"The Voice of the New Due Process Army" ————– Musings on Events in U.S. Immigration Court, Immigration Law, Sports, and Other Random Topics by Retired United States Immigration Judge (Arlington, Virginia) and former Chairman of the Board of Immigration Appeals Paul Wickham Schmidt. To see my complete professional bio, just click on the link below.
Anti-Chinese Poster Public RealmSkeleton in the Closet Public RealmJessica Pearce Rotondi American Freelance Writer & Editor PHOTO: Facebook
Before the Chinese Exclusion Act, This Anti-Immigrant Law Targeted Asian Women
The 1875 Page Act was one of the earliest pieces of federal legislation to restrict immigration to the United States.
Jessica Pearce Rotondi Mar 19, 2021
The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 is often seen as the first major law to restrict immigration in the United States. But there is an earlier law that was used to effectively prevent Chinese women from immigrating to the United States: The Page Act of 1875.
Chinese Immigration in America
The first Chinese immigrants began arriving in the United States in the 1850s. Many were fleeing the economic consequences of The Opium Wars (1839-42, 1856-60), when the British fought to keep opium trafficking routes open in defiance of China’s efforts to stop the illegal trade. An ensuing series of floods and droughts drove members of the lower classes to leave their farms and seek new work opportunities abroad.
When gold was discovered in California in 1848, more and more Chinese immigrants traveled to the West Coast to join the Gold Rush. Some worked on American farms or in San Francisco’s growing textile industry. Others were employed as laborers with the Central Pacific and Transcontinental railroads—railroads which would speed up Westward expansion and facilitate
https://www.history.com/news/chinese-immigration-page-act-women?c…21-0329-03292021&om_rid=&~campaign=hist-inside-history-2021-0329 Page 1 of 7
Before the Chinese Exclusion Act, This Anti-Immigrant Law Targeted Asian Women – HISTORY 3/29/21, 11:35 PM
the movement of troops during the Civil War.
Despite their pivotal role in building the infrastructure of the United States, racism directed at Chinese immigrants was a constant from the moment they arrived on American shores.
. . . .
Both European and Asian immigrants came to the United States seeking to improve their economic well being, explains Dr. Melissa May Borja, assistant professor in the Department of American Culture at the University of Michigan. But Chinese immigrants were regarded as a bigger threat.
“They were seen as a racial threat to a pure white America. They were seen as an economic threat to free white labor. They were depicted as a disease threat—a lot of anti-Chinese rhetoric hinged on portraying Chinese people as filthy and disease-ridden. They were also seen as a religious and moral threat as heathens who threatened a Christian America.”
. . . .
Chinese women were perceived as a particular type of threat: A sexual one. “They were stereotyped as promiscuous, as prostitutes,” says Borja.
While there were Chinese women working in the sex industry in the mid-19th century, they were singled out from their white peers: “Chinese women were specifically accused of spreading sexually transmitted diseases. They were scapegoated. That sexualized stereotype stuck,” says Dr. Kevin Nadal, professor at the City University of New York and vice president of the Filipino American National Historical Society.
Did you know? The earliest known Chinese woman to immigrate to America, Afong Moy, arrived in New York from Guangzhou in 1834. She had bound feet and was exhibited as a curiosity across the United States, first by traders Nathaniel and Frederick Carne and later by American promoter and circus founder P. T. Barnum.
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Read the full article at the link.
The ugly history of abuse, vilification, sexualization, and racism directed at Asian American women has deep roots. It’s the history of the “real America” — essentially a “white’s only” sociopolitical structure engrafted on a national economy and culture built on the backs of black, Asian, Hispanic, and immigrant labor. The history that today’s GOP both doesn’t want you to learn while they generate hate directed at people of color and strive to repeat the mistakes and “reprise” the false racist narratives of the past.
The answer to the question posed is actually simple. As of today, DHS Enforcement and politicos at the DOJ “own” the so called Immigration “Courts” lock, stock, and barrel!
That’s an overt violation of the clear Fifth Amendment requirement that those whose lives and property are at stake be judged by a fair and impartial adjudicator — by definition one who is an expert in asylum law, human rights, and has demonstrated the ability to conduct fair hearings.
That’s also bad news for the Hispanic Community, because for the last four years those wholly owned “courts” have been operating with a clear bias against the civil and human rights of people of color, with Hispanic migrants and asylum seekers being a particular target — one that has adversely affected, even terrorized, Hispanic communities throughout the U.S. Hispanics are also grossly underrepresented among the “Immigration Judiciary” at both the trial and appellate levels, as well as on the Article III Bench — despite there being scores of Hispanic and other lawyers of color out here who would be head and shoulders above many of those currently holding these critical “life or death” judgeships!
The real questions are:
1) What can we do about it, and
2) How can we get Judge Garland and others in the Administration to listen, put an end to “Dred Scottification,” and get started on the task of bringing due process and fundamental fairness to a totally dysfunctional and dangerously biased system?
Tune in on April 7 to join the dialogue on how we can finally force the U.S. Government to make good on its unfulfilled, even mocked, Constitutional promise of due process for all persons!
🇺🇸⚖️🗽🧑🏽⚖️Due Process Forever!
“Eyore In Distress” Once A Symbol of Fairness, Due Process, & Best Practices, Now Gone “Belly Up”
Leon Krauze in the WashPost tells us what’s really happening at the border. WARNING: It has little to do with the myths and false narratives being peddled by the GOP, the Administration, and the media.
The current emergency at the border has found the U. S. media at its most solipsistic. Coverage seems more focused on whether the emergency should be called “a crisis” (it should) and what the political fallout for the Biden administration will be. With few exceptions — like the remarkable work of MSNBC’s Jacob Soboroff or Politico’s Sabrina Rodriguez — many news outlets seem utterly uninterested in the stories of the migrants themselves.
This is wrong because it fails to provide one crucial piece of the puzzle: the very concrete context of human suffering.
. . . .
This by no means excuses the stories of anguish and confinement that have emerged over the last few weeks from within the facilities set up by the Biden administration to deal with the number of young migrants crossing the border, nor does it absolve the president himself from delivering on his promise of a humane immigration system, diametrically opposed to Trump’s cruel policies, designed in collaboration with unapologetic racist xenophobes like Stephen Miller.
The Biden administration can and should do better. But the current debate cannot ignore the very concrete despair facing thousands of immigrant families who, under the direct threat of violence or abuse, chose to push their young children to the United States, in search of safety.
If the alternative was famine, gang violence, kidnapping, rape or sexual slavery, wouldn’t you bet it all on the journey north? If more people understood this, the political debate and the coverage surrounding the crisis would be much more empathetic and we would get closer at delivering concrete, humane solutions.
Now, let’s hear more “simple truth” from Suzanne Gamboa over at NBC News:
Suzanne Gamboa, Political Editor, NBCLatino, NBC NewsDate: October 21, 2013 Place: Washington, DC Credit: Maria Patricia Leiva/OAS Creative Commons License
America’s immigration impasse — an endless loop across different administrations — is largely self-inflicted, because Congress has repeatedly failed to acknowledge one simple thing: Immigration happens.
Accordingly, immigration laws must be continually adjusted, reformed and revised, experts say.
“People will always want to come to the U.S., and the U.S. will always need people,” said former Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez, who was a top immigration adviser to President George W. Bush.
Until there is a system that allows enough legal immigration to meet the economy’s needs, there will be illegal immigration, Gutierrez said.
“That’s just part of how our economy is set up. It’s part of demographics,” Gutierrez said. “Our birthrate is not high enough to be able to fill the needs of our economy.”
The coronavirus pandemic reinforced the importance of immigrant labor to the American economy, including labor by the undocumented.
All of those people and many other immigrants, including young immigrants — often called “Dreamers” based on never-passed proposals in Congress called the DREAM Act — will play a key role in helping the economy recover from its pandemic bust.
But immigration requires periodic calibration, and the economics and the changing patterns are lost in the politics.
“People are going to move — as they are all around the world — where they think they can find places to better feed their children. That’s the bottom line, and that’s the history of migration to the United States,” said Luis Fraga, director of the Institute for Latino Studies at the University of Notre Dame.
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Everyone should read the rest of the stories at the above link.
