🇺🇸⚖️STRAIGHT TALK FROM HON. JEFFREY S. CHASE: “[F]or decades the BIA has enforced the offensive, outdated message to women seeking protection from such abuse that ‘this is not their world.’ The time has come to finally put an end to this sad substitute for true administrative appellate review.”

Trial by Ordeal
Woman Being “Tried By Ordeal”
17th Century Woodcut
Public Realm
Source: Ancient Origins Website
https://www.ancient-origins.net/history/trial-ordeal-life-or-death-method-judgement-004160
Trial By Ordeal
Woman Being “Tried By Ordeal”
17th Century Woodcut
Public Realm
Source: Ancient Origins Website
https://www.ancient-origins.net/history/trial-ordeal-life-or-death-method-judgement-004160
Jeffrey S. Chase
Hon. Jeffrey S. Chase
Jeffrey S. Chase Blog
Coordinator & Chief Spokesperson, Round Table of Former Immigration Judges

 

https://www.jeffreyschase.com/blog/2021/4/6/the-bias-mansplaining-of-gender-based-asylum

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The BIA’s Mansplaining of Gender-Based Asylum

“Every woman knows what I’m talking about. It’s the presumption that makes it hard, at times, for any woman in any field; that keeps women from speaking up and from being heard when they dare; that crushes young women into silence by indicating, the way harassment on the street does, that this is not their world. It trains us in self-doubt and self-limitation just as it exercises men’s unsupported overconfidence.”

Rebecca Solnit, Men Explain Things to Me

On April 5, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit issued a published decision in Rodriguez Tornes v. Garland.  The opening sentences of the decision are heartbreaking:

Since the age of five, Petitioner has been told that men will beat her if she does not submit. Her mother demanded that she learn how to do housework, how to accept spousal abuse, and how “to obey everything that [her] husband would say.” She beat Petitioner with various objects almost daily, in part to prepare her for future beatings from her husband.

But along with the darkness there was also hope.  The decision’s opening paragraph concludes: “Yet Petitioner came to believe that ‘there should be equality in opinions[] and in worth’ between men and women. She became a teacher.”

Remarkably, over all the years that followed, the Petitioner’s hope survived the most brutal attempts to crush her into silence and submission.  As her mother had foreseen, she endured unspeakable and repeated forms of physical and psychological torture, including beatings and rape, at the hands of her husband.  Yet she continued to express the belief in her rights as an equal, and was brutally punished each time she did so, in an attempt to destroy the part of her capable of forming such belief.  Neither the police nor her own family offered her any possibility of protection.

When she finally succeeded in escaping to the U.S., her abuse continued, merely transferred to the hands of another domestic partner with whom she had three children in this country.  In 2017, our government deported both her and her latest abuser.  Facing the prospect of continued harm in her native Mexico, her still unbroken hope guided her to the U.S. once again, where she was placed into removal proceedings.

Her hope was briefly rewarded when an Immigration Judge granted the Petitioner asylum, ruling that her persecution was on account of her feminist political opinion.  The Immigration Judge alternatively held that asylum was warranted on account of the Petitioner’s membership in the particular social group consisting of “Mexican females,” which formed at least one central reason for her persecution.

It isn’t clear why ICE appealed the IJ’s decision.  On appeal, the BIA acknowledged the Petitioner’s honesty and the ongoing, systemic nightmare of violence she endured because of her gender and unbroken belief that she possessed rights.  And yet the BIA chose to act like a rubber stamp for the administration it served, and found a way to reverse the IJ’s well-reasoned decision.  According to a concurring opinion of the circuit court, the BIA managed this by suggesting that the Petitioner’s brutal suffering was motivated by her “personal relationship” with her abuser.   According to the concurrence, the BIA supported this conclusion by relying on the decision of former Attorney General Jeff Sessions in Matter of A-B-.

Of course, asylum applications require an individualized analysis of the facts of the specific case under consideration.  Matter of A-B- involved a different asylum seeker from a different country who experienced different facts than this petitioner.  So in citing A-B- to reach a conclusion so at odds with the facts of this case, the BIA’s judges were signaling their choice of a specific policy objective over their duty to neutrally apply law to specific facts.

