"The Voice of the New Due Process Army" ————– Musings on Events in U.S. Immigration Court, Immigration Law, Sports, Music, Politics, and Other Random Topics by Retired United States Immigration Judge (Arlington, Virginia) and former Chairman of the Board of Immigration Appeals PAUL WICKHAM SCHMIDT and DR. ALICIA TRICHE, expert brief writer, practical scholar, emeritus Editor-in-Chief of The Green Card (FBA), and 2022 Federal Bar Association Immigration Section Lawyer of the Year. She is a/k/a “Delta Ondine,” a blues-based alt-rock singer-songwriter, who performs regularly in Memphis, where she hosts her own Blues Brunch series, and will soon be recording her first full, professional album. Stay tuned! 🎶 To see our complete professional bios, just click on the link below.
The Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” crackdown at the border this spring was troubled from the outset by planning shortfalls, widespread communication failures and administrative indifference to the separation of small children from their parents, according to an unpublished report by the Department of Homeland Security’s internal watchdog.
The report, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Post, is the government’s first attempt to autopsy the chaos produced between May 5 and June 20, when President Trump abruptly halted the separations under mounting pressure from his party and members of his family.
The DHS Office of Inspector General’s review found at least 860 migrant children were left in Border Patrol holding cells longer than the 72-hour limit mandated by U.S. courts, with one minor confined for 12 days and another for 25.
Many of those children were put in chain-link holding pens in the Rio Grande Valley of southern Texas. The facilities were designed as short-term way stations, lacking beds and showers, while the children awaited transfer to shelters run by the Department of Health and Human Services.
U.S. border officials in the Rio Grande Valley sector, the busiest for illegal crossings along the nearly 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexico border, held at least 564 children longer than they were supposed to, according to the report. Officials in the El Paso sector held 297 children over the legal limit.
The investigators describe a poorly coordinated interagency process that left distraught parents with little or no knowledge of their children’s whereabouts. In other instances, U.S. officials were forced to share minors’ files on Microsoft Word documents sent as email attachments because the government’s internal systems couldn’t communicate.
“Each step of this manual process is vulnerable to human error, increasing the risk that a child could become lost in the system,” the report found.
Based on observations conducted by DHS inspectors at multiple facilities along the border in late June, agents separated children too young to talk from their parents in a way that courted disaster, the report says.
“Border Patrol does not provide pre-verbal children with wrist bracelets or other means of identification, nor does Border Patrol fingerprint or photograph most children during processing to ensure that they can be easily linked with the proper file,” the report said.
“It is a priority of our agency to process and transfer all individuals in our custody to the appropriate longer-term detention agency as soon as possible,” U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which includes Border Patrol, said in a statement. “The safety and well-being of unaccompanied alien children . . . is our highest responsibility, and we work closely with the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Office of Refugee Resettlement to ensure the timely and secure transfer of all unaccompanied minors in our custody as soon as placement is available from HHS.”
In its Sept. 14 response to the inspector general’s report, DHS acknowledged the “lack of information technology integration” across the key immigration systems and “sometimes” holding children beyond the 72-hour limit.
Jim Crumpacker, the DHS official who responded to the report, said the agency held children longer mainly because HHS shelter space was unavailable. But he said transferring children to less-restrictive settings is a priority.
On June 23, three days after the executive order halting the separations, DHS announced it had developed a “central database” with HHS containing location information for separated parents and minors that both departments could access to reunite families. The inspector general found no evidence of such a database, the report said.
“The OIG team asked several [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] employees, including those involved with DHS’ reunification efforts at ICE Headquarters, if they knew of such a database, and they did not,” it states. “DHS has since acknowledged to the OIG that there is no ‘direct electronic interface’ between DHS and HHS tracking systems.”
Inspectors said they continue to have doubts about the accuracy and reliability of information provided by DHS about the scope of the family separations.
In late June, a federal judge ordered the government to reunite more than 2,500 children taken from their parents, but three months later, more than 100 of those minors remain in federal custody.
The inspector general’s report also found that U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) restricted the flow of asylum seekers at legal ports of entry and may have inadvertently prompted them to cross illegally. One woman said an officer had turned her away three times, so she crossed illegally.
At one border crossing, the inspection team saw CBP attempt to increase its detention space by “converting former offices into makeshift hold rooms.”
The observations were made by teams of lawyers, inspectors and criminal investigators sent to the border amid concerns raised by members of Congress and the public. They made unannounced visits to CBP and ICE facilities in the border cities of El Paso and McAllen, Tex.
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Meanwhile, over at Vanity Fair, Isobel Thompson give us the “skinny” on how the self-created “Kiddie Gulag” that Sessions, Stevie Miller, and Nielsen love so much has turned into total chaos, with the most vulnerable kids among us as its victims. We’ll be feeling the effects of these cruel, inhuman, and unconstitutional policies for generations!
Three months after Donald Trump gave in to global opprobrium and discontinued his administration’s policy of separating children from their parents at the Mexican border, the stark impact of his zero-tolerance directive continues to unfold, with reports emerging that, in the space of a year, the number of migrant children detained by the U.S. government has spiked from 2,400 to over 13,000—despite the number of monthly border crossings remaining relatively unchanged. The increase, along with the fact that the average detainment period has jumped from 34 to 59 days, has resulted in an accommodation crisis. As a result, hundreds of children—some wearing belts inscribed with their emergency-contact information—have been packed onto buses, transported for hours, and deposited at a tented city in a stretch of desert in Tornillo, West Texas. According to The New York Times, these journeys typically occur in the middle of the night and on short notice, to prevent children from fleeing.
The optics of the child-separation crisis have been some of the worst in history for the Trump administration, and the tent city in Tornillo is no exception. The facility is reportedly run according to “guidelines” provided by the Department of Health and Human Services, but access to legal aid is limited, and children—who sleep in bunks divided by gender into blocks of 20—are given academic workbooks, but no formal teaching. In theory, the hundreds of children being sent to Tornillo every week should be held for just a short period of time; the center first opened in June as a temporary space for about 400. Since then, however, it has been expanded to accommodate 3,800 occupants for an indefinite period.