Degrading Ourselves As A Nation Won’t Stop Human Migration
By Judge (Ret) Paul Wickham Schmidt
“Courtside” Exclusive
March 26, 2021
Notwithstanding the endlessly disingenuous and self-centered alarmist rhetoric coming from all directions on the border mess, often mindlessly regurgitated by the press (not just Fox News), the real “crisis” involves the human lives at stake and the unnecessary human misery we are causing by failing to establish, professionally staff, and fairly and competently operate the legal refugee and particularly asylum systems required by law. This “due process crisis” actually has devastating and debilitating practical effects, starting with the dysfunctional immigration, refugee, and asylum system and the beyond dysfunctional Immigration Courts.
Heck, we don’t even pretend to comply with Constitutionally-required due process of law for asylum seekers who present themselves to us seeking life-saving refuge. Most of those who show up at legally-established border ports are told that the border is “closed” and that there is no way for them to apply. OK, so they attempt to cross between ports and immediately present themselves to the Border Patrol. But, they also are told there is no way to apply and are orbited back to some of the most dangerous countries in the world without any process whatsoever, let alone due process of law. Who are we kidding with all our dishonest pontificating about “the rule of law?”
It’s a strange way to implement the statutory command that any foreign national “irrespective of . . . status, may apply for asylum,” along with a constitutional guarantee that “No person shall . . . be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.” Gee, you don’t even need one of those fancy Ivy League law degrees to understand that language. You just have to be able to read, comprehend, and act.
What you do have to do to get where we are today is to view asylum seekers and other migrants (predominantly people of color) as less than human — “non-persons” in a constitutional sense. It’s what some of us call “Dred Scottification of the other” and it has accelerated over the past four years — not just in immigration.
The whole idea of a “court system” being run by the Executive who also is the chief of enforcement is beyond constitutionally preposterous. It’s a “negative tribute” to the Supremes and other Article III life-tenured judges who have grown so distant from their own humanity and immigration stories as to become willfully blind to the ongoing farce that constitutes “justice” and “due process of law” for asylum seekers and other immigrants in the U.S.
Today’s nearly non-existent “asylum system” is a deadly and illegal “catch 22,” with the Supremes sitting in their marble palace refusing to do the primary task that justifies their continued existence: enforce the Constitution against Government misbehavior and in favor of the “little guys” and the “vulnerable.” No thanks, not up to the job!
The real tragedy is that there are plenty of folks out here with the knowledge, integrity, courage, and ability to establish a legal system that would actually comply with out laws, our Constitution, and further offer the hope of constructively addressing some problems before refugees arrive at our borders. But, they remain “benched,” even by the Biden Team. So the “good guys”are going to keep attacking the corrupt and broken system in court and at the polls for as long as it takes to get some course correction — years, decades, centuries — ask most African Americans how long it takes to achieve the true justice that America promises to all, but historically has only delivered to some.
In the long run, a fair system would undoubtedly accept many more legal refugees and asylum seekers. That’s what happens in refugee situations — it’s the core of what we call “forced migration” — when you sign on to international conventions intended to prevent the “next holocaust,” and you fairly and humanely apply the rules meant to protect refugees and those who face torture. And, as they have in the past, the overwhelming number of refugees and asylees, like the overwhelming majority of immigrants (essentially all of us, except Native Americans) will adapt, fit in, and contribute to the health, wealth, and future of our nation. They will change, but so will we — ultimately for the better!
Sure, America wouldn’t be as white, “Christian” (to the extent that adherence to a nominal Christian denomination, rather than actually performing Christ’s extremely difficult, self-sacrificing, risky, compassionate mission, defines Christianity), and nominally heterosexual as it was when White Nationalist myths and whitewashed history ruled the roost. But, it would be a better nation — one that actually has a chance of prospering, realizing the full potential of all its residents, and leading the world in the 21st century. A nation that could devote more human, natural, and monetary resources to building and exporting greatness, rather than to an endless stream of cruel, inhuman, stupid, and wasteful enforcement and deterrence gimmicks.
Bottom line, folks are going to come to America, as they have throughout history. Some will stay, some won’t. But, come they will, unless and until those like Trump and the GOP create such a mess that our own people start fleeing to foreign shores. Immigration, regardless of status, is a sign of strength. Xenophobia a sign of fatal weakness.
Our real choice isn’t whether we want to “close” borders, bar refugees, and abuse children as the Cottons, Cruzes, Millers, and Hawleys advocate. It’s whether we create a robust, orderly, rational legal system to screen, regulate, and distribute the inevitable flow or whether, as we have for the past decades, we force millions to reside and work underground — part of an “extralegal” or “black market” system that pols of both parties and those who profit from that underground system have created.
Sprawling mismanaged enforcement bureaucracies, dysfunctional “courts,” armies of publicly-paid lawyers defending the indefensible, for-profit civil prisons, big agriculture, hospitality giants, loads of upwardly mobile professionals who need child care to pursue careers, communities that live off of marketing ethnic culture, meat packing conglomerates, architects and construction firms who are “building America,” even news media fixated on hyping the problem rather than fixing it (see, e.g., yesterday’s Biden press conference), the list of those who profit from a talented, hard working, reliable, loyal, yet politically and socially disenfranchised, workforce is endless.
Even the GOP’s “Cotton-Cruz crowd” benefits from having an imaginary enemy to rant and rail and gin up hate against — safe in the knowledge that the tanking of our economy, upheaval of society, and possible threat to their privilege that would result from realizing their disingenuous call to boot the entire undocumented population will never happen. Their kids and grandkids can continue to reap the privilege that comes from exploiting an essential, yet politically neutered, workforce. It’s really more about institutionalizing racism to maintain economic and political power over the eventual non-white majority that drives their bogus and ugly narratives.
We can degrade ourselves as a nation, but it won’t stop human migration!
🇺🇸⚖️🗽🧑🏽⚖️Due Process Forever! It’s a vision based on a written promise, not a “pipe dream!”
Reade Levinson Reporter, ReutersKristina Cooke Reporter, ReutersMica Rosenberg National Immigration Reporter, ReutersBIA Asylum Panel In Action Albrecht Dürer, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Reade Levinson, Kristina Cooke, & Mica Rosenberg report for Reuters:
(Reuters) – On a rainy September day in 2018, Jeff Sessions, then U.S. attorney general, addressed one of the largest classes of newly hired immigration judges in American history.
“The vast majority of asylum claims are not valid,” he said during a swearing-in ceremony in Falls Church, Virginia, according to his prepared remarks. If judges do their job, he said, “the number of illegal aliens and the number of baseless claims will fall.”
It was a clear message to the incoming class: Most of the immigrants who appear in court do not deserve to remain in the United States.
As U.S. President Joe Biden works to undo many of the restrictive immigration policies enacted by former President Donald Trump, he will confront one of his predecessor’s indelible legacies: the legion of immigration judges Trump’s administration hired.
The administration filled two-thirds of the immigration courts’ 520 lifetime positions with judges who, as a whole, have disproportionately ordered deportation, according to a Reuters analysis of more than 800,000 immigration cases decided over the past 20 years.
Judges hired under Trump ordered immigrants deported in 69% of cases, compared to 58% for judges hired as far back as the administration of President Ronald Reagan. Because hundreds of thousands of immigrants have cases before the court each year, that 11 percentage-point difference translates to tens of thousands more people ordered deported each year. Appeals are rarely successful.
Biden has promised to dramatically expand the courts by doubling the number of immigration judges and other staff. That’s a worthwhile effort, said Stephen Legomsky, a former chief counsel of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services who is now a professor emeritus at Washington University School of Law in St. Louis. “But the challenge is going to be tremendous.”
Although there are no statutory limits on the number of judges who can be hired, expanding the court would be costly and could take years, immigration law experts said.
“The fact that these (Trump-era) judges are already in place inhibits him a great deal,” Legomsky said of Biden.
Stephen Miller, the key architect of Trump’s immigration agenda, told Reuters that the administration had aimed to hire more immigration judges as part of an effort to “create more integrity in the asylum process” and quickly resolve what he termed meritless claims to cut down on a massive backlog.
“Most of the people that are coming unlawfully between ports of entry on the southwest border are not eligible for any recognized form of asylum,” Miller said in an interview. “There should be a very high rejection rate.”
Under U.S. law, immigrants are eligible for asylum only if they can prove they were being persecuted in their home countries on the basis of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group or their political opinions. Miller said many migrants arriving at the border are coming for economic reasons and present fraudulent asylum claims.
