are still detained.

The letters were collected at the Dilley detention center in Texas. They were provided via the Dilley Pro Bono Project by the Immigration Justice Campaign, a joint effort by leading immigrant advocacy and legal groups to provide access to legal support in immigrant detention centers.

The mothers speak with the Dilley Pro Bono staff in visitation trailers in the evenings and had expressed a desire to tell their stories to the public. The staff suggested writing them down, and the mothers agreed to write the letters, translated from Spanish, under pseudonyms.

More: https://www.cnn.com/2018/09/30/politics/separated-mothers-reunited-letters/index.html

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Yup. Don’t let all the BKavs commotion distract you from focusing on the daily intentional and gross abuses of human rights and fundamental decency being committed by the Trump Administration.

Think a partisan Trump sycophant like BKavs would ever impartially uphold the rule of law against the abuses of the Trump Administration, particularly when it comes to treatment of women? Not a chance! He’s being put on the Supremes because Trump & the GOP are confident of his predetermined extreme right-wing agenda, his lack of objectivity, and his demonstrated inability to think outside the “box of privilege” which has allowed him to succeed and prosper (often at the expense of others).

No more BKavs for America!

PWS

10-01-18

NIGHT MOVES: Immigrant Kids Rousted From Their Beds & Taken To The “New American Kiddie Gulag!”

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/30/us/migrant-children-tent-city-texas.html

Caitlin Dickerson reports for the NY Times:

Migrant Children Moved Under Cover of Darkness to a Texas Tent City

Image
Migrant children at a detention facility in Tornillo, Tex.CreditCreditMike Blake/Reuters

By Caitlin Dickerson

Sept. 30, 2018

In shelters from Kansas to New York, hundreds of migrant children have been roused in the middle of the night in recent weeks and loaded onto buses with backpacks and snacks for a cross-country journey to their new home: a barren tent city on a sprawling patch of desert in West Texas.

Until now, most undocumented children being held by federal immigration authorities had been housed in private foster homes or shelters, sleeping two or three to a room. They received formal schooling and regular visits with legal representatives assigned to their immigration cases.

But in the rows of sand-colored tents in Tornillo, Tex., children in groups of 20, separated by gender, sleep lined up in bunks. There is no school: The children are given workbooks that they have no obligation to complete. Access to legal services is limited.

These midnight voyages are playing out across the country, as the federal government struggles to find room for more than 13,000 detained migrant children — the largest population ever — whose numbers have increased more than fivefold since last year.

The average length of time that migrant children spend in custody has nearly doubled over the same period, from 34 days to 59, according to the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees their care.

To deal with the surging shelter populations, which have hovered near 90 percent of capacity since May, a mass reshuffling is underway and shows no signs of slowing. Hundreds of children are being shipped from shelters to West Texas each week, totaling more than 1,600 so far.

The camp in Tornillo operates like a small, pop-up city, about 35 miles southeast of El Paso on the Mexico border, complete with portable toilets. Air-conditioned tents that vary in size are used for housing, recreation and medical care. Originally opened in June for 30 days with a capacity of 400, it expanded in September to be able to house 3,800, and is now expected to remain open at least through the end of the year.

“It is common to use influx shelters as done on military bases in the past, and the intent is to use these temporary facilities only as long as needed,” said Evelyn Stauffer, a spokeswoman for the Health and Human Services Department.

Ms. Stauffer said the need for the tent city reflected serious problems in the immigration system.

“The number of families and unaccompanied alien children apprehended are a symptom of the larger problem, namely a broken immigration system,” Ms. Stauffer said. “Their ages and the hazardous journey they take make unaccompanied alien children vulnerable to human trafficking, exploitation and abuse. That is why H.H.S. joins the president in calling on Congress to reform this broken system.”

But the mass transfers are raising alarm among immigrant advocates, who were already concerned about the lengthy periods of time migrant children are spending in federal custody.

The roughly 100 shelters that have, until now, been the main location for housing detained migrant children are licensed and monitored by state child welfare authorities, who impose requirements on safety and education as well as staff hiring and training.