Among the facts the BIA chose to ignore was the opinion of an expert who drew “on more than three decades of research, writing, legal representation, and lawmaking” in support of her conclusion. The expert, Prof. Nancy Lemon of the Univ. of Cal. – Berkeley Law School, explained how all of the weapons at abusers’ disposal are “tied to social belief systems that ‘men are entitled to dominate and control women because the male sex is considered superior.’”  Prof. Lemon went into great detail in explaining the political nature of the mistreatment.  Of course, it mattered not to the Board.

In discussing this case, an esteemed colleague pointed to a decision that the same court issued more than three decades ago.  In 1987, in an opinion authored by Judge John T. Noonan, Jr., a conservative Reagan appointee, the Ninth Circuit concluded that a Salvadoran woman subjected to repeated sexual abuse and other violence by a sergeant in the Salvadoran military had been persecuted on account of her political opinion where the abuser threatened to falsely label her a “subversive if she refused to submit to his abuse.”1  In the words of Judge Noonan, the fact that the persecutor gave the asylum seeker “the choice of being subjected to physical injury and rape or being killed as a subversive does not alter the significance of political opinion…” The decision reversed the conclusion of the BIA that “the evidence attests to mistreatment of an individual, not persecution,” precisely the same finding the Board used more than three decades later in denying Ms. Rodriguez Tornes of her grant of asylum.

In 1993, Justice Samuel Alito, then sitting at the Third Circuit, wrote that “we have little doubt that feminism qualifies as a political opinion within the meaning of the relevant statutes.”2  28 years later, the Ninth Circuit cited Justice Alito’s words in Rodriguez Tornes, adding that it had reached the same conclusion in its own unpublished 1996 decision.3  These were obviously not the decisions of liberal judges forwarding a political agenda.  To the contrary, these judges were able to transcend political ideology by neutrally applying law to facts; this is what judges do.  As a result, the law of asylum has progressed to increasingly provide asylum protection to victims of domestic abuse.  Immigration Judges appointed by both Republican and Democratic administrations have followed suit, authoring well-reasoned decisions granting asylum in numerous cases of domestic abuse, including this one.

Yet over the same period of time, the BIA has stubbornly refused to budge from its 1980s position that domestic abuse is simply a personal matter not linked to a political opinion within society.  In the words of Jeff Sessions in Matter of A-B-, the vile abuse was simply due to the abuser’s “preexisting personal relationship with the victim.”4

When a mother feels compelled to begin abusing her five year old daughter to prepare her to obey her husband one day, can the inevitable spousal abuse that follows really be dismissed as just a personal matter?  And when the record contained Prof. Lemon’s evidence (because expert testimony is evidence) of “a correlation between patriarchal norms that support male dominance and violence against women by intimate partners,” what unsupported overconfidence did the BIA’s judges rely on in explaining that they know better?

The BIA decided this case during the Trump Administration.  For those hoping that the change in administration will usher in a change in the Board’s view, it bears noting that neither the Clinton nor Obama administrations brought about a sea change in the Board’s approach to domestic violence claims.  Under Clinton, the BIA issued Matter of R-A-,5 a precedent that essentially precluded the granting of asylum to domestic violence victims based on their membership in a particular social group.  The decision was vacated by then-Attorney General Janet Reno, who promised more enlightened regulations on the issue that never arrived.  Similar regulations were rumored to be in the works under Eric Holder, but again did not materialize.  The BIA’s one grudging concession to the political climate of the Obama era, Matter of A-R-C-G-, was later vacated by Jeff Sessions.  While the BIA discussed a second decision under Obama expanding on the narrow holding of A-R-C-G-, it too never came to be.

Based on that history, it seems safe to say that without drastic action by Attorney General Merrick Garland, the BIA will continue issuing the same denials for the same reasons as before.  For every individual such as Ms. Rodriguez Tornes who is able to succeed on appeal, there are countless more who merely end up as stratistics, deported to face more of the horrendous abuse that drove them here in the first place.  The Ninth Circuit recently had to correct the BIA’s determination that attempted gang rape did not constitute persecution,6 and last year, reversed the Board erroneous rejection of a domestic violence victim’s particular social group on the grounds that it contained a few too many words.7  The BIA continues to be composed of the exact same group of judges who issued each of those decisions.