Sessions, who as attorney general had the final say in hiring immigration judges, told Reuters that “the problem is not with the Trump judges. The problem was with some of the other judges that seemed to not be able to manage their dockets, or, in many cases, rendered rulings that were not consistent with the law.
The Trump administration’s successors to Sessions, who was forced out in 2018, did not respond to requests for comment.
. . . .
“There has been a significant lack of basic understanding of immigration law and policy with many – not all – but many of the new hires under the Trump administration,” said Susan Roy, an attorney and former immigration judge appointed during the administration of President George W. Bush who has represented immigrants before some new judges.
Reuters spoke with eight other former immigration judges, five of whom served under Trump, who generally echoed her view. Sitting immigration judges are not permitted to speak to the media.
Even for judges with immigration backgrounds, the type of experience they have has been controversial. In 2017, a report commissioned by the Justice Department found a lack of diversity of experience among judges hired, due to an excess of former prosecutors here from Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
. . . .
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Read the rest of the report at the link.
Hon. Sue Roy is a distinguished member of our Round Table of Former Immigration Judges 🛡⚔️ now in private practice representing asylum seekers and other migrants in Immigration Court.
Hon. Charles Honeyman, quoted elsewhere in the article, is also a member of the Round Table who actually was removed from a case for failing to carry out what he believed to be improper instructions from his “supervisors” who were implementing Sessions’s anti-immigrant policies.
Stephen Legomsky is a former USCIS SeniorExecutive and esteemed retired Professor who generally is acknowledged as one of American’s leading scholar-experts on immigration and human rights.
Judge Dana Leigh Marks, quoted elsewhere in the article, is a former President of the NationalAssociation of Immigration Judges who also successfully argued the landmarkSupreme Courtcase INS v. Cardoza-Fonseca, which established the generous well-founded fear standard for asylum.
Sessions and Miller are notorious White Nationalist xenophobes who have neither represented asylum seekers nor been Immigration Judges. Their efforts to eradicate international norms and legal protections for vulnerable asylum seekers, and their particular bias against female asylum seekers, have been widely criticized and panned by human rights experts throughout the world, as well as enjoined or overruled by some U.S. Courts. They were architects of the widely condemned child separation policy and the New American Gulag (“NAG”).
EOIR is the failed DOJ agency that houses the dysfunctional Immigration Courts.
Jacqueline Thomsen Courts Reporter National Law Journal
Jacqueline Thomsen reports for the National Law Journal:
. . . .
Even with an emoluments lawsuit filed against Trump on his first day in office, four years later nothing came of it. After he left office, the lawsuits were declared moot by the U.S. Supreme Court and dismissed.
The struggle to legally hold Trump to account over the alleged emoluments violations were emblematic of the rest of the lawsuits he faced during his presidency, whether they targeted him individually or his administration.
When lower courts ruled against Trump officials—as they did in suits over border wall construction—his administration would go to the U.S. Supreme Court to get an emergency order that allowed them to continue the challenged action. More often than not, Trump got a ruling in his favor.
“Trump could count on them for anything,” Norm Ornstein, a conservative resident scholar with the American Enterprise Institute, said of Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito.
“And certainly that’s the case with Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett,” he added, referring to the three justices Trump appointed to the court.
And the novel legal questions surrounding lawsuits against a sitting president were enough to significantly delay several other challenges against him. House cases dragged out as courts determined whether lawmakers had the ability to sue to enforce subpoenas against the administration, a legal issue that forced similar suits to halt for months.
Despite two impeachments, hundreds of lawsuits against his administration and other litigation targeting him and his businesses, Trump left office relatively legally unscathed. Armed with a litigious past and a grip on his political party, he successfully managed to use the country’s institutions to minimize the blowback and get his way.
. . . .
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Those with NLJ access (everyone used to get 3 free articles/mo; now it’s down to one) can read the rest of Jacqueline’s article at the link. She’s a great writer. Too bad so much of her work is “hidden behind the wall.”
Lack of accountability for scofflaw behavior, abuse of power, and corruption are hallmarks of third-world dictatorships and authoritarian regimes throughout history.
The Supremes’ enabling started with the Travel Ban cases and continued to the Capitol insurrection, which “the complicit ones” were able to watch unfold from their marble palace across the street.
So, the Supremes, the institution whose most important job is to protect American democracy, democratic institutions, due process, and individual rights when the other two branches fail, wasn’t up to the job! Despite the Supremes’ best efforts to undermine democratic governance, and their active furthering of the GOP’s race-driven voter suppression agenda, 81 million voters bailed us out this time around. But, it’s highly unlikely that American democracy could survive another “Trump-type” authoritarian regime. Don’t expect any help from the Supremes as currently comprised.
Elizabeth Gibson Attorney, NY Legal Assistance Group Publisher of “The Gibson Report”
COVID-19 & Closures
Note: Policies are rapidly changing, so please verify information with the government and colleagues.
EOIR Status Overview & EOIR Court Status Map/List: Hearings in non-detained cases at courts without an announced date are postponed through, and including, March 19, 2021 (The timing of postponement notices has been inconsistent and it is unclear when the next announcement will be. EOIR announced 3/19 on Wed. 2/10, 2/19 on Mon. 1/25, 2/5 on Mon. 1/11, and 1/22 on Mon. 12/28). There is no announced date for reopening NYC non-detained at this time.
Reuters: U.S. President Joe Biden on Wednesday revoked a proclamation from his predecessor that blocked many green card applicants from entering the United States.
Politico: ACLU Executive Director Anthony D. Romero was quick to welcome Mayorkas’ announcement, but cautioned that “the devil is in the details and Secretary Mayorkas has to shed all the caveats and qualifications around his announcement and follow through with everything that’s necessary to right the wrong.” See also Lawyers have found the parents of 105 separated migrant children in past month.
NYT: The two leaders, who previously talked about ways to stem migration in a call on Jan. 22, just days after Mr. Biden took office, are expected to discuss addressing the root causes of persecution and poverty that force Central American families to flee to the United States.
WaPo: Government officials say the camp is needed because facilities for migrant children have had to cut capacity by nearly half because of the coronavirus pandemic. At the same time, the number of unaccompanied children crossing the border has been inching up, with January reporting the highest total — more than 5,700 apprehensions — for that month in recent years.
Politico: U.S. District Judge Drew Tipton granted a preliminary injunction that blocks the moratorium the Biden administration announced on its first day.
WaPo: U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers have tapped a private database containing hundreds of millions of phone, water, electricity and other utility records while pursuing immigration violations, according to public documents uncovered by Georgetown Law researchers and shared with The Washington Post.
InTheseTimes: According to the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) — the Justice Department agency that oversees these immigration adjudication centers — nearly 300,000 asylum cases have been heard via videoconference in the past two years.
NPR: Nana Gyamfi, Executive Director of the Black Alliance for Just Immigration, tells NPR’s Scott Simon about challenges Black immigrants to the U.S. face.
NBC: The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau on Monday filed a lawsuit against Libre by Nexus, claiming the company is preying on immigrants through a bond scam that traps participants into paying expensive fees.
Examiner: Protocols for caring for families and children, border wall infrastructure, decriminalizing illegal immigration, immigration courts, employment-based immigration, and private detention facilities were not addressed in either the House or Senate versions of the bill.
USCIS has launched a temporary pilot program to facilitate attorney or representative participation in an asylum interview from a remote location via video or telephone. The pilot program is available only at the Arlington, Boston, Miami, Newark, and Newark/Manhattan Branch asylum offices. AILA Doc. No. 21030131
Law360: A fractured Second Circuit panel tossed an El Salvadoran asylum seeker’s appeal, finding that his opposition to gangs was not a political opinion and that he could avoid future beatings, a view the dissenting judge called an “uncharitable” interpretation of the case.
BIA ruled that an applicant for special rule cancellation of removal under INA §240A(b)(2) based on spousal abuse must demonstrate both that the abuser was their lawful spouse and was either a U.S. citizen or LPR at the time of the abuse. Matter of L-L-P-, 28 I&N Dec. 241 (BIA 2021) AILA Doc. No. 21022432
Law360: A pair of thorny immigration cases “baffled” and “confused” the inquisitive justices of the U.S. Supreme Court Tuesday as they wrestled with when testimony of asylum applicants must be presumed to be credible.