The tent city in Tornillo, on the other hand, is unregulated, except for guidelines created by the Department of Health and Human Services. For example, schooling is not required there, as it is in regular migrant children shelters.

Mark Greenberg, who oversaw the care of migrant children under President Barack Obama, helped to craft the emergency shelter guidelines. He said the agency tried “to the greatest extent possible” to ensure that conditions in facilities like the one at Tornillo would mirror those in regular shelters, “but there are some ways in which that’s difficult or impossible to do.”

Several shelter workers, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of being fired, described what they said has become standard practice for moving the children: In order to avoid escape attempts, the moves are carried out late at night because children will be less likely to try to run away. For the same reason, children are generally given little advance warning that they will be moved.

At one shelter in the Midwest whose occupants were among those recently transferred to Tornillo, about two dozen children were given just a few hours’ notice last week before they were loaded onto buses — any longer than that, according to one of the shelter workers, and the children may have panicked or tried to flee.

The children wore belts etched in pen with phone numbers for their emergency contacts. One young boy asked the shelter worker if he would be taken care of in Texas. The shelter worker replied that he would, and told him that by moving, he was making space for other children like him who were stuck at the border and needed a place to live.

Some staff members cried when they learned of the move, the shelter worker said, fearing what was in store for the children who had been in their care. Others tried to protest. But managers explained that tough choices had to be made to deal with the overflowing population.

The system for sheltering migrant children came under strain this summer, when the already large numbers were boosted by more than 2,500 young border crossers who were separated from their parents under the Trump administration’s zero-tolerance policy. But those children were only a fraction of the total number who are currently detained.

Most of the detained children crossed the border alone, without their parents. Some crossed illegally; others are seeking asylum.

Children who are deemed “unaccompanied minors,” either because they were separated from their parents or crossed the border alone, are held in federal custody until they can be matched with sponsors, usually relatives or family friends, who agree to house them while their immigration cases play out in the courts.

The move to Texas is meant to be temporary. Rather than send new arrivals there, the government is sending children who are likely to be released sooner, and will spend less time there—mainly older children, ages 13 to 17, who are considered close to being placed with sponsors. Still, because sponsorship placements are often protracted, immigrant advocates said there was a possibility that many of the children could be living in the tent city for months.

“Obviously we have concerns about kids falling through the cracks, not getting sufficient attention if they need attention, not getting the emotional or mental health care that they need,” said Leah Chavla, a lawyer with the Women’s Refugee Commission, an advocacy group.

“This cannot be the right solution,” Ms. Chavla said. “We need to focus on making sure that kids can get placed with sponsors and get out of custody.”

The number of detained migrant children has spiked even though monthly border crossings have remained relatively unchanged, in part because harsh rhetoric and policies introduced by the Trump administration have made it harder to place children with sponsors.

Traditionally, most sponsors have been undocumented immigrants themselves, and have feared jeopardizing their own ability to remain in the country by stepping forward to claim a child. The risk increased in June, when federal authorities announced that potential sponsors and other adult members of their households would have to submit fingerprints, and that the data would be shared with immigration authorities.

Last week, Matthew Albence, a senior official with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, testified before Congress that the agency had arrested dozens of people who applied to sponsor unaccompanied minors. The agency later confirmed that 70 percent of those arrested did not have prior criminal records.

“Close to 80 percent of the individuals that are either sponsors or household members of sponsors are here in the country illegally, and a large chunk of those are criminal aliens. So we are continuing to pursue those individuals,” Mr. Albence said.

Seeking to process the children more quickly, officials introduced new rules that will require some of them to appear in court within a month of being detained, rather than after 60 days, which was the previous standard, according to shelter workers. Many will appear via video conference call, rather than in person, to plead their case for legal status to an immigration judge. Those who are deemed ineligible for relief will be swiftly deported.

The longer that children remain in custody, the more likely they are to become anxious or depressed, which can lead to violent outbursts or escape attempts, according to shelter workers and reports that have emerged from the system in recent months.

Advocates said those concerns are heightened at a larger facility like Tornillo, where signs that a child is struggling are more likely to be overlooked, because of its size. They added that moving children to the tent city without providing enough time to prepare them emotionally or to say goodbye to friends could compound trauma that many are already struggling with.