Again, the lag time is largely thanks to the White House. Typically, children labeled “unaccompanied minors” are held in federal custody until they can be paired with sponsors, who house them as their immigration case filters through the courts. But thanks to the harsh rhetoric embraced by the White House, such sponsors are now in short supply. They’re often undocumented immigrants themselves, which means that in this environment, claiming a child would put them at risk for deportation. In June, that risk became even more acute when authorities announced that potential sponsors would have to submit their fingerprints, as well as those of any adults living in their household: data that would then be passed to immigration authorities. Matthew Albence, who works for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, unwittingly illustrated the problem when he testified before Congress last week that I.C.E. had arrested multiple people who had applied to sponsor unaccompanied minors. Almost three-quarters had no criminal record.
Over time, the number of detained children is only expected to increase. According to The Washington Post, the flood of Central American immigrants moving north, driven by “hunger, joblessness, and the gravitational pull of the American economy,” shows no sign of abating. The number of men who cross the border with children has reportedly risen from 7,896 in 2016 to 16,667 this year, while instances of migrants falsely claiming children as their own have reportedly increased “threefold.” “Economic opportunity and governance play much larger roles in affecting the decision for migrants to take the trip north to the United States,” Kevin McAleenan, a border-security official, told the Post, adding that “a sustained campaign that addresses both push and pull factors” is “the only solution to this crisis.”
Given the attitude of the current administration, such a campaign seems unlikely to materialize. With Congress poorly positioned to pass comprehensive immigration reform, and a suddenly swamped detention system draining money and resources and damaging the mental health of thousands of children, the escalating crisis seems poised to become an ever more serious self-inflicted thorn in the president’s side. Although the White House is confident that, as hard-liner Stephen Miller boasts, it can’t lose on immigration, it will at some point be forced to acknowledge that its draconian strategy has morphed into chaos.
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Wonder if any of these evil dudes who along with Sessions helped plan and implement the “Kiddie Gulag” knowing that it was likely in violation of the Constitution (in Federal court, DOJ lawyers didn’t even contest that a policy of intentional child separation would be unconstitutional) took out the “Bivens Insurance” offered to USG employees at relatively low-cost (I sure did!).
The only good news is that they are likely to be tied up in law suits seeking damages against them in their personal capacities for the rest of their lives!
So, perhaps there will eventually be some justice! But, that’s still won’t help traumatized kids whose lives have been screwed up forever as an illegal, immoral, and bogus, “deterrent” by a racist White Nationalist regime.
Trump’s immigration policies have especially affected women and domestic violence victims
By: Tal Kopan, CNN
The Salvadoran woman could not escape her ex-husband’s abuse. Even after their divorce, he tracked her down in a town two hours away, raped her, and separately had a friend and his police officer brother threaten her directly. So she snuck into the US and applied for asylum.
Then Attorney General Jeff Sessions used her case to make it extremely difficult for her and women like her to get those protections.
The identity of the woman in the case remains anonymous. But her story is too familiar for the advocates and attorneys who work with thousands of immigrant women and immigrant women victims seeking the right to stay in the country.
Despite their stated objectives of cracking down on criminals and fraud, many of the Trump administration’s immigration policies have especially impacted the vulnerable and victims.
One policy change that could deter women victims from reporting their crimes takes effect Monday as the Senate deliberates whether to confirm Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh amid assault allegations against him, which he has vehemently denied.
Some of the changes were barely noticed. Others, like Sessions’ overhaul of asylum law, have generated numerous headlines.
But the sum total of those policies could put an already particularly vulnerable population even at risk, advocates who work with women say. And that could empower abusers and predators even further, they add, making everyone less safe.
The policies
A policy takes effect on Monday that could increase the risk of deportation for undocumented immigrant victims or witnesses of crimes. The agency that considers visa applications will begin to refer immigrants for deportation proceedings in far more cases, including when a person fails to qualify for a visa. The policy would also constrain officers’ discretion.
The new US Citizenship and Immigration Services policy specifically applies to visas designed to protect victims of violent crime and trafficking, including some created under the Violence Against Women Act. Those visas will give legal status to victims who report or testify about crimes.
The result: Victims who apply for the special visas but fall short, including for reasons like incomplete paperwork or missing a deadline, could end up in deportation proceedings. Previously, there was no guidance to refer all visa applicants who fall short to immigration court for possible deportation. Under the new policy, it’ll be the presumption. Advocates for immigrants worry the risk will be too great for immigrants on the fence about reporting their crimes.
In the Salvadoran woman’s case, Sessions ruled in June that gang and domestic violence victims generally don’t qualify for asylum, and the Department of Homeland Security applied those rules to all asylum seekers at the border and refugees applying from abroad.
Other policies that especially impact women and victims include:
‘I wouldn’t wish it even on my worst enemy’: Reunited immigrant moms write letters from detention
By Tal Kopan, CNN
The women say they were treated like dogs and told that their children would be given up for adoption. They lied awake at night, wondering if their kids were safe.
But even after being reunited with their children, they say their nightmare has not ended.
Their anguish is conveyed in a collection of letters written from one of the few immigrant family detention centers in the country, where some moms and children who were separated at the border this summer are now being held together while they await their fate. The mothers’ writings reflect a mix of despair, bewilderment and hope as they remain in government custody and legal limbo, weeks after they were reunited.
“My children were far from me and I didn’t know if they were okay, if they were eating or sleeping. I have suffered a lot,” wrote a mother identified as Elena. “ICE harmed us a lot psychologically. We can’t sleep well because my little girl thinks they are going to separate us again. … I wouldn’t want this to happen to anyone.”
The letters reflect the scars inflicted at the height of family separations this summer, when thousands of families were broken up at the border and kept apart for weeks to months at a time. They also reflect the ongoing uncertainty and emotional recovery for the families that are still detained.
The letters were collected at the Dilley detention center in Texas. They were provided via the Dilley Pro Bono Project by the Immigration Justice Campaign, a joint effort by leading immigrant advocacy and legal groups to provide access to legal support in immigrant detention centers.
The mothers speak with the Dilley Pro Bono staff in visitation trailers in the evenings and had expressed a desire to tell their stories to the public. The staff suggested writing them down, and the mothers agreed to write the letters, translated from Spanish, under pseudonyms.