A district court grants nationwide preliminary injunction to prohibit enforcement and implementation of the 100-day pause on removals as outlined in the 1/20/21 DHS memo. (State of Texas v. USA, et al., 2/23/21) AILA Doc. No. 21012634
On 2/24/21, President Biden issued Proclamation 10149 revoking Proclamation 10014, section 1 of Proclamation 10052, and section 1 of Proclamation 10131, which suspended immigrant visas due to the 2019 novel Coronavirus outbreak. (86 FR 11847, 3/1/21) AILA Doc. No. 21022490
DOS updates its announcement and FAQs on the phased resumption of visa services following the rescission of Presidential Proclamation 10014, which suspended the entry of certain immigrant visa applicants into the United States. AILA Doc. No. 20071435
Documented: Judge Alison Nathan’s Nov. 30 ruling at U.S. District Court in Manhattan was the first to draw a constitutional line on how long an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainee waits for an initial hearing before a judge.
Law360: A Florida federal judge ruled Friday that a Mexican citizen can join a class action challenging U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement detainee conditions at three South Florida facilities during the COVID-19 pandemic, saying the agency cannot escape jurisdiction by transferring him to a facility across the country.
AIC: The Council and partners filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit to compel the government to release documentation of three raids on a humanitarian aid station in the deadly desert in Southern Arizona.
The Department of Health and Human Services published a notice stating that it is no longer pursuing changes to the forms for sponsors of unaccompanied children on which it had requested public comment on 1/5/21 at 86 FR 308, and therefore withdraws its request for comment. (86 FR 11537, 2/25/21) AILA Doc. No. 21022531
DHS: Secretary Mayorkas announced that Michelle Brané will serve as the Task Force’s Executive Director. Most recently, she served as the senior director of the Migrant Rights and Justice program at the Women’s Refugee Commission.
RESOURCES
· Correction: The ERO ombudsman email that was circulating last week had a typo and should be: EROOmbudsman@ice.dhs.gov.
Check out “Top News #7.” It’s an article by Arvind Dilawar in In These Times about “EOIR’s Black Sites,” 🏴☠️ euphemistically known as “Immigration Adjudication Centers” where imposters masquerading as “judges” “process” cases by TV on the deportation assembly line, often without regard to the law, the facts, and the humanity of their victims and the lawyers representing them.
Here’s an excerpt:
Lisa Koop, associate director of legal services for the National Immigrant Justice Center (NIJC), stood with her client in immigration court in September 2019. The client (name withheld for privacy) had escaped violence in Central America and fled to the United States with her young daughter. Here, they were taken into custody by immigration authorities, which landed them in this courtroom, waiting to hear whether they would be granted asylum.
They were initially scheduled with a traditional, in-person immigration judge. But that judge retired and the case was transferred to an “immigration adjudication center.” This new judge video conferenced in. Koop says the judge did not allow an opening statement, was not familiar with relevant precedent and did not ask Koop to address any particularities of the case in the closing argument. The judge ruled that, while the case was “very sad,” it did not meet the criteria for asylum, then wished Koop’s client “good luck” following deportation.
This outrageous mockery of due process, fundamental fairness, and real judicial proceedings is ongoing, in the Department of “Justice” — yes, folks, the Chief Prosecutor of the U.S. maintains his own “wholly owned” “court system”in a nation where justice supposedly is unbiased and impartial — more than five weeks into the Biden Administration.
Last week, we heard a refreshingly emotional expression of personal gratitude and recognition of the essential role of refugee protections from Judge Merrick Garland.
What we haven’t heard to date is a recognition that what will soon be “his” DOJ treats refugees (in this case vulnerable asylum seekers) with disdain and disrespect “revved up” by four years of White Nationalist abuses heaped on them by Judge Garland’s corrupt predecessors as AGs for Trump. We also have yet to hear what Judge Garland plans to do about the deadly and disreputable “EOIR Clown Show” 🤡🦹🏿♂️ which will soon be operating under his auspices and which, whether he realizes it or not, will form the the major part of his legacy to American Justice.
Judge Garland should call up folks like Lisa Koop at NIJC, Claudia Valenzuela at American Immigration Council, andtheir colleagues to get a “real life dose” of what it means to be or represent an asylum seeker in today’s dysfunctional and disreputable Immigration “Courts” that actually are 21st Century Star Chambers.
“Justice” Star Chamber Style
Better yet, he should replace the current EOIR Senior Executives and BIA Appellate Immigration Judges with Koop, Valenzuela, and others like them — “practical experts” in due process, equal justice, immigration, and human rights — who would restore and advance judicial integrity and fairness to a system that has abandoned and trampled upon those fundamental values!
G. Reaper Approaches ICE Gulag With “Imbedded Captive Star Chamber” Run By EOIR, For Their “Partner” Reaper Image: Hernan Fednan, Creative Commons License
As stated at the end of Dilawar’s article:“Asylum-seekers are wrongfully denied asylum, and justice is not served.” Duh!
🇺🇸🗽⚖️Due Process Forever! End the EOIR Clown Show!🤡🦹🏿♂️🎪☠️
Quick: You’re a lawyer and your client is on trial for inciting a violent insurrection. The problem is, he’s guilty beyond a shadow of a doubt. Literally, there is no question whatsoever that he did what he’s been accused of—none! Whatsoever! And everyone knows it! To wonder if he’s guilty is to look at O.J. Simpson and think, “Well, the glove doesn’t fit, so who knows?” Nevertheless, you’ve been hired to defend him—after basically everyone else in your profession refused—and defend him you will! But how? If you’re Donald Trump’s attorneys, the answer is clearly: Lie, lie, play some Madonna clips, and lie some more.
There were far, far too many lies told over the course of Bruce Castor Jr., David Schoen, and Michael van der Veen’s presentation to catalog them all. In fact, it would be easier to simply point out the rare moments in which they did tell the truth. But, just for posterity’s sake, here were some of the biggest whoppers the defense team told as it claimed that Trump wasn’t responsible for the rally that took place at the Capitol on January 6:
Trump never intended for “the joint session [of Congress] be prevented from conducting its business”: This is obviously completely false and the reason we know that is because Trump repeatedly tried to get Mike Pence to stop Congress from doing just that, reportedly telling the V.P., “You can either go down in history as a patriot, or you can go down in history as a pussy.”
The rioters were mostly antifa, and one of the first people arrested was a member of the left-wing group: This, like virtually all of Trump’s lawyers’ claims are not true. The first person arrested was John E. Sullivan, who has denied being a member of antifa, and the FBI has said there is zero evidence that the supporters’ movements participated in the riot, no matter what Trump’s most shameless loyalists say. (Rep. Matt Gaetz, for instance, falsely claimed, “They were masquerading as Trump supporters and, in fact, were members of the violent terrorist group antifa.”)
A prior protest in front of the White House was just as bad: Referring to the June protest in front of the White House, van der Veen claimed “violent rioters” attacked officers and “at one point, pierced a security wall, culminating in the clearing of Lafayette Square.” (1) There was no breach; (2) five people didn’t die (3) the people who were hurt were the protesters tear-gassed so that Trump could do a photo shoot with a bible outside a church (an event that, surprisingly, did not result in him bursting into flames).
“The reality is Mr. Trump not in any way shape or form instructing these people to fight or use physical violence. What he was instructing them to do was to challenge their opponents in primary elections, to push for sweeping election reforms, to hold Big Tech responsible—all customary and legal ways to petition your government for redress of grievances which of course is also protected Constitutional speech.” Right, right, sure, sure. Trump totally wasn’t encouraging his supporters to air their grievances via violence, he just wanted them to push for election reforms. He just wanted them to form political action committees, you see! Run for office! Fight ideological differences at the ballot box! It’s actually extremely impressive van der Ween was able to get through this whole thing without bursting into laughter, and for that he should win some kind of award (and then lose his license to practice law).
“There was no insurrection”: There was! We all saw it! If you missed it, just google “Capitol riot” or “Capitol attack” or “Trump insurrection.”