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If you don’t want to turn back the clock to 1939, get out the vote to remove this scofflaw, White Nationalist, racist Administration from power before it’s too late!

PWS

09-30-18

GONZO’S WORLD: HE FIDDLES AS ROME BURNS! — Threats To Judges, Xenophobia, Racism, Cutting Corners, Dissing Respondents & Their Lawyers, Bogus Numbers, Aimlessly Adding Bodies Fail To Stem Tide Of Backlogged Cases In An Obviously Broken System — When Will Congress &/Or The Article IIIs Do Their Jobs By Restoring Due Process, Impartiality, & Competent, Apolitical Court Management To This Sorry Caricature Of A Court System?

Here’s the latest from TRAC:

==========================================
Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse
==========================================
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Greetings. In August 2018, Immigration Courts remained overwhelmed with record numbers of cases awaiting decision. As of August 31, 2018, the number had reached 764,561. In July, the number of cases awaiting decision was 746,049 cases. This is a significant increase – up 41 percent – compared to the 542,411 cases pending at the end of January 2017, when President Trump took office.

California, Texas, and New York have the largest backlogs in the nation at 142,260, 112,733, and 103,054 pending caseloads respectively. While California is the state with the most pending cases, New York City’s immigration court topped the list of immigration courts with highest number at 99,919 pending cases at the end of August.

To view further details see TRAC’s immigration court backlog tool:

http://trac.syr.edu/phptools/immigration/court_backlog/

In addition to these most recent overall figures, TRAC continues to offer free monthly reports on selected government agencies such as the FBI, ATF, DHS and the IRS. TRAC’s reports also monitor program categories such as official corruption, drugs, weapons, white collar crime and terrorism. For the latest information on prosecutions and convictions through July 2018, go to:

http://trac.syr.edu/tracreports/bulletins/

Even more detailed criminal enforcement information for the period from FY 1986 through August 2018 is available to TRACFed subscribers via the Express and Going Deeper tools. Go to http://tracfed.syr.edu for more information. Customized reports for a specific agency, district, program, lead charge or judge are available via the TRAC Data Interpreter, either as part of a TRACFed subscription or on a per-report basis. Go to http://trac.syr.edu/interpreter to start.

If you want to be sure to receive notifications whenever updated data become available, sign up at:

http://tracfed.syr.edu/cgi-bin/tracuser.pl?pub=1&list=imm

or follow us on Twitter @tracreports or like us on Facebook:

http://facebook.com/tracreports

TRAC is self-supporting and depends on foundation grants, individual contributions and subscription fees for the funding needed to obtain, analyze and publish the data we collect on the activities of the US Federal government. To help support TRAC’s ongoing efforts, go to:

http://trac.syr.edu/cgi-bin/sponsor/sponsor.pl

David Burnham and Susan B. Long, co-directors
Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse
Syracuse University
Suite 360, Newhouse II
Syracuse, NY 13244-2100
315-443-3563

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

At approximately 20,000 more backlogged cases per month, the “Gonzo-ized” version of the US Immigration Courts are on track to jack the backlog up to 1 million by the end of FY 2019! Talk about self-inflicted, totally unnecessary chaos!

Hiring more new Immigration Judges won’t solve the problem because 1) if they do the job right, they will be slow and deliberative, 2) if they are slow, they will be fired, 3) but if they do it “Gonzo’s way” and give Due Process a pass, many of their cases will be sent back by the Courts of Appeals, adding to the mess.

Gonzo’s recent “My Way or the Highway” speech to new IJs where he unethically urged them to violate their oaths of office by ignoring relevant humanitarian factors in asylum cases (which actually are supposed to be humanitarian adjudications) and just crank out more removal orders to carry out the Administration’s White Nationalist agenda is a prime example of why more judicial bodies can’t solve the problem without a complete overhaul of the system to refocus it on Due Process — and only Due Process.

Someday, the Immigration Courts will become independent of the DOJ. That should include a professionally-administered, transparent, merit-based, judicial selection and retention system with provision for meaningful public input. (Such systems now are used for selection and retention of US Bankruptcy Judges and US Magistrate Judges.) When that happens, those Immigration Judges who “went along to get along” with Gonzo’s xenophobic, anti-immigrant, ignore Due Process system might be challenged to explain why they are best qualified to be retained in a new system that requires fair, impartial, and scholarly judges.