It is the role of the BIA to reach fair decisions by applying the applicable law to the individual facts.  Doing so in the domestic violence context would require the Board to finally recognize opposition to systemic male oppression as a political opinion warranting asylum.  Instead, for decades the BIA has enforced the offensive, outdated message to women seeking protection from such abuse that “this is not their world.”  The time has come to finally put an end to this sad substitute for true administrative appellate review.

Notes:

  1. Lazo-Majano v. INS, 813 F.2d 1432 (9th Cir. 1987).
  2. Fatin v. I.N.S., 12 F.3d 1233, 1242 (3rd Cir. 1993).
  3. Moghaddam v. I.N.S., 95 F.3d 1158 (9th Cir. 1996) (unpublished).
  4. Matter of A-B-, 27 I&N Dec. 316, 339 (A.G. 2018).
  5. 22 I&N Dec. 906 (BIA 1999).
  6. Kaur v. Wilkinson, No. 18-73001, __ F.3d __ (9th Cir., Jan. 29, 2021).
  7. Diaz-Reynoso v. Barr, 968 F.3d 1070 (9th Cir. 2020).

Copyright 2021, Jeffrey S. Chase.  All rights reserved.

Republished by permission.

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

Different style, but the same message as I delivered yesterday about the BIA’s institutionalized racist misogyny and the strange tolerance that Attorney General Merrick Garland has exhibited to date for this type of grotesque judicial misconduct. 

https://immigrationcourtside.com/2021/04/06/%f0%9f%8f%b4%e2%80%8d%e2%98%a0%ef%b8%8fbias-misogynistic-anti-asylum-ignore-the-experts-the-evidence-approach-%f0%9f%a4%ae-rebuked-again-9th-cir-slams-bia-big-time-in-rodriguez/

And, this is on top of the astounding, largely self-inflicted 1.3 million case backlog and total dysfunction generated by the BIA’s failures combined with the “maliciously incompetent” effort by DOJ politicos and EOIR bureaucrats to disguise a “deportation railroad” as “administrative review!” Leaving aside all the legal travesties, the mal-administration and waste of public resources alone would be more than enough to require the immediate replacement of EOIR “upper (mis)management” and the entire BIA with qualified judicial professionals and professional judicial administrators.

EYORE
“Eyore In Distress”
Once A Symbol of Fairness, Due Process, & Best Practices, Now Gone “Belly Up”

Jeffrey and I are hardly the first to expose the charade of “appellate review” at the BIA. Two decades ago, following the “Ashcroft Purge,” administrative scholar and former GOP House Counsel Peter Levinson published his seminal work “The Facade of Quasi-Judicial Independence In Immigration Appellate Adjudications” documenting the mockery of due process and legitimate judicial practices being foisted off on the public by DOJ politicos.

COURTSIDE HISTORY: LEST WE FORGET: THE “ASHCROFT PURGE” AT THE BIA IN 2003 DESTROYED THE PRETEXT OF JUDICIAL INDEPENDENCE AT EOIR FOREVER – HERE’S HOW! — Read Peter Levinson’s 2004 Paper: “The Facade Of Quasi-Judicial Independence In Immigration Appellate Adjudications”

In the two decades since, legislators, DOJ Officials, and Article III Judges have done their utmost to ignore and paper over the glaring constitutional and administrative disasters identified by Peter. Not surprisingly, during that time the BIA and the Immigration Courts have descended into a slimy mass of disastrous bias, injustice, and judicial and administrative incompetence unequaled in American Justice since the heyday of the First Era of Jim Crow. (We are now in the “New Era of Jim Crow.”)

Of course, we need an independent Article I Immigration Court as a matter of the highest national priority. But, it’s not on schedule to happen tomorrow, even though it should! In the interim, Judge Garland could fix lots of the festering problems in this system. I gotta wonder if and when he is going to wake up and pay attention to the “assembly line injustice” being cranked out by “his” Immigration Courts?

