Category: Courthouse News

https://www.courthousenews.com/uncle-max-made-it-past-the-border-patrol/

Robert Kahn, Editor of Courthouse News writes:

My Uncle Max made it past the Border Patrol and became a doctor in the United States — a chest specialist. He wasn’t really my uncle. He was a med student who fled the Nazis in 1936 — before the United States started turning away Jewish refugees — and ended up living in Chicago with my grandparents.

I don’t know how Uncle Max found his way to my Oma and Opa, and I suppose I’ll never know. All of them are dead. I heard the story from Uncle Max in 1973, after I graduated from college and had a nagging cough.

I had no money for a doctor. I was working for the Post Office in Portland, Oregon, and playing baritone sax in a funk band.

“Call your Uncle Max,” my Mom told me from Chicago.

“Who’s Uncle Max?” I said.

Uncle Max examined me, suggested I cut down on the weed, and told me his story.

He was a medical student in Germany — fairly advanced, as he already had the tools of his trade. He lived with his parents. They were Jewish.

One day, some Nazi gentlemen knocked on their door, or barged in, ransacked the place, and found Max’s little black bag. In it they found a syringe and some hypodermic needles.

“Aha! A morphinist!” one said. They left, but said they’d be back.

Uncle Max’s parents — I do not know their names — told him he had to leave the country immediately. And he did — the next day, I believe.

This was two years before Kristallnacht — Nov. 9-10, 1938 — when the war on the Jews had become official policy. Four years after Kristallnacht, with the big war on, FDR turned away boatloads full of Jews fleeing the Third Reich. FDR called them a threat to national security.

Max’s entire family was murdered by the Nazis. In Auschwitz, I believe. But what does it matter where they died? We know who killed them, and why, and to some extent, how it could have been prevented.

How Max hooked up with my Oma and Opa, as I’ve said, I do not know. I suppose through some Jewish relief organization.

Uncle Max, a refugee, enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1944, though he did not have to, as he was 35 years old. He married in 1950 and he and his wife raised three children, two girls and a boy.

Now, here is an interesting thing. This is not the first time I’ve written this column. The first time was 30 years ago, give or take. I was city editor of The Brownsville Herald, in Texas, and the Reagan administration was rounding up and imprisoning tens of thousands of refugees from government death squads in Central America — women, children and babies — for the despicable crime of trying to escape from war.

The Herald hired me because I’d written a few news articles about the work I’d done as a paralegal in U.S. immigration prisons, helping attorneys represent victims of rape, torture and war. I’d also covered the privatization of our immigration prisons, in which our federal government hired private, money-seeking Republican campaign contributors — I mean, corporations — and gave them the power to strip-search children, mothers and babies.

The privatization of immigration prisons gives private corporations — above all, Corrections Corporation of America, or CCA, which changed its name to CoreCivic in 2016, because the CCA logo had become so thoroughly soaked in the blood of children; and GEO Group, CoreCivic’s main competitor; and dozens of well-intentioned but benighted church-affiliated groups that imprison refugee children to save the federal government the bother and expense — as I was saying, all these private prisons give the U.S. government a way to sidestep responsibility for the war crimes it is committing, and has been committing for decades — surely since 1985, when my 3-year-old client was strip-searched in CCA’s Laredo prison because her Salvadoran mother made the outrageous demand to speak to a pro bono attorney.

This is all true.

Do you like it?

I can’t see how you could.

What is going on today, under the Trump administration, is far worse.

I know what you’re thinking: What could be worse than strip-searching children?

Killing them.

I am tired, my friends. I worked for virtually nothing in U.S. immigration prisons to try to save Central Americans’ lives under the Reagan administration. I’m not going back to the prisons. But hundreds of other human rights workers are doing it.

They are doing — dare I say it? — God’s work, and doing it under obnoxious and intrusive government surveillance. Most of them are doing it for free, or for far less than minimum wage.

I would like to list the names of a few of them here — pro bono legal organizations, human rights groups — who are doing what our government should be doing, and failed to do, in the 1940s and 1980s, and is failing to do today. But times being what they are, I fear this might do them more harm than good.

We should support them. Most of them are tax-exempt nonprofits.

(Courthouse News editor Robert Kahn’s book, “Other People’s Blood: U.S. Immigration Prisons in the Reagan Decade,” (1996) was the first history of U.S. immigration prisons.)