This court system can be fixed, but not by the likes of Gonzo Apocalypto; also, not without giving the Immigration Judges back authority over their dockets and leverage to rein in a totally undisciplined, irresponsible, unprofessional, and out of control ICE. (Responsible, professional, practical, humane leadership at DHS and ICE is also a key ingredient for a well-functioning and efficient court system.)

PWS

09-27-18

TAL @ CNN REPORTS ON THE LATEST ACT IN ADMINISTRATION’S ONGOING “IMMIGRATION THEATER OF THE ABSURD” – DHS’s Matthew Albence Uses Congressional Hearing To Double Down On Ridiculous Claim That The “New American Gulag” Is Like A ”Summer Camp” — One Where Neither He Nor Anyone Else In their Right Minds Would Send Their Kids!

ICE official stands by comparing detention centers to ‘summer camp,’ won’t say if he’d send his kids to one

By Tal Kopan, CNN

A senior Trump administration official on Tuesday stood by his controversial comments comparing the detention centers for immigrant families to “summer camp,” but declined to answer whether he’d send his own children there.

The remarks came at a congressional hearing where immigration and border security officials struggled to answer foundational questions from senators about the administration’s push to expand the detention of immigrant families and children.

Democratic Sen. Kamala Harris of California asked Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s chief of arrests and deportations, Matthew Albence, if he stood by his comments earlier this summer that family detention centers are like “summer camp.”

“Absolutely I do,” he said.

But he demurred when asked whether he’d send his own children, or those of people he is close to, to the centers.

“Would you send your children to one of these detention centers?” she asked.

“That question’s not applicable,” he said.

Albence did say the standards for family centers are “very safe” and “humane,” and that at one he had visited, families had access to TVs, food and video games and other activities.

“The point is, the parent made the illegal entry,” Albence said when pressed further. “The parent put themselves in this position.”

The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing topic was ostensibly a court settlement that governs how immigrant children can be treated by the US, including limiting the length of time a family can be involuntarily detained to 20 days. The administration is seeking to nullify that settlement and allow itself to detain far more immigrant families for far longer.

Harris’ line of questioning was one of a series from Democrats, who pressed the officials on why they’d want to expand family detention and child detention despite widely held beliefs among medical professionals that even short periods of detention can inflict permanent and devastating trauma on children. Though the hearing did not include the Department of Health and Human Services, which runs the government’s program for immigrant children who are in the US on their own, senators also asked about the ongoing fallout over family separations and unaccompanied child detention.

Members of both parties pressed as to why the agencies were not pursuing other measures with bipartisan support that could streamline the immigration court system over an expensive effort to vastly expand family detention.

More from the hearing: http://www.cnn.com/2018/09/18/politics/ice-albence-family-detention-summer-camp/index.html

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

Ever doubt that we currently have idiots in charge of our Government’s immigration policies? Matthew puts those to rest.

PWS

09-19-18

IMMIGRATION COURTS: MISSION FAILURE! – PROPOSED SETTLEMENT AGREEMENT GIVES A GLIMPSE OF HOW SOME U.S. IMMIGRATION JUDGES ABANDONED THEIR OATH TO UPHOLD CONSTITUTIONAL DUE PROCESS & “RUBBER STAMPED” DENIALS FOLLOWING SHOCKINGLY UNFAIR “REVIEW” PROCESS – “Exhibit A” In Why The Current Bogus Credible Fear Process As Manipulated By Sessions Needs Meaningful Review By Article III Judges! – A “Dependent Judiciary” Just Can’t Be Trusted To Do The Job In The “Age of Trump & Sessions!”

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/13/us/family-separation-asylum-settlement.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage

Caitlin Dickerson reports for the NY Times:

. . . .

Mr. Sandoval-Moshenberg, who represented the plaintiffs, said that many parents were evaluated for “credible fear” after having their children removed, but before they were told where the children had been taken. He said his team submitted evidence showing that, during the interviews, the parents were “out of their minds with trauma, focused solely on the well-being and the whereabouts of their kids.”