🇺🇸⚖️🗽Due Process Forever!

PWS

04-07-21

🏴‍☠️BIA’S MISOGYNISTIC, ANTI-ASYLUM, IGNORE THE EXPERTS & THE EVIDENCE APPROACH 🤮 REBUKED AGAIN — 9th Cir. Slams BIA Big Time In Rodriguez Tornes v. Garland! — “Concurring, Judge Paez wrote that in addition to ignoring evidence that Rodriguez was targeted on account of her feminist political opinion, the Board also ignored extensive record evidence from a leading authority on domestic violence that directly rejected the Board’s premise that domestic violence is presumed to be motivated by nothing more than the private dynamics of a ‘personal relationship.’”

Four Horsemen
BIA Asylum Panel In Action
Albrecht Dürer, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Woman Tortured
“Nothing to see here, fellas, just the private dynamics of a personal relationship! Tough noogies, baby! You should have been born a man. It’s your own fault! Ha! Mercy and compassion? Those aren’t in any of our precedents, are they?” Amazing StoriesArtist Unknown, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Kangaroos
“Expert, what expert? We’re the experts! That is, in misogyny, abuse of asylum seekers of color, and specious legal reasoning. And, Garland is letting us get away with it! Whew, for a moment I thought he might have been a ‘real’ judge, but seems he’s just like us. Think I’ll jump for joy! Four more years of unbridled abuse of the most vulnerable and helpless, and I’ll be eligible to retire! Shooting down female asylum seekers for no good reason is like shooting fish in a barrel, just like Jeffy Gonzo and Billy the Bigot taught us! Wonder how many we can kill this year? Happy hunting! But, let’s stay out of the 9th Circuit. It’s dangerous territory. I hear the 5th Circuit loves misogynists and White Nationalists!”
https://www.flickr.com/photos/rasputin243/
Creative Commons License

 

https://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2021/04/05/19-71104.pdf

Rodriguez Tornes v. Garland, 9th Cir., 04-05-21

PANEL: Susan P. Graber, M. Margaret McKeown, and Richard A. Paez, Circuit Judges.

OPINION BY: Judge Graber

CONCURRING OPINION: Judge Paez

COUNSEL: Elaine J. Goldenberg (argued), Munger Tolles & Olson LLP, Washington, D.C.; Sara A. McDermott, Munger Tolles & Olson LLP, Los Angeles, California; Richard Caldarone, Julie Carpenter, and Rachel Sheridan, Tahirih Justice Center, Falls Church, Virginia; for Petitioner.

Timothy Bo Stanton (argued), Trial Attorney; Sabatino F. Leo, Senior Litigation Counsel; Office of Immigration

  

ROGRIGUEZ TORNES V. GARLAND 5

Litigation, Civil Division, United States Department of Justice, Washington, D.C.; for Respondent.

Blaine Bookey, Karen Musalo, Neela Chakravartula, and Anne Peterson, Center for Gender & Refugee Studies, U.C. Hastings College of Law, San Francisco, California, for Amicus Curiae Center for Gender & Refugee Studies.

Betsey Boutelle, DLA Piper LLP (US), San Diego, California; Anthony Todaro, Jeffrey DeGroot, and Lianna Bash, DLA Piper LLP (US), Seattle, Washington; for Amicus Curiae National Immigrant Women’s Advocacy Project.

SUMMARY BY COURT STAFF:

Immigration

The panel granted Maria Rodriguez Tornes’s petition for review of the Board of Immigration Appeals’ decision reversing an immigration judge’s grant of asylum and withholding of removal, and remanded, holding that the evidence compelled the conclusion that Rodriguez established a nexus between her mistreatment in Mexico and her feminist political opinion.