Yup. Don’t let all the BKavs commotion distract you from focusing on the daily intentional and gross abuses of human rights and fundamental decency being committed by the Trump Administration.
Think a partisan Trump sycophant like BKavs would ever impartially uphold the rule of law against the abuses of the Trump Administration, particularly when it comes to treatment of women? Not a chance! He’s being put on the Supremes because Trump & the GOP are confident of his predetermined extreme right-wing agenda, his lack of objectivity, and his demonstrated inability to think outside the “box of privilege” which has allowed him to succeed and prosper (often at the expense of others).
ICE official stands by comparing detention centers to ‘summer camp,’ won’t say if he’d send his kids to one
By Tal Kopan, CNN
A senior Trump administration official on Tuesday stood by his controversial comments comparing the detention centers for immigrant families to “summer camp,” but declined to answer whether he’d send his own children there.
The remarks came at a congressional hearing where immigration and border security officials struggled to answer foundational questions from senators about the administration’s push to expand the detention of immigrant families and children.
Democratic Sen. Kamala Harris of California asked Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s chief of arrests and deportations, Matthew Albence, if he stood by his comments earlier this summer that family detention centers are like “summer camp.”
“Absolutely I do,” he said.
But he demurred when asked whether he’d send his own children, or those of people he is close to, to the centers.
“Would you send your children to one of these detention centers?” she asked.
“That question’s not applicable,” he said.
Albence did say the standards for family centers are “very safe” and “humane,” and that at one he had visited, families had access to TVs, food and video games and other activities.
“The point is, the parent made the illegal entry,” Albence said when pressed further. “The parent put themselves in this position.”
The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing topic was ostensibly a court settlement that governs how immigrant children can be treated by the US, including limiting the length of time a family can be involuntarily detained to 20 days. The administration is seeking to nullify that settlement and allow itself to detain far more immigrant families for far longer.
Harris’ line of questioning was one of a series from Democrats, who pressed the officials on why they’d want to expand family detention and child detention despite widely held beliefs among medical professionals that even short periods of detention can inflict permanent and devastating trauma on children. Though the hearing did not include the Department of Health and Human Services, which runs the government’s program for immigrant children who are in the US on their own, senators also asked about the ongoing fallout over family separations and unaccompanied child detention.
Members of both parties pressed as to why the agencies were not pursuing other measures with bipartisan support that could streamline the immigration court system over an expensive effort to vastly expand family detention.
The main benefit would be the creation of a federal licensing scheme for additional Family Residential Centers that would provide care for alien minors and their parents.
Maybe, but if a challenge to the regulation goes to court, the main issue is likely to be whether administration officials can bypass an explicit statutory provision requiring mandatory detention in expedited removal proceedings with a settlement agreement.
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Go on over to The Hill at the link to read the rest of Nolan’s article which contains summaries of the Flores settlement and the expedited removal process.
Mr. Sandoval-Moshenberg, who represented the plaintiffs, said that many parents were evaluated for “credible fear” after having their children removed, but before they were told where the children had been taken. He said his team submitted evidence showing that, during the interviews, the parents were “out of their minds with trauma, focused solely on the well-being and the whereabouts of their kids.”
In one piece of evidence included in the case, a recording of an immigration judge questioning a mother about her asylum claim, the mother can be heard crying too hard to answer the judge’s questions and says that she feels sick, Mr. Sandoval-Moshenberg said. After a few minutes, he said, the judge affirms an asylum officer’s finding that the woman’s fear of returning to her home country is not credible and asks that she be taken to see a doctor.
. . . .
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Read Caitlin’s full article concerning the recent proposed settlement at the above link.
Obvious question: Why would somebody like Jeff Sessions be given authority over a “court system” that is supposed to insure Due Process for asylum applicants? That’s even worse than having the fox guard the henhouse! The results are as horrible and unlawful as they are predictable.
Defendants respectfully object to the appointment of former immigration judge (“IJ”) Carol King as the Flores independent monitor. As an initial matter, while Defendants agree that former IJ King has significant experience with immigration law, Defendants object because former IJ King appears to have little or no direct experience with U.S. Customs and Border Protection (“CBP”) or U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (“ICE”) holding and detention facilities themselves, or more specifically with the conditions at such facilities, the management of such facilities, or the legal standards applicable to such facilities, which go beyond substantive immigration law.
Moreover, former IJ King has no demonstrated background in overseeing complex litigation or compliance with consent decrees. Immigration judges have limited powers delegated to them by regulation to decide individual cases, and only for matters designated to them under the Immigration and Nationality Act. 8 C.F.R. § 1003.10(b). This is very different from the substantial and complex task of overseeing the operations of multiple agencies as is required in the present matter. Given this lack of experience, Defendants disagree that former IJ King would have only a “minimal learning curve” in undertaking to serve as an independent monitor related to the issues in the Court’s June 27, 2017 order.
Defendants also object to the appointment of former IJ King on the ground that she has published a writing to promote her law practice that gives the appearance of a very real and serious bias against the defendants. These sentiments, expressed publicly, at the very least create the appearance that former IJ King would not carry out her duties as special master with the type of impartiality that is required for a quasi-judicial role. These statements criticize a defendant in this matter – the Attorney General – and address policies relating to children subject to the Flores Agreement.
Specifically, on her law office web site, former IJ King states in the “Introduction to Carol King Law Office” that “[t]he current wave of attacks on immigrants [that] has clearly been manufactured . . . to sow division and grab power” includes “those who have been so viciously attacked . . . immigrant parents and young children.” Introduction to Carol King Law Office, July 9, 2018, available at: https://carolkinglawoffice.com/2018/07/09/hello-world/. Former IJ King further states that “[t]he lack of any ethical, moral or compassionate compass reflected in the current administration is more disturbing than anything in recent history[,]” and that the “current actions on the part of the President, Attorney General and administration, which reflect only a commitment to power and to hatred, hurt me so deeply.” Id.