In one piece of evidence included in the case, a recording of an immigration judge questioning a mother about her asylum claim, the mother can be heard crying too hard to answer the judge’s questions and says that she feels sick, Mr. Sandoval-Moshenberg said. After a few minutes, he said, the judge affirms an asylum officer’s finding that the woman’s fear of returning to her home country is not credible and asks that she be taken to see a doctor.

. . . .

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

Read Caitlin’s full article concerning the recent proposed settlement at the above link.

Obvious question: Why would somebody like Jeff Sessions be given authority over a “court system” that is supposed to insure Due Process for asylum applicants? That’s even worse than having the fox guard the henhouse! The results are as horrible and unlawful as they are predictable.

PWS

09-14-18

BREAKING: WHAT DID I TELL YOU? – HASTE MAKES WASTE! – TRUMP SCOFFLAWS FORCED TO AGREE TO REHEAR ASYLUM CASES OF THOSE DENIED DUE PROCCESS THROUGH FAMILY SEPARATION!!!!

https://www.vox.com/2018/9/13/17853770/children-separated-news-update-parents-trump

Dara Lind reports for Vox News:

As many as 1,000 parents separated from their children are getting a second chance to stay in the US

In a huge reversal, the Trump administration is giving families another chance to claim asylum — and even some parents who’ve already been deported might be eligible.

By Dara Lind dara@vox.com Sep 13, 2018, 12:41am EDT

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A Honduran father and his 6-year-old son worship during Sunday mass on September 9, 2018, in Oakland, California. They fled their country seeking asylum in the US.
Mario Tama/Getty Images

The Trump administration has just agreed to give parents who were separated from their children at the US-Mexico border earlier this year a second chance to make asylum claims in the US.

The Department of Justice has negotiated an agreement that covers three lawsuits filed against the government over the family-separation policy. Parents in the US who’d been ordered deported would get another chance to pass an interview demonstrating a “credible fear” of persecution — the first step in the asylum process.

If either the parent or the child passes the screening interview, families will be allowed to apply for asylum together. Some parents who don’t pass will be allowed to remain with their children in the US while the children’s cases are adjudicated.

And in some cases, the government is even willing to consider reopening cases for parents who were already deported from the US.

The agreement covers three lawsuits: Ms. L v. ICE, which forced the government to reunite separated families this summer; M- M- M- v. ICE, brought on behalf of children separated from parents; and Dora v. Sessions, a lawsuit from parents who had failed their initial asylum screenings because they were distraught after weeks of separation from their children.

If the agreement is approved by the federal judges overseeing the three lawsuits, it will result in a second chance for hundreds of parents. Muslim Advocates and the Legal Aid Justice Center, who represented the plaintiffs in Dora v. Sessions, believe it could give “well over 1,000” parents another chance at an asylum claim. And for many families, it will eliminate (or at least defer) the impossible choice between giving up a child’s legal case, and separating the family again by keeping the child in the US while the parent is deported.

Separating families made it much harder for parents to seek asylum

Under the Trump administration’s family separation policy, a parent who wanted to seek asylum in the US had one chance: to pass a “credible fear” screening interview with an asylum office.

If a parent passed the credible fear screening, he or she was given a chance to seek asylum before an immigration judge; if the parent failed, he or she could appeal the decision to an immigration judge, with much worse odds. Losing the appeal, or agreeing to drop the case, led to an order of deportation.

Generally, most asylum seekers pass their credible fear screenings. But evidence suggests that parents who were separated from their children often failed their interviews. Parents were often so consumed by grief over their separation from their children that they weren’t able to answer asylum officers’ questions fully and effectively, according to the lawsuit filed in Dora v. Sessions.

“Explaining the basis for an asylum claim is very difficult under the best of circumstances,” said one source familiar with the interview process but not professionally authorized to speak on the record. “When someone is a) detained, b) almost certainly unrepresented, and c) beside herself with fear and desperation because of having had her child taken from her,” the source continued, “it is almost impossible.”