The panel noted that under the Attorney General’s recent decision in Matter of A-B-, 28 I. & N. Dec. 199 (A.G. 2021) (“Matter of A-B- II”), in order to establish the requisite nexus for asylum relief, a protected ground (1) must be a but-for cause of the wrongdoer’s act; and (2) must play more than a minor role—in other words, it cannot be incidental or tangential to another reason for the act. The panel explained that this standard was substantively indistinguishable from this circuit’s precedent. The panel wrote that the fact that an unprotected ground, such as a personal dispute, also constitutes a central reason for persecution does not bar asylum. Rather, if a retributory motive exists alongside a protected motive, an applicant need show only that a protected ground is “one central reason” for his or her persecution.

Observing that this court has held repeatedly that political opinions encompass more than electoral politics or formal

* This summary constitutes no part of the opinion of the court. It has been prepared by court staff for the convenience of the reader.

ROGRIGUEZ TORNES V. GARLAND 3

political ideology or action, the panel wrote that it had little doubt that feminism qualifies as a political opinion within the meaning of the relevant statutes. The panel concluded that Rodriguez’s testimony concerning equality between the sexes, her work habits, and her insistence on autonomy compelled the conclusion that she has a feminist political opinion. The panel also held that the record compelled the conclusion that Rodriguez’s political opinion was at least one central reason for her past persecution. The panel explained that some of the worst acts of violence came immediately after Rodriguez asserted her rights as a woman, and that the fact that some incidents of abuse may also have reflected a dysfunctional relationship was beside the point, as Rodriguez did not need to show that her political opinion—rather than interpersonal dynamics—played the sole or predominant role in her abuse. By demonstrating that her political opinion was “one central reason” for her persecution, the panel concluded that Rodriguez likewise established that her political opinion was “a reason” for her persecution for purposes of withholding of removal.

Because in granting relief under the Convention Against Torture the agency necessarily determined that Rodriguez carried her burden to prove the other elements of her claims for asylum and withholding of removal, the panel concluded that Rodriguez’s petition presented a recognized exception to the ordinary remand rule under I.N.S. v. Ventura, 537 U.S. 12 (2002) (per curiam). The panel explained that because the agency concluded that Rodriguez met the higher burden of establishing that she is likely to be tortured, she necessarily met the lower burdens for asylum and withholding relief of establishing that she has a well-founded fear, or clear probability, of persecution. Similarly, because the Board determined that the Mexican government would acquiesce to

4 ROGRIGUEZ TORNES V. GARLAND

Rodriguez’s torture, the panel concluded that the Board had necessarily decided that the Mexican government would be unwilling or unable to protect Rodriguez from future persecution. The panel also concluded that because the Board determined that it would be unreasonable for Rodriguez to relocate within Mexico to avoid future torture, she likewise could not relocate to avoid future persecution.

The panel held that Rodriguez was thus eligible for asylum and entitled to withholding of removal, and it remanded for the Attorney General to exercise his discretion whether to grant Rodriguez asylum, and if asylum is not granted, to grant withholding of removal.

Concurring, Judge Paez wrote that in addition to ignoring evidence that Rodriguez was targeted on account of her feminist political opinion, the Board also ignored extensive record evidence from a leading authority on domestic violence that directly rejected the Board’s premise that domestic violence is presumed to be motivated by nothing more than the private dynamics of a “personal relationship.”

CONCURRING OPINION:

PAEZ, Circuit Judge, concurring:

I join Judge Graber’s fine opinion in full. I write separately on a point the court’s opinion does not address. In rejecting Ms. Rodriguez Tornes’s political opinion claim, the BIA suggests that the presence of a “personal relationship” motivation for intimate partner violence implies that there were no intersectional or additional bases for the violence Ms. Rodriguez Tornes experienced. The court’s opinion thoroughly documents the record evidence, which the BIA ignored, demonstrating how Ms. Rodriguez Tornes was targeted for violence by her domestic partners on account of her feminist political opinion. The BIA, however, also ignored extensive record evidence from expert witness Prof. Nancy Lemon, a leading authority on domestic violence, that directly rejects the BIA’s premise that domestic violence is presumed to be motivated by nothing more than the private dynamics of a “personal relationship.”