To be sure, there is nothing improper about holding strong views on government policies, but public statements such as these are not consistent with performing the quasi-judicial function of a special master, where officers must meticulously avoid “[c]onduct that compromises or appears to compromise the independence, integrity, and impartiality of a judge” because it “undermines public confidence in the judiciary.” ABA Model Rules of Judicial Conduct 1.2, Comment [3]; see id. Comment [5] (“[t]he test for appearance of impropriety is whether the conduct would create in reasonable minds a perception that the judge . . . engaged in other conduct that reflects adversely on the judge’s . . . impartiality”). The published criticism of a named defendant, and of government policies related to children who are subject to the Flores Agreement, as an introduction to her law practice do not, Defendants submit, meet this exacting standard. A reasonable person could question, in light of such statements, whether former IJ King will be impartial in evaluating compliance with this Court’s orders for facilities that are currently operated by Defendants CBP and ICE, who are agencies of that same administration against which former IJ King has a clearly and publicly expressed bias. Defendants therefore object to the appointment of former IJ King as an independent monitor in this case.
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Let’s get this straight! The DOJ Attorneys who filed this with Judge Gee represent and work for a named defendant Jeff Sessions who:
Unapologetically masterminded the “zero tolerance” policy that resulted in the unconstitutional separation of children and the intentional violation of Judge Gee’s earlier order in the case;
After having his legal arguments soundly rejected by Judge Gee is actively trying to “back door” his contemptuous behavior by proposing unlawful regulations that any reasonable person would know would be “dead on arrival;”
This week told supposedly “fair and impartial” judges who work for him, without any supporting evidence, that “the vast majority of the current asylum claims are not valid under the law;”
Knowingly and intentionally misrepresented the DOJ’s own statistics relating to asylum grants on the merits to understate the grant rates to make them appear to support his false anti-asylum narrative;
Warned Immigration Judges not to be “sympathetic” toward asylum applicants appearing before them in Immigration Court;
Intentionally created a false narrative linking asylum policy to Southern Border arrivals that ignores the majority of reliable studies showing that refugee producing conditions in foreign countries, not changes in US policy, drive individuals to seek refuge;
In the words of AILA, before Immigration Judges expressed his “disdain for lawyers who take a solemn oath to uphold the law” and showed “a complete disregard for the role of independent judges in overseeing our adversarial system;”
In front of a group of Immigration Judges referred to attorneys representing individuals asylum cases (many serving pro bono or “low bono”) as “dirty lawyers;”
Promoted the role of “judges” as enforcement officers rather than fair, impartial, independent adjudicators;
Unethically acted in a quasi-judicial capacity in Matter of A-B- after publicly prejudging the substantive issue in the case during a radio interview.
So, how do these DOJ lawyers, with straight faces and in compliance with their ethical duties, have the audacity to argue the ABA Model Rules of Judicial Conduct against Judge King (who does not currently serve in any judicial capacity) when their own boss and named defendant is in violation of that provision (and also the EOIR’s own rules of judicial conduct). No “reasonable person” would believe that Jeff Sessions, in light of his public antipathy to migrants, asylum seekers, and their lawyers, and his clear, highly inappropriate favoritism for DHS Enforcement could properly and ethically run the Immigration Courts and actually act in a quasi-judicial capacity in individual cases! Yet, he is still doing both, to the detriment of Due Process and the rule of law.
Jeff Sessions has total contempt for the Constitution, the law, and courts of every type (both the ones he controls and the ones he appears before through DOJ attorneys). At some point, the Article IIIs, if they wish to maintain their position as a “separate but equal Branch” are going to have to take on the biased, contemptuous, and overtly unethical performance of Attorney General Sessions head on. Otherwise, he will run right over them as he has the US Immigration Courts and the Constitutional guarantee of Due Process.
Sophia Genovese, Sept. 10, 2018 – “US asylum law is nuanced, at times contradictory, and ever-changing. As brief background, in order to be granted asylum, applicants must show that they have suffered past persecution or have a well-founded fear of future persecution on account of their race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion, and that they are unable or unwilling to return to, or avail themselves of the protection of, their country of origin owing to such persecution. 8 C.F.R. § 1208.13(b)(1) & (2). Attorneys constantly grapple with the ins and outs of asylum law, especially in light of recent, dramatic changes to asylum adjudication.
Even with legal representation, the chances of being granted asylum are slim. In FY 2017, only 45% asylum-seekers who had an attorney were ultimately granted asylum. Imagine, then, an asylum-seeker fleeing persecution, suffering from severe trauma, and arriving in a foreign land where he or she suddenly has to become a legal expert in order to avoid being sent back to certain death. For most, this is nearly impossible, where in FY 2017, only 10% of those unrepresented successfully obtained asylum.
It is important to remember that while asylum-seekers have a right to obtain counsel at their own expense, they are not entitled to government-appointed counsel. INA § 240(b)(4)(A). Access to legal representation is critical for asylum-seekers. However, most asylum-seekers, especially those in detention, go largely unrepresented in their asylum proceedings, where only 15% of all detained immigrants have access to an attorney. For those detained in remote areas, that percentage is even lower.
Given this inequity, I felt compelled to travel to a remote detention facility in Folkston, GA and provide pro bono legal assistance to detained asylum-seekers in their bond and parole proceedings. I travelled along with former supervisors turned mentors, Jessica Greenberg and Deirdre Stradone, Staff Attorneys at African Services Committee(ASC)/Immigrant Community Law Center (ICLC), along with Lucia della Paolera, a volunteer interpreter. Our program was organized and led by the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Southeast Immigrant Freedom Initiative (SIFI). SIFI currently only represents detained asylum-seekers in their bond and parole proceedings in order to assist as many folks as possible in obtaining release. Their rationale is that since bond and parole representation take up substantially less time than asylum representation, that they can have a far greater impact in successfully obtaining release for several hundred asylum-seekers, who can hopefully thereafter obtain counsel to represent them in their asylum proceedings.