By the time nearly 2,000 parents and children were reunited in July (thanks to Judge Dana Sabraw’s rulings in the Ms. L case ordering family reunification), the overwhelming majority of parents had already lost their cases and been ordered deported. But their children — who’d been placed on a separate legal track as “unaccompanied alien children” after being separated from their parents — often still had ongoing cases and a real chance of winning some form of legal status in the US.

So upon being reunited, hundreds of families were faced with the choice between returning to their home country together (and facing possible peril or persecution), and keeping the child in the US in hopes of winning asylum or another form of legal status — and separating the family anew. (Some parents alleged they weren’t even given this chance, and were coerced into withdrawing their children’s legal claims — and forcibly reseparated without warning if they refused to comply.)

None of this would have happened if families hadn’t been separated to begin with. Under normal circumstances, if either a parent or a child passed an asylum interview, the government would allow them both to file asylum claims. And obviously, parents who weren’t traumatized by family separation might have had a better chance with their interviews. But simply reuniting the family didn’t solve the problem.

The government is agreeing to give reunited families the same chance they’d had if they’d never been separated

Here is what the agreement proposed by the government would actually do, if approved:

Parents who passed their initial “credible fear” interviews for asylum will be allowed to continue; this agreement doesn’t change those cases.

Parents who had lost their cases and been ordered deported will be given a full review to reassess whether or not they have a credible fear of persecution. This review will include a second interview for “additional fact-gathering” — during which a lawyer can be present (or can dial in by phone). Parents will be allowed to do this even if they didn’t ask for a credible fear interview when they were first arrested.

Parents who fail their credible fear screenings will be allowed to remain in the US and apply for asylum if their child passes his or her credible fear screening. The reverse is also true: If a child fails her asylum screening but the parent passes his, both parent and child will be allowed to apply for asylum. This is the way things normally work when families are apprehended together; by instituting it now, the government is essentially wiping away the legal side effects of family separation.

Parents who aren’t eligible for a credible fear interview because they had been deported before and were returning will still be allowed to avoid deportation if they meet a higher standard (“reasonable fear”) and qualify for something called “withholding of removal.” Even if they fail that standard, they will be allowed to stay in the US while their children are going through their asylum cases.

Parents who have already been deported will not have their cases automatically reviewed by the government. However, the plaintiffs in these lawsuits will have 30 days to present evidence to the government that particular parents should be allowed to return, and the government will consider those requests. (The agreement doesn’t make it clear whether deported parents will have their own cases reopened, or whether they will solely be allowed to return to stay with their children while the children’s legal cases are ongoing.)

If the agreement is approved, it will officially send the legal fight over family separation into its endgame phase. While hundreds of parents and children remain separated, the legal fight over reunification is largely about who’s responsible for carrying out various parts of the government’s reunification plan; the new agreement would set a similar plan up for the legal due process of parents and children making claims to stay in the US.

It would almost certainly run into similar implementation obstacles to the reunification plan, but it would set expectations that the government would provide this process by default, rather than moving forward with deportation.

The Trump administration is never going to wholly be able to erase the consequences of its decision to separate families as a matter of course. But it is now agreeing to give up the legal advantages that it accrued by separating parents’ and children’s cases — and forcing parents to go through interviews with life-or-death stakes without knowing when or whether they’d ever see their children again.

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I’ve been saying it over and over again. Why not just do it right, provide full Due Process, and follow the law?

Not only are the policies being promoted by Sessions, Trump, and the rest of the GOP White Nationalists unconstitutional, illegal, vile, and immoral, they are totally wasteful of limited Government resources (particularly in a time of GOP-fueled budget deficits) and unnecessarily tie up the Federal Courts. Contrary to Jeff Sessions’s false narratives, no court system anywhere has unlimited time for all the nonsense that the Government could potentially pursue. When common sense and sane prosecutorial discretion lose out, they whole system suffers.