In addition to the many lies told by Trump’s defense, his legal team also proffered a series of arguments for why he couldn’t possibly be found guilty that sound like something a bunch of stoned college kids came up with shortly before a mock trial they forgot to prepare for, which is actually an insult to stoned college kids unprepared for mock trials. Specifically, we’re talking about the series of clips the defense presented showing various Democrats using the word “fight,“ which they claim means Trump can’t also be held responsible for telling his supporters to “fight,“ because other people have said “fight” before and they weren’t found guilty of inciting insurrections. (Naturally, they left out the part about how, for instance, when Elizabeth Warren told supporters to “fight” they didn’t proceed to storm the Capitol and try to burn down democracy):
Or that, when Chuck Schumer said “fight” he was talking about fighting COVID-19. Yes, this a real thing that actually happened:
And yes, there was also this:
Of course, the bald-faced lies and complete lack of convincing arguments will clearly do little to sway the majority of Republicans, who have already decided how they’re going to vote, which we know because they‘ve already said as much and also because during the question-and-answer portion of the day, a typical question posed of the attorneys went something like, “Can you tell us how it’s possible that President Trump has not been named People’s Sexiest Man Alive yet? Is it because the media is in the can for liberals? Because we can’t think of another explanation!”
Anyway, Madonna, eh? Someone better impeach that menace, ASAP!
Just in case there was any question re: whether or not Trump loved the insurrection he personally set into motion…
CNN reports that the ex-president insisted the rioters were patriots in a call with House leader Kevin McCarthy:
In an expletive-laced phone call with House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy while the Capitol was under attack, then President Donald Trump said the rioters cared more about the election results than McCarthy did. “Well, Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are,” Trump said, according to lawmakers who were briefed on the call afterward by McCarthy.
McCarthy insisted that the rioters were Trump’s supporters and begged Trump to call them off. Trump’s comment set off what Republican lawmakers familiar with the call described as a shouting match between the two men. A furious McCarthy told the president the rioters were breaking into his office through the windows, and asked Trump, “Who the f–k do you think you are talking to?” according to a Republican lawmaker familiar with the call.
“I think it speaks to the former president’s mindset,” Rep. Anthony Gonzalez, an Ohio Republican who voted to impeach Trump last month, told CNN. “He was not sorry to see his unyieldingly loyal vice president or the Congress under attack by the mob he inspired. In fact, it seems he was happy about it or at the least enjoyed the scenes that were horrifying to most Americans across the country.”
In reality, as others have observed, the “defense team” could have read old copies of the Congressional Record or all the baseball scores from the 2019 season from the podium and it wouldn’t have made any difference to corrupt GOP Sens who had already decided to acquit notwithstanding the overwhelming evidence of guilt.
The indifference and boredom with the suffering of others and the clear misdeeds of Trump exhibited by scumbags like Cruz (who actually helped prepare the inept “defense”), Hawley, Cotton, et al, was pretty telling. Obviously, they wouldn’t have cared a fig if Trump’s rioters had done in Pence, Romney, or any other of their “colleagues.”
It’s all about the next election and destroying American democracy.
My favorite part is when the Trump defense Team kept whining about the rights of 74 million who voted for the The Big Clown. It’s like their attempt to disenfranchise and diss the 81+ million of us who didn’t vote for Putin’s Puppet are irrelevant? But, that’s always been the way the “modern GOP” has “governed.”
Right now, the GOP is hard at work at the state level trying to disenfranchise as many Black and Brown voters as possible in advance of the 2022 elections.
Remember all the great “bipartisanship” and concern with the legislative process on the tax giveaway (nobody actually read it, clearly not Trump) or the unsuccessful attempt to “do in” Obamacare. Lots of great “bipartisanship” on display with the Coney Barrett confirmation and the confirmation of a steady stream of Federalist Society judges.
The current GOP is an ongoing threat to the national security and well-being of our nation.
Maria Sacchetti Immigration Reporter, Washington Post, Photo: WashPostArelis R. Hernandez Southern Border Reporter Washington Post, Photo: WashPost
By Maria Sacchetti and Arelis R. Hernández in WashPost:
Prominent Black lawmakers are urging the Biden administration to stop expelling migrants to nations such as Haiti that are engulfed in political turmoil, fearing that they could be harmed or killed.
Hundreds of immigrants have been swept out of the United States in recent days, a blow to groups that had been counting on President Biden and Vice President Harris, the daughter of immigrants and the first Black vice president, to halt deportations and overturn the Trump administration’s hard-line immigration policies.
Biden attempted to pause most deportations on Jan. 20, but a federal judge temporarily blocked the move. Immigration officials say the recent removals match Biden’s new enforcement priorities — such as people who recently crossed the border or who were convicted of serious crimes — but advocates say immigrants are being sent to nations where they could face danger.
“The community should not still be in panic across this nation when we have an administration that is willing to do the work of stopping these deportations,” Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) said Friday in a call with reporters. “They have the authority to say no more flights will leave the United States.”
Migrants who cross the border are still being removed under a Trump administration order that allowed the expulsion of recently arrived people under Title 42, Section 265, of the public health law that aims to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. Advocates for immigrants tracking the flights say Immigration and Customs Enforcement has expelled approximately 900 Haitians, including dozens of children, in the past two weeks.
Advocates for immigrants say the situation is urgent, as Haiti and nations in Africa are facing varying threats. Haiti, the Western Hemisphere’s poorest country, has seen its democracy plunge into a constitutional crisis with allegations of a coup attempt and conflicting claims to the presidency.
. . . .
ICE deported New York resident Paul Pierrilus to Haiti on Feb. 2, even though he has never been to that country and has lived 35 of his 40 years in the United States.
He had fought deportation since 2004 after a drug conviction. His parents are of Haitian descent, but they are U.S. citizens and Pierrilus was born on the Caribbean island of St. Martin.
Haiti had never recognized him as a citizen, he said, but an immigration judge ordered him deported more than 16 years ago and he lost his appeals.
In an interview, Pierrilus described how he had to be dragged off the airplane. He wore the parka he used to wear in New York into the tropical 85-degree air. He said he is stunned and defeated.
“I’m not a Haitian citizen! I’m not a Haitian citizen!” Pierrilus recalled yelling as local officials pushed him onto a bus. “I felt helpless because it’s a situation out of my control. It’s a situation I can’t do anything about. No one is hearing what I’m saying.”
. . . .
*********************
Read the complete article at the link.
The Pierrilus story is particularly indicative of ICE’s attitude toward people of color: If he’s black send him to Haiti, ask questions later!
Courtside was “on top” of Ed Pilkington’s recent Guardian article on deporting babies and children to total disorder and danger in Haiti.
Remember, creating an atmosphere of fear and terror in ethnic communities throughout the United States was a key priority of the Trump White Nationalist kakistocracy — with a some help from the Supremes’ majority. It has been very successful. In fact, as noted by Vice President Harris, hate crimes directed against Asian Americans are up astronomically.
But, of course, there aren’t any Asian American Justices, are there? So, out of sight out of mind for perhaps Ameria’s “least representative” court (with the possible exception of the EOIR “courts”).
I’ve consistently been making several points that others are finally starting to pick up on and that will be essential for Biden Administration policy makers to keep in mind:
The issues of racial justice and immigrant justice are deeply intertwined — one can’t be solved without addressing the other;
Dehumanization of “the other” (Black, Latino, Asian-American, women, immigrants, asylum seekers, etc.) — “Dred Scottification” — has been promoted over the past four years and essentially endorsed and furthered by a tone-deaf Supremes’ majority;
Racist attitudes and misogyny are deeply ingrained in the current DHS and EOIR (now operating as an adjunct of DHS Enforcement) enforcement mechanisms and in some of the personnel carrying out enforcement policies, including some EOIR judges;
An aura of impunity and unaccountability infects both DHS and DOJ;
Racial justice and equal justice under law will not be achieved without significant personnel and attitude changes at the “retail level” of both DHS and EOIR.
Finally, complaining is a start. But, it won’t result in the necessary systemic changes.
The only way that African-American, Hispanic-American, Asian-American, and female lawmakers are going to get durable change is by prevailing on their colleagues to recognize the humanity of all persons in the United States and to make the necessary statutory changes in the immigration laws, beginning, but not ending, with an independent Article I Immigration Court.