Folkston is extremely remote. It is about 50 miles northwest of Jacksonville, FL, and nearly 300 miles from Atlanta, GA, where the cases from the Folkston ICE Processing Center are heard. Instead of transporting detained asylum-seekers and migrants to their hearings at the Atlanta Immigration Court, Immigration Judges (IJs) appear via teleconference. These proceedings lack any semblance to due process. Rather, through assembly-line adjudication, IJs hear several dozens of cases within the span of a few hours. On court days, I witnessed about twenty men get shuffled into a small conference room to speak with the IJ in front of a small camera. The IJ only spends a few minutes on each case, and then the next twenty men get shuffled into the same room. While IJs may spend a bit more time with detainees during their bond or merits hearings, the time spent is often inadequate, frequently leading to unjust results.
Even with the tireless efforts of the Staff Attorneys and volunteers at SIFI, there are simply too few attorneys to help every detainee at the Folkston ICE Processing Center, which houses almost 900 immigrants at any given time, leaving hundreds stranded to navigate the confusing waters of immigration court alone.
During initial screenings, I encountered numerous individuals who filled out their asylum applications on their own. These folks try their best using the internet in the library to translate the application into their native language, translate their answers into English, and then hand in their I-589s to the IJ. But as any practitioner will tell you, so much more goes into an asylum application than the Form I-589. While these asylum seekers are smart and resourceful, it is nearly impossible for one to successfully pursue one’s own asylum claim. To make matters worse, if these asylum-seekers do not obtain release from detention ahead of their merits hearing where an IJ will adjudicate their asylum claim, they will be left to argue their claims in the Atlanta Immigration Court, where 95%-98% of all asylum claims are denied. For those detained and/or unrepresented, that number is nearly 100%.
Despite the Attorney General’s most recent comments that lawyers are not following the letter of the law when advocating on behalf of asylum-seekers, it is clear that it is the IJs, [tasked with fairly applying the law, and DHS officials, tasked with enforcing the law,] who are the ones seeking to circumvent the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA). Throughout the Trump era, immigration attorneys have faithfully upheld asylum law and have had to hold the government accountable in its failure to apply the law fairly. Good lawyers, using all of their talents and skill, work every day to vindicate the rights of their clients pursuant to the INA, contrary to Sessions’ assertions.
But more importantly, asylum-seekers have suffered from serious human rights abuses and merit protection under our laws. Their cases are not denied because they are not bona fide. Their cases are not denied because they do not qualify as refugees under the INA. Indeed, most of these asylum-seekers were found to possess a credible fear of return upon their initial apprehension. Through a combination of lack of access to counsel, unfair and uneven adjudication by IJs, and impermissible interference by the Attorney General, credible and bona fide cases are frequently denied.
We’ve previously blogged about the due process concerns in immigration courts under Sessions’ tenure. Instead, I want to highlight the stories of some of the asylum-seekers I met in Folkston. If these individuals do not obtain counsel for the bond or parole proceedings, and/or if they are denied release, they will be forced to adjudicate their claims in the Atlanta Immigration Court where they will almost certainly be ordered removed. It is important that we understand who it is that we’re actually deporting. Through sharing their stories, I want to demonstrate to others just how unfair our asylum system is. Asylum was meant to protect these people. Instead, we treat them as criminals by detaining them, do not provide them with adequate access to legal representation, and summarily remove them from the United States. Below are their stories:
Twenty-Five Year Old From Honduras Who Had Been Sexually Assaulted on Account of His Sexual Orientation
At the end of my first day in Folkston, I was asked to inform an individual, Mr. J-, that SIFI would be representing him in his bond proceedings. He’s been in detention since March 2018 and cried when I told him that we were going to try and get him out on bond.
Mr. J- looks like he’s about sixteen, and maybe weighs about 100 pounds. Back home in Honduras, he was frequently ridiculed because of his sexual orientation. Because he is rather small, this ridicule often turned into physical assault by other members of his community, including the police. One day when Mr. J- was returning from the store, he was stopped by five men from his neighborhood who started berating him on account of his sexual orientation. These men proceeded to sexually assault him, one by one, until he passed out. These men warned Mr. J- not to go to the police, or else they would find him and kill him. Mr. J- knew that the police would not help him even if he did report the incident. These men later tracked down Mr. J-’s cellphone number, and continued to harass and threaten him. Fearing for his life, Mr. J- fled to the United States.
Mr. J-’s asylum claim is textbook and ought to be readily granted. However, given Sessions’ recent unilateral change in asylum law based on private acts of violence, Mr. J- will have to fight an uphill battle to ultimately prevail. See Matter of A-B-, 27 I&N Dec. 316 (A.G. 2018). If released on bond, Mr. J- plans to move in with his uncle, a US citizen, who resides in Florida. Mr. J-’s case will then be transferred to the immigration court in Miami. Although the Immigration Court in Miami similarly has high denial rates, where nearly 90% of all asylum claims are ultimately denied, Mr. J- will at least have a better chance of prevailing there than he would in Atlanta.
Indigenous Mayan from Guatemala Who Was Targeted on Account of His Success as a Businessman
During my second day, I met with an indigenous Mayan from Guatemala, Mr. S-. He holds a Master’s degree in Education, owned a restaurant back home, and was the minister at his local church. He had previously worked in agriculture pursuant to an H-2B visa in Iowa, and then returned to Guatemala when the visa expired to open his business.
He fled Guatemala earlier this year on account of his membership in a particular social group. One night after closing his restaurant, he was thrown off his motorcycle by several men who believes were part of a local gang. They beat him and threatened to kill him and his family if he did not give them a large sum of money. They specifically targeted Mr. S- because he was a successful businessman. They warned him not to go to the police or else they would find out and kill him. The client knew that the police would not protect him from this harm on account of his ethnic background as an indigenous Mayan. The day of the extortionists’ deadline to pay, Mr. S- didn’t have the money to pay them off, and was forced to flee or face a certain death.
Mr. S- has been in immigration detention since March. The day I met with him at the end of August was the first time he had been able to speak to an attorney.