Think what might have happened if, instead of wasting time and money on illegal family separation, unnecessary criminal prosecutions, and bending protection law out of shape, the Government had done the right thing and spent the money:

Working with NGOs and legal aid groups to release folks in locations where they could get legal assistance, virtually guaranteeing their appearance in Immigration Court;
Agreeing to grant the many domestic violence and other types of gang-related cases that could have been granted after proper preparation and documentation under a proper application of the law (before Sessions messed it up);
Taking all of the cases of long-term law-abiding residents off overloaded Immigration Court dockets so that the real contested asylum cases could be given priority without denying anyone Due Process or moving everything else back through “Aimless Docket Reshuffling” (“ADR”).
Any “bad guys,” or “true economic migrants” could have been given full hearings, denied, and removed. But, totally contrary to Sessions’s racist blather, most of the folks arriving are actually legitimate refugees. They could have been granted status and allowed to go out and work and study to make America better. I’ve found few individuals (including many native-born US citizens) more grateful and willing to work hard and contribute than those granted asylum.
The money spent on wasteful litigation and needless, cruel and inhuman, detention could instead have been used;
- to establish a viable overseas refugee screening program in the Northern Triangle;
- working with other countries to share resettlement responsibilities;
- and trying to correct the situations in the Northern Triangle which gave rise to the refugee flows in the first place.

Sadly, this is hardly the first, and probably by no means the last, time that the US Government has been forced to reprocess large numbers of asylum seekers because of a failure to follow Due Process and do the right thing in the first place. Just check out the history of the ABC v. Thornburgh litigation and settlement (a case I was involved in during my time in the “Legacy INS” General Counsel’s Office).

Indeed, the Trump scofflaws are “doubling down” on every failed policy fo the past. They actually are at it again with their bone-headed proposal to thumb their collective noses at Judge Dolly Gee and withdraw from the Flores settlement and set up a “Kiddie Gulag” by regulation. Good luck with that. The Trump Scofflaws are already wasting your taxpayer money on more “tent cities in the Kiddie Gulag” that they almost certainly will be enjoined from using at some point. Then, cooler heads will prevail and we’ll undoubtedly have a “Flores II” settlement.

Also, compare the real role of immigration lawyers in enforcing the law and holding Goverment scofflaws like Sessions and Nielsen accountable with the totally bogus picture painted by Sessions in his false, unethical, and highly inappropriate speech to US Immigration Judges this week. Truth is exactly the opposite of nearly everything that Jeff Sessions says.

Our country can’t afford the scofflaw conduct, inhumanity, immorality, and wastefulness of Trump, Sessions, Miller and their racist White Nationalist cabal. Vote for regime change this Fall!

Haste Makes Waste! Told ya so!

PWS

09-13-18

GONZO’S WORLD: WHITE NATIONALIST AG MAKES VICIOUS UNFOUNDED ATTACK ON REFUGEES & THEIR ATTORNEYS THE CENTERPIECE OF HIS SPEECH TO LARGEST CLASS OF INCOMING U.S. IMMIGRATION JUDGES — “Good lawyers using all their talents and skills work every day … like water seeping through an earthen dam to get around the plain words of (immigration law) to advance their clients’ interests.”

Sessions to immigration judges: Immigrants’ attorneys like ‘water seeping’ around law

By Tal Kopan, CNN

Attorney General Jeff Sessions told a new group of immigration judges Monday that it is their job to “restore the rule of law” to the immigration system over the contrary efforts of the lawyers who represent immigrants.

The remarks at the training of the largest-ever class of new immigration judges implied that the judges were on the same team as the Trump administration, and that immigrants and their attorneys were trying to undermine their efforts.

“Good lawyers using all their talents and skills work every day … like water seeping through an earthen dam to get around the plain words of (immigration law) to advance their clients’ interests,” Sessions said, adding the same happens in criminal courts. “And we understand that. Their duty, however, is not uphold the integrity of the act. That’s our duty.”

Sessions noted that “of course” the system “must always respect the rights of aliens” in the courts. But he also warned the judges of “fake claims.”

“Just as we defend immigrant legal rights, we reject unjustified and sometimes fake claims,” Sessions said. “The law is never serviced when deceit is rewarded so that the fundamental principles of the law are defeated.”

The comments came in the context of Sessions’ repeated moves to exert his unique authority over the immigration courts, a separate legal system for immigrants that is entirely run by the Justice Department.