Dumping Asylum Seekers in Honduras Artist: Monte Wolverton Reproduced under license“She struggled madly in the torturing Ray” Amazing StoriesArtist Unknown, Public domain, via Wikimedia CommonsNina Lakhani Central American Reporter, The Guardian, Photo: TheDailyBeast.com
Keyla Martínez screamed for help from inside the police cell, but no one came to save her.
Martínez, a 26-year-old trainee nurse from La Esperanza, western Honduras, died in police custody last weekend after being detained for breaching a coronavirus curfew.
Police officers initially claimed Martínez had killed herself. But a preliminary autopsy found she had died from “mechanical asphyxiation” and prosecutors announced they were investigating her death as a murder.
How Honduras became one of the most dangerous countries to defend natural resources
She was the latest victim in a relentless wave of misogynistic killings and state-sponsored violence in Honduras – one of the most dangerous and corrupt countries in the Americas. Twenty-nine women have been killed so far this year in Honduras, which has a population of about 9 million – only slightly more than New York City.
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This week, security forces have teargassed protesters demanding truth and justice for the young nurse. Human rights groups are also demanding accountability amid the alarming escalation of deadly violence against women. At least six women have been killed since Martínez died.
“This killing has all the hallmarks of an extrajudicial execution and must be investigated as such,” said Erika Guevara-Rosas, Americas director at Amnesty International.
“Grave human rights violations such as the killing of Keyla Martínez do not happen in a vacuum. They are the product of rampant impunity and the lack of political will to address the human rights crisis in Honduras. This dire context has produced a relentless and widespread stream of abuses by state security forces.”
Honduras is one of the most dangerous countries in the world to be a woman or girl. It is a deeply machista society where conservative church leaders exert a powerful influence over the personal and political spheres – including women’s access to reproductive healthcare and protection from violence.
Last month, congress voted to amend the constitution to make it virtually impossible to overturn the country’s abortion laws – which are already some of the strictest in Latin America.
In 2009, a coup orchestrated by a network of military, economic, political and religious elites, ushered in an authoritarian government, which remains in power despite multiple allegations of corruption, extrajudicial killings, electoral fraud and ties to international drug trafficking networks.
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Since then emigration has risen dramatically, as hundreds of thousands of men, women and children have fled north looking for safety and jobs. A culture of impunity has also meant that violence against women has only worsened.
In the decade before the coup, 222 women were murdered annually, according to analysis by the Centre for Women’s Studies – Honduras (CEM-H). In the past five years, 381 have been killed on average annually. Ninety-six per cent of the murders remain unsolved.
Honduras lawmakers seek to lock in ban on abortion for ever
“The militarization of the country since the coup has increased the threat to women’s lives, there are guns everywhere and we know the police have links to criminal gangs,” said Suyapa Martínez (no relation to Keyla Martínez) from CEM-H, a feminist organisation based in Tegucigalpa.
. . . .
**************
Read the rest of the article at the link.
Refugee women continue to flee Honduras, even though the Trump regime misogynist nativists have skewed asylum law to make it more difficult for them to gain legal protection.
The Biden Administration has directed consideration of gender-based asylum regulations. It’s hardly a new idea — former AG the late Janet Reno ordered development of regulations regularizing the granting of “gender-based” asylum claims two decades ago.
Those efforts were basically sabotaged by DOJ bureaucrats and litigators more interested in narrowing asylum eligibility and making denials easier to defend than they were in protecting women — one of the world’s most persecuted groups by any reasonable accounting.
After years of screwing around, including eight years of inaction during the Obama Administration, super-misogynist and anti-asylum racist Stephen Miller arrived. He perversely came up with absurdly illegal regulations that incredibly purported to bar gender-based asylum claims! Those illegal (not to mention immoral) regulations have been enjoined. Nevertheless, the anti-asylum, anti-woman, anti-Latino attitudes and “judicial” decision-making at EOIR and DHS remain deeply ingrained!
The lesson: Changing policies in the bureaucracy requires something in addition to high level support. It requires bureaucrats who actually believe in the change and are committed to making it happen! That’s why dismantling the Trump immigration kakistocracy and getting better qualified individuals at all levels is so important.
Moreover, for lasting “Miller proof” change: Get it into legislation!
“Eyore In Distress” Once A Symbol of Fairness, Due Process, & Best Practices, Now Gone “Belly Up”BIA Asylum Panel In Action Albrecht Dürer, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons“Justice” Star Chamber StyleKate Voigt Senior Associate Director of Government Relations AILA PHOTO: AILA
In just four years, President Trump implemented radical changes that fundamentally compromised the integrity of the immigration courts. This policy brief explains the most critical and urgent changes President Biden should make to the immigration court system to ensure fairness and impartiality.
*****************
Download the complete policy brief at the link.
Thanks, Kate!
Great report!
I hope you have arranged to have a copy of this delivered to Judge Garland, Vanita Gupta, and Lisa Monaco. As you know better than anyone, every day the current BIA remains empowered to grossly distort and intentionally misapply the law and dish out injustice is another day of outrageous abuse for migrants and psychological harm inflicted on their representatives.
It is also essential that the folks in MPP and others applying at our borders are represented and judged according to a properly fair and generous interpretation of our asylum laws (as you point out, no more “99% denial club” assigned to Central American cases). Along with bogus “no show” rates, artificially inflated asylum denial rates have been used as key parts of the false narrative to smear and dehumanize asylum applicants at our Southern Border.
🇺🇸⚖️🗽🧑🏽⚖️👨🏻⚖️👩⚖️Due Process Forever!
Thanks again for all you and your colleagues do, and best wishes,
Supremes Sign Death Warrants For Vulnerable Refugees, Trash Refugee Act of 1980Dumping Asylum Seekers in Honduras Artist: Monte Wolverton Reproduced under licenseA girl peers out from an encampment at the U.S.-Mexico border where she and several hundred people waited to present themselves to U.S. immigration to seek asylum. / Photo by David Maung
by Adolfo Flores and Hamed Aleaziz in BuzzFeed News:
After days of confusion about changes along the southern border, the Biden administration on Wednesday said immigrants should not try to enter the US because most will still be turned away under a Trump-era policy that has recently come under legal scrutiny.
. . . .
Confusion about who was being allowed into the US in recent days forced the administration to issue a stronger warning. Last week, reports of some families being allowed into the US after being apprehended at the border resulted in speculation that immigrants would no longer be immediately expelled and instead be allowed to fight their immigration cases from within the United States. In the Rio Grande Valley in South Texas, immigration advocates have reported seeing about 100 people a day released by Customs and Border Protection. In other parts of Texas, shelters have also seen increasing numbers of immigrant families, but it is not clear why.
Attorneys and advocates who work with immigrants along the border have been bombarded with phone calls and texts about whether they should try their luck at getting into the US. Erika Pinheiro, policy and litigation director with the immigrant advocacy group Al Otro Lado, said it was “incredibly disappointing” that the Biden administration has continued to expel immigrants under the CDC order.
“We know now that the CDC order prohibiting asylum processing at the border did not arise from public health concerns but rather was part of Stephen Miller’s efforts to dismantle the US asylum system and was implemented despite opposition from CDC leadership,” Pinheiro said, referring to one of Trump’s former senior advisers. “US expulsions of asylum-seekers, including infants, constitute plain violations of domestic and international laws meant to protect vulnerable refugees. CBP absolutely has the resources to process asylum-seekers in a safe and humane way.”
The turnbacks, known as expulsions, are legally different from deportations, which would mean an immigrant had actually undergone the immigration process and found to not be legally allowed to stay in the US. Critics say the government is using the public health orders as an excuse to turn back immigrants at the border.
. . . .
“While we recognize that the Biden administration has been saddled with a lot of bad policy and structural problems, it cannot continue the Trump administration practice of turning away people in danger based on illegal policies, such as the notorious and pretextual Title 42 policy,” said Lee Gelernt, an attorney with the ACLU.
. . . .
**********************
Read the full article at the link.
“Go suffer and die somewhere else, out of our sight,” might not be the best message for an Administration trying to re-establish its human rights and humanitarian leadership and credentials.Ever hear of the “St. Louis Incident?” It’s always easy to find a way to “just say no” to refugees — and the consequences are seldom pretty.
Those who won’t learn from history are destined to repeat it. Refugee and forced migration situations happen in the “here and now;” they can’t be “back burnered” — no matter how much policy officials might wish otherwise. In a forced migration situation, “doing nothing” is an action that produces consequences for both the forced migrant and those who ignore their plight.