Mr. S-’s prospects for success are uncertain. Even prior to the recent decision in Matter of A-B-, asylum claims based on the particular social group of “wealthy businessmen” were seldom granted. See, e.g., Lopez v. Sessions, 859 F.3d 464 (7th Cir. 2017); Dominguez-Pulido v. Lynch, 821 F.3d 837, 845 (7th Cir. 2016) (“wealth, standing alone, is not an immutable characteristic of a cognizable social group”); but see, Tapiero de Orejuela v. Gonzales, 423 F.3d 666 (7th Cir. 2005) (confirming that although wealth standing alone is not an immutable characteristic, the Respondent’s combined attributes of wealth, education status, and cattle rancher, satisfied the particular social group requirements). However, if Mr. S- can show that he was also targeted on account of his indigenous Mayan ancestry, he can perhaps also raise an asylum claim based on his ethnicity. The combination of his particular social group and ethnicity may be enough to entitle him to relief. See, e.g., Ordonez-Quino v. Holder, 760 F.3d 80, 90 (1st Cir. 2014) (Respondent demonstrated that his “Mayan Quiché identity was ‘at least one central reason’ why he” was persecuted).
As business immigration attorneys may also point out, if Mr. S- can somehow locate an employer in the US to sponsor him, he may be eligible for employment-based relief based on his Master’s degree, prior experience working in agriculture, and/or his business acumen on account of his successful restaurant management. Especially if Mr. S- is not released on bond and forced to adjudicate his claims in the Atlanta Immigration Court where asylum denial rates are high, his future attorney may also want to explore these unorthodox strategies.
Indigenous Mam-Speaking Guatemalan Persecuted on Account of His Race, Religion, and Particular Social Group
My third day, I met with Mr. G-, an indigenous Mam from Guatemala. Mr. G- is an incredibly devout Evangelical Christian and one of the purest souls I have ever met. He has resisted recruitment by rival gangs in his town and has been severely beaten because of his resistance. He says his belief in God and being a good person is why he has resisted recruitment. He did not want to be responsible for others’ suffering. The local gangs constantly assaulted Mr. G- due to his Mam heritage, his religion, and his resistance of them. He fled to the US to escape this persecution.
Mr. G- only speaks Mam, an ancient Mayan dialect. He does not speak Spanish. Because of this, he was unable to communicate with immigration officials about his credible fear of return to his country upon his initial arrival in November 2017. Fortunately, the USCIS asylum officer deferred Mr. G-’s credible fear interview until they could locate a Mam translator. However, one was never located, and he has been in immigration detention ever since.
August 29, 2018, nine months into his detention, was the first time he was able to speak to an attorney through an interpreter that spoke his language. Mr. G- was so out of the loop with what was going on, that he did not even know what the word “asylum” meant. For nine months, Mr. G- had to wait to find out what was going on and why he was in detention. My colleague, Jessica, and I, spoke with him for almost three hours. We could not provide him with satisfactory answers about whether SIFI would be able to take his case, and when or if he would be let out of detention. Given recent changes in the law, we couldn’t tell him if his asylum claim would ultimately prevail.
Mr. G- firmly stated that he will be killed if he was forced to go back to Guatemala. He said that if his asylum claim is denied, he will have to put his faith in God to protect him from what is a certain death. He said God is all he has.
Even without answers, this client thanked us until he was blue in the face. He said he did not have any money to pay us but wanted us to know how grateful he was for our help and that he would pray for us. Despite the fact that his life was hanging in the balance, he was more concerned about our time and expense helping him. He went on and on for several minutes about his gratitude. It was difficult for us to hold back tears.
Mr. G- is the reason asylum exists, but under our current framework, he will almost certainly be deported, especially if he cannot locate an attorney. Mr. G- has an arguable claim under Ordonez-Quino v. Holder, on account of his Mam heritage, and an arguable claim on account of his Evangelical Christianity, given that Mr. G-’s persecution was compounded by his visible Mam ethnicity and vocal Evangelical beliefs. His resistance to gang participation will be difficult to overcome, though, as the case law on the subject is primarily negative. See, e.g., Bueso-Avila v. Holder, 663 F.3d 934 (7th Cir. 2011) (finding insufficient evidence that MS-13 targeted Petitioner on account of his Christian beliefs, finding instead that the evidence supported the conclusion that the threats were based on his refusal to join the gang, which is not a protected ground). Mr. G-’s low prospects of success are particularly heart-wrenching. When we as a country fail to protect those seeking refuge from persecution, especially those fleeing religious persecution, we destroy the very ideals upon which this country was founded.
Twenty-Year Old Political Activist From Honduras, Assaulted by Military Police on Account of His Political Opinion
I also assisted in the drafting of a bond motion for a 20 year-old political activist from Honduras, Mr. O-, who had been severely beaten by the military police on account of his political opinion and activism.
Mr. O- was a prominent and vocal member of an opposition political group in Honduras. During the November 2017 Honduran presidential elections, Mr. O- assisted members of his community to travel to the polling stations. When election officials closed the polls too early, Mr. O- reached out to military police patrolling the area to demand that they re-open the polling stations so Hondurans could rightfully cast their votes. The military police became angry with Mr. O-’s insistence and began to beat him by stomping and kicking him, leaving him severely wounded. Mr. O- reported the incident to the police, but was told there was nothing they could do.
A few weeks later, Mr. O- was specifically targeted again by the military police when he was on his way home from a political meeting. The police pulled him from his car and began to beat him, accusing him of being a rioter. He was told to leave the country or else he would be killed. He was also warned that if he went to the national police, that he would be killed. Fearing for his life, Mr. O- fled to the US in April 2018 and has been in detention ever since.
SIFI was able to take on his bond case in August, and by the end of my trip, the SIFI team had submitted his request for bond. Since Mr. O-’s asylum claim is particularly strong, and because he has family in the US, it is highly likely that his bond will be granted. From there, we can only hope that he encounters an IJ that appropriately follows the law and will grant him asylum.”
(The author thanks Jessica Greenberg and Deirdre Stradone for their constant mentorship as well as providing the author the opportunity to go to Folkston. The author also thanks Lucia della Paolera for her advocacy, passion, and critical interpretation assistance. Finally, the author expresses the utmost gratitude to the team at SIFI, who work day in and day out to provide excellent representation to the detained migrants and asylum-seekers detained at Folkston ICE Processing Center.)
Photos from my trip to Folkston, GA:
The Folkston ICE Processing Center.
Downtown Folkston, GA.