Sessions approves every judge hired and can instruct them on how to interpret law, and thus decide cases, as well as how to manage cases. He has used that authority multiple times in the past year, including issuing a sweeping ruling that will substantially narrow the types of cases that qualify for asylum protections in the US. Those decisions overrode the evolution of years of immigration judges’ and the immigration appellate board’s decisions.

Sessions reminded the new judges of that authority and those decisions in his remarks, saying he believes they are “correct” and “prudent” interpretations of the law that “restores” them to the original intent.

More: http://www.cnn.com/2018/09/10/politics/sessions-immigration-judges/index.html

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Another totally inappropriate and unethical effort by Sessions to insure that migrants, particularly asylum seekers, receive neither fair consideration nor Due Process from U.S. Immigration Judges in connection with their, in many instances, very compelling cases for protection.

Let’s shine a little light of truth on the Sessions’s dark myth-spinning:

As recently as 2012, the majority of asylum applicants who received decisions on the merits of their claims in Immigration Court were granted protection;
Conditions in most “sending countries” — particularly those in the Northern Triangle — have gotten worse rather than better;
There is no reasonable explanation for the large drop in approvals in recent years other than bias against asylum seekers;
Even after Sessions took over, 30% of those who get merits determinations won their cases;
The success rate is higher for those released from detention and given fair access to counsel;
Most detained migrants, particularly those intentionally detained in substandard conditions in obscure locations, do not have reasonable access to counsel;
Most attorneys representing detained asylum seekers serve pro bono or for minimal compensation (particularly in relation to the amount of time and effort required to prepare and present an asylum case in detention);
Detention of asylum seekers simply to deter them from coming is illegal;
Separation of families is a deterrent is also illegal;
Neither detention nor “zero tolerance” prosecutions have been shown to have a material impact on the flow of refugees to our Southern Border;
Sessions has provided no evidence of any widespread fraud in asylum applications by refugees from the Northern Triangle;
The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (“UNHCR”), the leading interpreter of refugee and asylum protections, has consistently criticized the US’s overly restrictive approach to asylum adjudication;
Article III U.S. Courts continue to be critical of both the unlawful policies being promoted by Sessions and the fundamental errors still being made by the BIA and some Immigration Judges in analyzing asylum cases and claims under the Convention Against Torture;
According to the US Supreme Court, a chance of harm as low as 10% can satisfy the generous legal standard for asylum;
According to the UNHCR, asylum applicants should be given the “benefit of the doubt;”
Most of those who fail to get asylum, like the abused woman denied protection by Sessions in Matter of A-B-, face life threatening situations in their home countries — we have merely made a conscious choice not to offer them asylum or some alternative form of life-saving protection.

As Sessions sees that his time as Attorney General will likely come to an end before the end of this year, he is doubling down on his White Nationalist, xenophobic, racist, restrictionist, lawless agenda. He wants to inflict as much damage on migrants, refugees, women, and people of color as he can before being relegated to his former role as a rightist wing-nut. He also seeks to convince the Immigration Judges that they are not independent juridical officials but mere highly paid enforcement agents with an obligation to deport as many folks as possible in support of the President’s agenda.

I do agree with Sessions, however, that the newly-minted Immigration Judges have a tremendously difficult job. If they adopt his philosophy, they are likely to violate their oaths to uphold the Constitution and laws of the US and to wrongly return individuals to death-threatening situations. On the other hand, if they carefully and fairly follow the law and give full consideration to the facts, they will be compelled to grant protection in many cases, thus potentially putting them on EOIR’s “hit list.” (Basically, new US Immigration Judges, even those with many years of civil service, can be “fired at will” by EOIR during their first two years of “probation” as judges.)

The only solution is an independent Article I Immigration Court that will guarantee that someone as totally unqualified as Sessions can never again impose his personal will and bigoted, anti-Due-Process views on what is supposed to be a fair and impartial court system.

PWS

09-10-18

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As many as 1,000 parents separated from their children are getting a second chance to stay in the US

In a huge reversal, the Trump administration is giving families another chance to claim asylum — and even some parents who’ve already been deported might be eligible.

Separating families made it much harder for parents to seek asylum

The government is agreeing to give reunited families the same chance they’d had if they’d never been separated

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