There are many daily potentially deadly and dehumanizing consequences of continuing to ignore asylum laws and Constitutional due process for asylum seekers at our Southern Border.
One predictable one: Instead of turning themselves in at the border or to the Border Patrol shortly after entry, as had been happening until Miller & co. intervened, those seeking refuge apparently have gotten the message that our legal system is and remains a sham for them. Consequently, increasingly they are simply evading the Border Patrol and disappearing into the interior with no screening whatsoever — health, legal, or background. Also, by intentionally driving people out of the legal system, the Administration is totally blowing a chance to harness and build upon one of the most powerful known facts — represented individuals with asylum hearings scheduled show up for their hearings!
According to an article in today’s Washington Post, the estimated number of so-called “get always” — actually human beings seeking refuge — hit 1,000 on Sunday.
Sure, there are many aspects of this problem. But, it has been “out there” for nearly a year!
Sure seems to me that with the right experts in charge, including folks like Lee Gelernt and Erika Pinhero, this issue could and should have been addressed more constructively and with much more urgency by the Biden Administration by now. Why not harness the expertise and proven problem solving abilities of folks like Lee, Erika, and many other members of the New Due Process Army rather than fighting with and resisting them?
Instead, it looks like time and resources will continue to be wasted on forcing policy changes through litigation. Meanwhile, vulnerable asylum seekers and their families will continue to suffer as illustrated by this recent article from HuffPost about the human consequences for those caught up in the Government’s scofflaw border policies.
NOTE TO PRESIDENTIAL PRESS SECRETARY JEN PSAKI: Sorry, Jen, but those fleeing for their lives don’t generally respond well to “don’t come right now, we don’t want you” messages, particularly from folks who have never been in that situation themselves. It’s actually pretty insulting to think that folks fleeing to the U.S. 1) aren’t smart enough to know the dangers involved; 2) don’t realize that the the U.S. Government doesn’t want them; and/or 3) have choices about their travel as Jen and her buddies might have when planning a summer vacation.
As one of my esteemed colleagues once told me: “Desperate people do desperate things.” What about people who keep repeating the same policy mistakes over and over while expecting different results and failing to grasp either the absolute urgency or the human side of forced migration issues? It’s sort of like going to the emergency room with a burst appendix and being told, “Why don’t you just sit in the waiting room until we doctors figure out what to do? Get back to you later!”
Somewhere out there, Stephen Miller must be gloating about how he totally outsmarted and outflanked the Biden Team!
🇺🇸⚖️🗽Due Process Forever! Oh, when will they ever learn, when will they learn?
PWS
02-11-21
UPDATE: THE CONTINUING REAL TRAUMA CAUSED BY THE “REMAIN IN MEXICO PROGRAM” (A/K/A “LET ‘EM DIE IN MEXICO”) WHILE THE BIDEN ADMINISTRATION “STUDIES” THEIR NEXT MOVE:
Emily Green writes in Vice, as reposted in ImmigrationProf Blog:
“Eyore In Distress” Once A Symbol of Fairness, Due Process, & Best Practices, Now Gone “Belly Up“She struggled madly in the torturing Ray” Amazing StoriesArtist Unknown, Public domain, via Wikimedia CommonsDan Kowalski Online Editor of the LexisNexis Immigration Law Community (ILC)
Dan Kowalski reports for LexisNexis Immigration Community:
“Diaz de Gomez claims that she received repeated death threats from a gang in Guatemala after she and her family witnessed a mass killing by gang members and refused to acquiesce to the gang’s extortion and other demands. … [W]e reject the Board’s “excessively narrow” view of the nexus requirement, and conclude that Diaz de Gomez established that her familial ties were one central reason for her persecution. … We also hold that the record conclusively establishes that the Guatemalan government was unable or unwilling to control Diaz de Gomez’s persecutors. We therefore grant the petition for review and remand for the Board to reconsider Diaz de Gomez’s claims in light of our holdings.”
So, let’s compare the 4th Circuit’s view with the most recent abomination and intentional misconstruction of the “unable or unwilling to control” doctrine by totally unqualified political hack Jeffrey Rosen, then impersonating the “Acting Attorney General” and issuing clearly unconstitutional “precedents” to implement the defeated regime’s racially biased, misogynistic, anti-asylum agenda.
Talk about “crimes against humanity!” ☠️🏴☠️ Certainly, every current civil servant who supported and advanced this bogus designation should be held accountable.
Kakistocracy Kills: Obviously, with better qualified judges, competent representation, and a fair system operated in accordance with due process and a proper interpretation of asylum laws, many of those now being arbitrarily, capriciously, and unlawfully turned back at our borders would be entitled to our legal protection. This is life or death, not a problem that can “wait till tomorrow” to be addressed! Every day that the patently inadequate “judges” currently on the BIA remain in their positions means more injustice, trauma, and even death for legitimate asylum seekers!
From Justice Elena Kagan’s dissent in South Bay United Pentecostal Church v. Newsom:
I fervently hope that the Court’s intervention will not worsen the Nation’s COVID crisis. But if this decision causes suffering, we will not pay. Our marble halls are now closed to the public, and our life tenure forever insulates us from responsibility for our errors. That would seem good reason to avoid disrupting a State’s pandemic response. But the Court forges ahead regardless, insisting that science-based policy yield to judicial edict.
Justice Elena Kagan Photo: Mike Ball Creative Commons License
Ruth Marcus writes about U.S. District Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson in WashPost:
. . . .
Still, Jackson, named to the district court by Obama in 2013, brings to the bench an intriguing — and for the Democratic Party’s restless progressives, attractive — piece of career diversity as well: experience as a public defender.
No current Supreme Court justice has the perspective of having been a public defender, representing indigent defendants, although several — Justices Samuel A. Alito Jr., Sonia Sotomayor and Brett M. Kavanaugh, in his role as associate independent counsel — have prosecutorial experience.
For Jackson, the daughter of two public school teachers (her father later became a lawyer), the criminal justice system has an unusually personal wrinkle as well: Her uncle was convicted of a low-level drug crime when she was a senior in high school, and was sentenced to life in prison under a draconian three-strikes law. (He had been convicted previously of two minor offenses.) He ended up receiving clemency from Obama after serving three decades.
She also brings the real-world perspective of a working mother. In a remarkably candid speech at the University of Georgia in 2017, Jackson described the challenges she encountered juggling private practice at a major law firm, marriage to a surgeon and motherhood to two young daughters.
“I think it is not possible to overstate the degree of difficulty that many young women, and especially new mothers, face in the law firm context,” she observed. “The hours are long; the workflow is unpredictable; you have little control over your time and schedule; and you start to feel as though the demands of the billable hour are constantly in conflict with the needs of your children and your family responsibilities.” How refreshing to hear from a self-confessed non-Superwoman.
. . . .
But a more obscure ruling, involving William Pierce, a deaf D.C. man who was imprisoned for 51 days after a domestic dispute, may offer more insight into Jackson’s belief in law as a mechanism for achieving justice. Corrections officials did nothing to accommodate Pierce’s disability, as the law requires, ignoring his repeated requests for a sign-language interpreter.
Jackson assailed prison officials’ “willful blindness regarding Pierce’s need for accommodation.” She said it was “astonishing” for D.C. to claim that it had done enough, when “prison employees took no steps whatsoever” to figure out how to help him. And she took the unusual step of ruling for Pierce even before trial.
You can learn a lot about a judge by the way she handles the biggest-profile cases, involving those at the highest levels of government. But perhaps the more revealing test is how she applies the law to help those with the least power and the greatest need for justice.
U.S. District Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson Washington D.C. Official Photo Creative Commons License
*****************************
Read the full articles at the above links. “Willful blindness” and intentional abuses intended to “dehumanize” are daily occurrences in our warped and broken “immigration justice system” as almost any immigration/human rights/civil rights lawyer could tell you. It just operates below the radar screen, on the border, or in foreign countries (to which vulnerable humans seeking legal refuge are arbitrarily and capriciously “orbited”) where the very human trauma, torture, sickness, desolation, despair, and death are “out of sight, out of mind” to most Federal Judges and Justices.
Yes, eventually journalists and historians will document for posterity the disastrous human rights abuses in which the Federal Judiciary is complicit. But, by then it will be far too late for those who have suffered and died while those in black robes shirked their legal and moral duties!