Volunteers from Left to Right: Sophia Genovese (author), Deirdre Stradone (Staff Attorney at African Services Committee), Jessica Greenberg (Staff Attorney at ASC/ICLC), and Lucia della Paolera (volunteer interpreter).
Many thanks to the incomparable Dan Kowalski over at LexisNexis for forwarding this terrific and timely piece! These are the kinds of individuals that Jeff Sessions would like Immigration Judges to sentence to death or serious harm without Due Process and contrary to asylum and protection law.
As Sophia cogently points out, since the beginning of this Administration it has been private lawyers, most serving pro bono or “low bono,” who have been courageously fighting to uphold our Constitution and the rule of law from the cowardly scofflaw White Nationalist attacks by Trump, Sessions, Miller, Nielsen, and the rest of the outlaws. In a significant number of cases, the Article III Federal Courts have agreed and held the scofflaws at least legally (if not yet personally) accountable.
Like any bully, Sessions resents having to follow the law and having higher authorities tell him what to do. He has repeatedly made contemptuous, disingenuous legal arguments and presented factual misrepresentations in support of his lawless behavior and only grudgingly complied with court orders. He has disrespectfully and condescendingly lectured the courts about his authority and their limited role in assuring that the Constitution and the law are upheld. That’s why he loves lording it over the US Immigration Courts where he is simultaneously legislator, investigator, prosecutor, judge, jury, appellate court, and executioner in violation of common sense and all rules of legal ethics.
But, Sessions will be long gone before most of you new US Immigration Judges will be. He and his “go along to get along enablers” certainly will be condemned by history as the “21st Century Jim Crows.” Is that how you want to be remembered — as part of a White Nationalist movement that essentially is committed to intentional cruelty, undermining our Constitution, and disrespecting the legal and human rights and monumental contributions to our country of people of color and other vulnerable groups?
Every US Immigration Judge has a chance to stand up and be part of the solution rather than the problem. Do you have the courage to follow the law and the Constitution and to treat asylum applicants and other migrants fairly and impartially, giving asylum applicants the benefit of the doubt as intended by the framers of the Convention? Will you take the necessary time to carefully consider, research, deliberate, and explain each decision to get it right (whether or not it meets Sessions’s bogus “quota system”)? Will you properly factor in all of the difficulties and roadblocks intentionally thrown up by this Administration to disadvantage and improperly deter asylum seekers? Will you treat all individuals coming before you with dignity, kindness, patience, and respect regardless of the ultimate disposition of their cases. This is the “real stuff of genuine judging,” not just being an “employee.”
Or will you, as Sessions urges, treat migrants as “fish in a barrel” or “easy numbers,” unfairly denying their claims for refuge without ever giving them a real chance. Will you prejudge their claims and make false imputations of fraud, with no evidence, as he has? Will you give fair hearings and the granting of relief under our laws the same urgency that Sessions touts for churning out more removal orders. Will you resist Sessions’s disingenuous attempt to shift the blame for the existing mess in the Immigration Courts from himself, his predecessors, the DHS, and Congress, where it belongs, to the individuals and their attorneys coming before you in search of justice (and also, of course, to you for not working hard enough to deny more continuances, cut more corners, and churn out more rote removal orders)?
How will history judge you and your actions, humanity, compassion, understanding, scholarship, attention to detail, willingness to stand up for the rights of the unpopular, and values, in a time of existential crisis for our nation and our world?
Your choice. Choose wisely. Good luck. Do great things!
Sessions to immigration judges: Immigrants’ attorneys like ‘water seeping’ around law
By Tal Kopan, CNN
Attorney General Jeff Sessions told a new group of immigration judges Monday that it is their job to “restore the rule of law” to the immigration system over the contrary efforts of the lawyers who represent immigrants.
The remarks at the training of the largest-ever class of new immigration judges implied that the judges were on the same team as the Trump administration, and that immigrants and their attorneys were trying to undermine their efforts.
“Good lawyers using all their talents and skills work every day … like water seeping through an earthen dam to get around the plain words of (immigration law) to advance their clients’ interests,” Sessions said, adding the same happens in criminal courts. “And we understand that. Their duty, however, is not uphold the integrity of the act. That’s our duty.”
Sessions noted that “of course” the system “must always respect the rights of aliens” in the courts. But he also warned the judges of “fake claims.”
“Just as we defend immigrant legal rights, we reject unjustified and sometimes fake claims,” Sessions said. “The law is never serviced when deceit is rewarded so that the fundamental principles of the law are defeated.”
The comments came in the context of Sessions’ repeated moves to exert his unique authority over the immigration courts, a separate legal system for immigrants that is entirely run by the Justice Department.
Sessions approves every judge hired and can instruct them on how to interpret law, and thus decide cases, as well as how to manage cases. He has used that authority multiple times in the past year, including issuing a sweeping ruling that will substantially narrow the types of cases that qualify for asylum protections in the US. Those decisions overrode the evolution of years of immigration judges’ and the immigration appellate board’s decisions.
Sessions reminded the new judges of that authority and those decisions in his remarks, saying he believes they are “correct” and “prudent” interpretations of the law that “restores” them to the original intent.
Another totally inappropriate and unethical effort by Sessions to insure that migrants, particularly asylum seekers, receive neither fair consideration nor Due Process from U.S. Immigration Judges in connection with their, in many instances, very compelling cases for protection.