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https://www.latimes.com/opinion/la-ol-2-enter-the-fray-here-are-just-a-few-of-the-ways-our-1546013604-htmlstory

Scott Martelle writes in the LA Times:

Two court actions a continent apart are driving home — yet again — the point that the U.S. asylum system neither lives up to basic standards of human decency and due process nor, it seems, to the promises of the Constitution.

In New York on Thursday, a federal district court judge slammed the government for failing to even offer a bond hearing to a man it had detained for 34 months after he arrived at the U.S.-Mexico border and asked for asylum because of threats he’d received in his native Ivory Coast over his political affiliations.

Is that sufficient grounds for granting asylum? Good question, and we have both laws and a court system to guide the answer. Was it necessary for the government to detain Adou Kouadio, 43, while his application worked its way through the system?

No one knows because the government has not been forced to answer two basic questions: Does Kouadio pose a flight risk? And does he pose a danger to public safety? Both those fundamental questions determining whether an asylum-seeker or other migrant will remain incarcerated get addressed in a bond hearing.

Which the government has not granted. For 34 months.

U.S. District Court Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein on Thursday ordered a bond hearing be held within 14 days, a ruling legal experts said was both a rebuke to federal detention policies and a recognition that fundamental rights of due process extend to migrants.

“Petitioner has a clean record, never having been arrested or convicted,” Hellerstein wrote. “There is little risk of flight, since he seeks asylum within the United States, and little risk of danger to the community, judging from his lack of a prior criminal history. Yet, Petitioner has suffered 34 months of detention without an opportunity for a bond hearing while waiting for a final decision on his petition for asylum.”

The judge noted that the government had an interest in weighing due process rights against the national interest but that it had failed to make the case that Kouadio posed a particular threat.

“This nation prides itself on its humanity and openness with which it treats those who seek refuge at its gates,” Hellerstein wrote. “By contrast, the autocracies of the world have been marked by harsh regimes of exclusion and detention. Our notions of due process nourish the former spirit and brace us against the latter. The statutory framework governing those who seek refuge, and its provisions for detention, cannot be extended to deny all right to bail.”

Meanwhile, here on the West Coast, the American Civil Liberties Union has filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Riverside to protect another right of migrants. The suit accuses the federal government and some of the organizations it relies on for detaining people facing deportation — private prison operator Geo Group and the Orange County Sheriff’s Department — of making it nearly impossible for migrants to consult lawyers, which they have a right to do.

Geo Group operates the Adelanto ICE Processing Center in San Bernardino County, and the Orange County Sheriff’s Department operates the Theo Lacy Facility in Orange and the James A. Musick Facility near Irvine; all three facilities house migrants at ICE’s behest.

According to the complaint (which you really ought to read), three men seeking asylum have been unable to use telephones to find or consult with attorneys under bizarre systems in which the phones hang up automatically at the sound of an automated response, detained migrants are forced to make their calls within hearing of others (undermining fundamental attorney-client privilege), and detainees often don’t gain access to phones until after normal business hours.

Also, mail is slow to get delivered and sometimes arrives opened and damaged, further hindering the detainees’ ability to present their cases, the lawsuit charges.

These are no minor things. Hanging in the balance is the ability not only to get proper legal advice, but also to collect the sorts of documents often required to support an asylum claim. Detainees have missed court deadlines because of slow mails and inability to gather their documents from far-flung sources.

And I should note this isn’t a Trump thing. ICE officials, and their contracted detention overseers, have been acting in such manners for years. One of the plaintiffs, Jason Nsinano of Namibia, was initially detained under the Obama administration, as was Kouadio, the man for whom the New York judge ordered a bond hearing.

Though that hearing might not do much good. Shortly after his detention, ICE determined that Nsinano posed neither a flight risk nor a danger to public safety and set bond at $10,000 — an amount that Nsinano doesn’t have.

So Nsinano has been incarcerated for more than three years not because he has been charged with a crime, nor because he poses a flight risk or danger to society, but because he sought asylum and didn’t have the foresight to bring $10,000 with him.

That’s outrageous.

 

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Yup! Our treatment of asylum seekers and other migrants is outrageous! What’s even more outrageous are the legislators and Administration politicos who perpetuate this broken and corrupt system when fixing it should be legal and moral imperatives. And it would be a heck of a lot cheaper than the failed, corrupt, “killer” strategies being pursued now. We could get lots of much needed Due Process for less than $5 billion!

PWS

12-30-18