In contrast to the BIA’s “personal relationship” view of domestic violence,1 Prof. Lemon draws on more than three

1 The BIA cites Matter of A-B-, 27 I&N Dec. 316, 338–39 (A.G. 2018) as the basis for its assumption.

22 ROGRIGUEZ TORNES V. GARLAND

decades of research, writing, legal representation, and lawmaking to explain that “the socially or culturally constructed and defined identities, roles and responsibilities that are assigned to women, as distinct from those assigned to men, are the root of domestic violence.” She analyzes data from the U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics and studies from leading medical and social science publications to highlight “compelling evidence that heterosexual domestic violence is, in significant part, motivated by bias against women and the belief that men are entitled to beat and control women.” Prof. Lemon summarizes cross-cultural studies within the United States and internationally that demonstrate “a correlation between patriarchal norms that support male dominance and violence against women by intimate partners.”

In her report, which the IJ referenced in her decision, Prof. Lemon provides a lengthy examination of social science research exploring how particular behaviors exhibited by male abusers—including emotional abuse, sexual abuse, marital rape, economic abuse, blaming, guilt and using children—are each tied to social belief systems that “men are entitled to dominate and control women because the male sex is considered superior” and operate to “exploit the traditional socially constructed roles, identities, duties and status of women in intimate relationships.” In describing the legal, social, cultural, and political structures that lay the foundations for intimate partner violence, Prof. Lemon explains that “domestic violence is not typically caused by behaviors unique to the victim or by inter-personal dynamics unique to the relationship between the abuser and the abused. . . . Rather, heterosexual male batterers have certain expectations of intimate relationships with regard to which partner will control the relationship and how control will be

ROGRIGUEZ TORNES V. GARLAND 23

exercised. These expectations are premised on a dogmatic adherence to male privilege and rigid, distinct, and unequal roles for women and men.”

The record evidence of Prof. Lemon’s rigorous expert analysis undermines the BIA’s unsubstantiated premise that, unless otherwise shown, domestic violence is a purely private matter. The BIA makes no mention of the record evidence of Prof. Lemon’s expert analysis, let alone the decades of publicly available social science research and public policy that all reject the BIA’s outdated view of domestic violence as a quirk within a “personal relationship.”2 Thus, the BIA’s assertion that domestic violence is presumptively a private matter is not supported by substantial evidence.

2 See e.g., Nina Rabin, At the Border Between Public and Private: U.S. Immigration Policy for Victims of Domestic Violence, 7 Law & Ethics Hum. Rts. 109, 111–12 (2013) (“Fifty years ago, domestic violence was widely understood to be a private matter, and the extent to which it was appropriate for the state to intervene was highly contested. Now, domestic violence shelters, state laws and policies specific to the prosecution of domestic violence crimes, and significant state and federal government support for efforts to eradicate domestic violence are all commonplace. Crucial to bringing about this shift in the state’s role vis-à- vis domestic violence victims has been the acknowledgment of the structural roots of domestic violence. When conceived of as a problem tied to gender subordination and pervasive inequality rather than interpersonal conflict, the violence at issue demands a state response.”); Violence Against Women: Victims of the System, 102d Cong., 63 (1991); Elizabeth M. Schneider, The Violence of Privacy, 23 Conn. L. Rev. 973 (1991); Reva B. Siegel, “The Rule of Love”: Wife Beating As Prerogative and Privacy, 105 Yale L.J. 2117 (1996); Leslye E. Orloff & Janice v. Kaguyutan, Offering A Helping Hand: Legal Protections for Battered Immigrant Women: A History of Legislative Responses, 10 Am. U. J. Gender Soc. Pol’y & L. 95 (2001); see generally Am. Br. of the National Immigrant Women’s Advocacy Project.

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

Congrats to all counsel involved for the “good guys.”

Another completely disastrous performance by the BIA!

Bias, sloppiness, legal errors galore, misuse of the appeals process, dissing experts, ignoring evidence, lousy analysis, an ethically questionable remand attempt by OIL, almost every aspect of the unmitigated professional disaster at the BIA and the failed DOJ is on display in this truly terrible parody of justice. These fundamental defects are what has helped generate incredible backlogs that EOIR and DOJ are attempting to cover up and shift blame to the individuals they systematically malign.