Judge Jackson understands exactly what’s missing from today’s all too often elitist, non-diverse, non-representative Federal Judiciary (including much of the Immigration Judiciary) who are tone-deaf to, and insulated from, responsibility for the human trauma and injustice caused by their bad decisions.
Additionally, I can assure Justice Kagan that vulnerable refugees and asylum seekers (including children) have died and unnecessarily suffered lifetime trauma from the Supremes’ willful failure to enforce the Constitution against overt Executive tyranny in cases involving the “Remain in Mexico” (“Let ‘Em Die In Mexico”) Program, return of asylum seekers to torture and death with no due process whatsoever, and the “Muslim Ban.”
Indeed, the Supremes’ majority’s abdication of responsibility in the latter case led directly to Trump’s eventual insurrection against the Capitol. He was assured early on by Roberts and others that he was above the Constitution, uncountable, and exempt from normal conventions governing human decency and treatment of the most vulnerable among us in the 21st Century. I/O/W, “Dred Scottification” of the “other”— a 21st Century “Jim Crow Regime” — was A-OK with the GOP Supremes’ majority “forever insulat[ed] . . . from responsibility for [their] errors.”
Today in particular, our nation still struggles with the sense of impunity and unaccountability improperly conferred by a dilatory Supremes’ majority on their party and its leader. Insurrection, violence, attempted overthrow of democracy — it’s all “no problem” to a tone-deaf Supremes’ majority unconcerned with the fate of our democracy.
After all, the Trump’s magamoron rioters weren’t storming their marble halls — just those of the supposedly co-equal branch across the street. But, what might have happened if they had actually stood up against Trump? He might have identified them as “the enemy” and sent his rioters their way! Worth thinking about, Oh Cloistered Ones far removed from the pain and suffering you help cause and countenance!
A better judiciary 🧑🏽⚖️👨🏻⚖️👩⚖️ for a better America! Bring on the “practical scholars” and those with actual experience representing the mostly vulnerable among us (asylum seekers are a prime example) in court.
While Donald Trump failed to pass much signature legislation and largely failed to remake the federal government in ways that cannot be immediately corrected, his landmark achievement will be his lasting contributions to the federal judiciary. Breaking the records of his predecessors, Trump seated 234 judges on the federal courts in four years, including three at the Supreme Court. That means that whatever Biden and the Democrats try to do in the coming months and years, most of the efforts will ultimately be in the hands of life-tenured judges, 30 percent of whom were named by Trump. Those judges are overwhelmingly very young, very white, and very male. A preview of what’s likely to come happened just last week, when a federal judge tapped by Trump blocked Biden’s 100-day deportation “pause” with a nationwide injunction.
The question is what Biden and the Democrats can and will do in response to Trump’s enduring legacy. The new president is already making moves that indicate he understands that some of the norms and conventions that guided Barack Obama in building the judiciary are dead and gone. This week the Washington Post reported that the Biden administration is doing away with the formal American Bar Association vetting process that Democratic presidents used to abide by, because it was jettisoned by Republican presidents and because it simply lengthened the process. Biden is also hustling to put together the bipartisan commission he pledged would examine structural reforms for the Supreme Court and the federal judiciary. Former Wisconsin Sen. Russ Feingold is a leading Democrat attempting to strengthen the left’s ability to appoint judges, to match the pace the right has set. He is the president of the American Constitution Society, the left’s answer to the Federalist Society (we spoke last year when he assumed the post). Given the potential of the current moment for big changes in the judiciary, I wanted to ask him what happens next. Our conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
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Read the rest of the interview at the link.
The disgraceful mess that Trump and McConnell made out of our Federal Judiciary has been a constant theme here @ Courtside over the past four years!
What’s missing from this interview are these fundamental realizations that those of us in the world of immigration and human rights know well but seem to escape most of the others looking to fundamentally change and improve the Federal Judiciary:
There are few things that go on in the Federal Judiciary, at any level, as important to human lives and the future of our nation as what takes place in Immigration Court every day;
The Immigration Courts have hit stunning new levels of dysfunction, incompetence, and intentional injustice over the past four years — they are truly an ongoing national disgrace (“America’s Star Chambers” or “Clown Courts”🤡) and a stain on the humanity of our nation, as well as an abomination that threatens to collapse our entire justice system;
Immigration law and “weaponized” Immigration Courts have been the key to the Trump regime’s attack on American democracy and our Constitutional institutions culminating in the deadly Capitol insurrection;
The Biden Administration has complete authority to fix the Immigration Courts now — no waiting for Justices or Judges to retire, “negotiating with Mitch and the Federalist Society,” waiting for the scheduling of Senate Confirmation hearings, or humoring home state Senators;
Some of the lawyers and advocates who led the legal fight to preserve American democracy over the past four years would be outstanding choices for the Immigration Judiciary (as well as the Article III Judiciary — there is no shortage of diverse progressive talent with “real life retail experience” out here in the NDPA, Russ);
A well-functioning, diverse, independent Immigration Judiciary would not just help advance and enforce the Administration’s progressive, humane, due-process-focused immigration and human rights policies, but also should become a model of “best practices” for the Article III Judiciary, and an extraordinary source of well-trained, experienced, progressive, “practical scholar jurists” for filling positions in the Article III Judiciary;
Better understanding of, and commitment to, humanely and properly administering immigration and human rights laws by Federal Judges — and the total elimination of “Dred Scottification of the other” under law — is the absolutely essential “now-missing key” to achieving racial justice and social justice in America;
America can’t afford the astounding absence of true immigration scholarship, human understanding of immigrants, practical decision making and problem solving, and an overriding commitment to due process for all persons, including asylum seekers and migrants, that now infects the Federal Court system at all levels;
Those seeking to undermine American democracy will continue to exploit the Federal Judiciary’s overall lack of understanding of immigration and human rights laws and their willing abrogation of Constitutional due process and basic concepts of fundamental fairness and human dignity for some of the most vulnerable persons among us — we must fix this problem before it destroys us!
In his first days in office, President Joe Biden has made immigration a key priority for his administration, seeking to distinguish himself from another “deporter in chief,” as activists once called President Barack Obama.
He has issued a series of executive actions aimed at dismantling the Trump administration’s nativist legacy, unveiled an ambitious legislative proposal for immigration reform, begun to roll back a program that has left asylum seekers trapped in Mexico, and sought to enact a 100-day pause on deportations.
On Tuesday, he issued another three executive orders that create a task force to reunite families separated under President Donald Trump and implement measures to remove obstacles to noncitizens seeking to naturalize, enter the US on visas, and obtain asylum or other humanitarian protections. White House press secretary Jen Psaki said to expect additional announcements, including an expansion of the US refugee program, going forward.
For immigrant communities, those changes can’t come soon enough. Democrats have long promised to create a more just immigration system, and Biden’s initial actions have built confidence among some immigrant advocates that he intends to finally deliver, though they wish he would act even more quickly on behalf of people whose lives are hanging in the balance.
The task before Biden is immense. Immigrant communities expect him not just to revert to the Obama-era approach to immigration enforcement, which involved record deportations and an expansion of family detention, but to improve on it. And while Obama failed to pass comprehensive immigration reform or even a narrow bill offering legal protections to “DREAMers” who came to the US without authorization as children, activists see immigration reform as an imperative and are counting on Biden to pass it by whatever means possible.
Though Biden has largely stood by his record as vice president, he has acknowledged that the Obama administration stumbled on immigration, particularly with regard to mass deportations.
“We took far too long to get it right,” Biden told Univision last February. “I think it was a big mistake.”
Since Obama was in office, the public has become more favorable to immigration, in part as a reaction to the shock-and-awe tactics behind the Trump administration’s high-profile travel ban and family separation policies. The Democratic Party is also more unified on immigration, a topic they once regarded as politically radioactive.
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Get the rest of Nicole’s outstanding and highly readable analysis at the link!
As she points out, a major challenge for the Biden-Harris team, Secretary Mayorkas, and incoming AG Garland will be dealing with a totally dysfunctional immigration bureaucracy at DHS and DOJ that often eagerly engaged in and helped promote “crimes against humanity” and unconstitutional dehumanization of migrants under the bogus claim to be “upholding the rule of law.” What absolute poppycock!