This disgraceful muck heap 🤮 won’t be cleaned up by bogus “case processing requirements!” What this system needs is expertise, fairness, due process, quality control, common sense, and human decency — in huge doses! A complete professional makeover!

Among the many good things about the Circuit decision is that it basically limited the impact of the atrociously wrong Sessions “precedent” in Matter of A-B-, even while overlooking the obvious ethical errors in his maliciously biased dicta and the glaring overarching constitutional problem in his improper interference and participation in the quasi-judicial process. This should be Exhibit 1 in why this process needs to be removed from the DOJ, placed in an independent Article I Court, and a new, qualified Appellate Division with real judges — capable of fairly and efficiently adjudicating asylum cases — selected to replace the BIA.

One particularly cruel, senseless, and inane aspect of the BIA’s attempt to “snuff” the respondent’s asylum application: Because of the essentially uncontested CAT grant, she was going to be allowed to remain in the U.S. anyway! So, this was all about illegally depriving an abused refugee woman of color of her ability to get a green card, become eligible for citizenship, and obtain full legal and political rights in our society! 

Compare the time and effort expended by the BIA in trying to deprive this woman of her human rights with the carelessness and sloppiness of their legal analysis. That’s what the racist-driven “any reason to deny” culture created by Sessions, Barr, and their toadies at EOIR does to our justice system! 

Imagine how much different the “retail level” of American justice would look with real judges and professional administrators, committed to due process, fundamental fairness, and best practices, in charge! Amazingly, that’s what the “EOIR Vision” once was, before the forces of darkness, ignorance, and bias took over the system.

Think of how different the skewed asylum statistics would look if we honored, rather than mocked, our legal obligations to asylum seekers. Think of how many more individuals could fairly and efficiently be welcomed into our country at our borders and abroad in a well functioning system, staffed with professionals, that adhered to the rule of law. Think of how a better, more honest, and more professional Immigration Court could provide positive guidance on how to grant needed protection, rather than gushing forth an endless stream of bogus “how to deny” precedents based on racial and gender bias and specious reasoning.

Professor Nancy Lemon
Professor Nancy Lemon
Hastings Law
Photo: law.hastings.com
Karen Musalo
Professor Karen Musalo
Director, Center for Gender & Refugee Studies, Hastings Law
Blaine Bookey
Blaine Bookey
Legal Director
Center for Gender & Refugee Studies @ Hastings Law
Photo: CGRS website

Obviously, experts like Professor Nancy Lemon, Professor Karen Musalo, and her colleague Blaine Bookey are the types of individuals who should be Appellate Judges at the BIA. The current BIA’s glaring lack of professional competence and its unconscionable abuse of vulnerable asylum seekers, particularly the institutional ignorance and shameless misogyny with which claims by women refugees are treated, has to be one of the darkest and most inexcusable chapters in modern American legal history!

Food for for thought:

  • How would an unrepresented individual, particularly one in detention or stuck on a street corner in Mexico, be able to prepare, document, and present a case like this to a biased court and then appeal successfully to the Circuit?
  • How is this system constitutional in any way, shape, or form?
  • How might the massive investment of resources, time, effort, and expertise in vindicating the legal and human rights of one individual in a broken system be redeployed to promote systemic fairness and efficiency in a court system that actually complied with constitutional due process?

And, we shouldn’t forget that the Biden Administration is still illegally killing off asylum seekers at the border with no due process at all! Cowardly inflicting human misery on the most vulnerable in violation of our Constitution, our laws, and our international obligations has become our “new national pastime!”

We might be averting our eyes from the slaughter now, but history will document and remember what the world’s richest nation did to our fellow humans seeking protection in their hour of direst need! No wonder we must dehumanize “the other” to go on with our daily lives. No wonder that racial and social justice remain elusive, unfulfilled concepts, throughout our society, in today’s “What’s in it for me” atmosphere promoted by many of our politicos!

🇺🇸⚖️🗽Due Process Forever!

PWS

04-06-21