Let’s shine a little light of truth on the Sessions’s dark myth-spinning:
As recently as 2012, the majority of asylum applicants who received decisions on the merits of their claims in Immigration Court were granted protection;
Conditions in most “sending countries” — particularly those in the Northern Triangle — have gotten worse rather than better;
There is no reasonable explanation for the large drop in approvals in recent years other than bias against asylum seekers;
Even after Sessions took over, 30% of those who get merits determinations won their cases;
The success rate is higher for those released from detention and given fair access to counsel;
Most detained migrants, particularly those intentionally detained in substandard conditions in obscure locations, do not have reasonable access to counsel;
Most attorneys representing detained asylum seekers serve pro bono or for minimal compensation (particularly in relation to the amount of time and effort required to prepare and present an asylum case in detention);
Detention of asylum seekers simply to deter them from coming is illegal;
Separation of families is a deterrent is also illegal;
Neither detention nor “zero tolerance” prosecutions have been shown to have a material impact on the flow of refugees to our Southern Border;
Sessions has provided no evidence of any widespread fraud in asylum applications by refugees from the Northern Triangle;
The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (“UNHCR”), the leading interpreter of refugee and asylum protections, has consistently criticized the US’s overly restrictive approach to asylum adjudication;
Article III U.S. Courts continue to be critical of both the unlawful policies being promoted by Sessions and the fundamental errors still being made by the BIA and some Immigration Judges in analyzing asylum cases and claims under the Convention Against Torture;
According to the US Supreme Court, a chance of harm as low as 10% can satisfy the generous legal standard for asylum;
According to the UNHCR, asylum applicants should be given the “benefit of the doubt;”
Most of those who fail to get asylum, like the abused woman denied protection by Sessions in Matter of A-B-, face life threatening situations in their home countries — we have merely made a conscious choice not to offer them asylum or some alternative form of life-saving protection.
As Sessions sees that his time as Attorney General will likely come to an end before the end of this year, he is doubling down on his White Nationalist, xenophobic, racist, restrictionist, lawless agenda. He wants to inflict as much damage on migrants, refugees, women, and people of color as he can before being relegated to his former role as a rightist wing-nut. He also seeks to convince the Immigration Judges that they are not independent juridical officials but mere highly paid enforcement agents with an obligation to deport as many folks as possible in support of the President’s agenda.
I do agree with Sessions, however, that the newly-minted Immigration Judges have a tremendously difficult job. If they adopt his philosophy, they are likely to violate their oaths to uphold the Constitution and laws of the US and to wrongly return individuals to death-threatening situations. On the other hand, if they carefully and fairly follow the law and give full consideration to the facts, they will be compelled to grant protection in many cases, thus potentially putting them on EOIR’s “hit list.” (Basically, new US Immigration Judges, even those with many years of civil service, can be “fired at will” by EOIR during their first two years of “probation” as judges.)
The only solution is an independent Article I Immigration Court that will guarantee that someone as totally unqualified as Sessions can never again impose his personal will and bigoted, anti-Due-Process views on what is supposed to be a fair and impartial court system.
THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION ripped more than 2,600 migrant children from their parents’ arms with no plan or procedures for reuniting them, resulting in some 500 children remaining effectively orphaned even today, five months after the fact. Now it proposes a new policy for jailing migrant children indefinitely, one that ensures they “are treated with dignity, respect and special concern for their particular vulnerability as minors.”
That assurance, along with its rich irony, is offered by Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, who has proposed the policy in a brazen attempt to escape the strictures of a two-decade-old court settlement forbidding the long-term incarceration of minors who cross the border seeking asylum in the United States.
Ms. Nielsen, who was instrumental in executing the zero-compassion policy that traumatized so many toddlers, grade-schoolers, tweens and teens this spring and summer, now would have Americans believe her department recognizes children as particularly vulnerable human beings, deserving of dignity and respect. How will that dignity and respect be meted out when those children are confined, along with their parents, in long-term detention facilities that the administration now proposes to build?
Ms. Nielsen, along with immigration hard-liners such as White House adviser Stephen Miller, are convinced that so-called catch-and-release policies are largely to blame for the flow of families across the southern border. Among the factors contributing to those policies is the 1997 court agreement known as Flores, which arose from abundant evidence that migrant children had been harmed by long-term detention, and forbade it.
The reality is that Flores has been in effect for more than 20 years, during which migrant flows have dipped and surged. When the Trump administration tried, just a few months ago, to amend the Flores agreement to permit long-term detention of families, U.S. District Judge Dolly M. Gee rejected its argument that the agreement was to blame for a recent surge in border crossings. “Any number of other factors could have caused the increase in illegal border crossings, including civil strife, economic degradation, and fear of death in the migrants’ home countries,” the judge wrote.
The administration’s proposal sets up a new court fight, one that will test Homeland Security’s risible insistence that the new policy would “satisfy the basic purpose” of the Flores agreement while freeing the government to get tougher on migrants. The “basic purpose” of Flores was to protect children from harm; confining them defeats that mandate.
It is legitimate to take concrete steps to ensure that migrant families appear in immigration court when ordered to do so. Ankle bracelet monitors, bail and other means of achieving that have been effective, and their use can be expanded. What’s less effective, and at odds with American values, is the administration’s abiding faith in punitive measures where children are concerned. There’s no evidence that they work to cut illegal border-crossing; there’s plenty of evidence of their cruelty.
The editorial board represents the opinions of the board, its editor and the publisher. It is separate from the newsroom and the Op-Ed section.
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Undocumented immigrants at a bus station in McAllen, Tex.CreditCreditIlana Panich-Linsman for The New York Times
For all the human brain’s mysteries, its development is quite well understood. Early childhood and adolescence are crucial times of unparalleled neural growth. Just as trust and stability can enhance that growth, fear and trauma can impede it. Institutionalization, in particular, can have profound and deleterious effects, triggering a range of developmental delays and psychiatric disorders from which recovery can be difficult, if not impossible.
In light of that knowledge, the Trump administration’s latest move against immigrant children is especially troubling. On Thursday, the Department of Homeland Security proposed new regulations that would allow the government to detain migrant children indefinitely. Officials are now prohibited from detaining such minors for more than 20 days by an agreement known as the Flores settlement, which has been in place since 1997. The new rules would end that settlement and would likely open the door to an expansion of detention centers across the country.
D.H.S. says that by eliminating Flores, officials will deter illegal immigration, reasoning that undocumented adults will be less likely to enter the country to begin with if they know they can’t avoid long-term detention simply by having a child in tow. Immigration activists say the proposed rule’s true aims are both simpler and more diabolical than that: “They want to strip away every last protection for detained immigrant children,” says Omar Jadwat, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Immigrants’ Rights Project.
Even with Flores in place, those protections have proved thin. Youth migrant shelters — there are roughly 100 such facilities housing more than 10,000 minors across the country — have been cited for a long list of abuses, including physical abuse, sexual abuse, blatant medical neglect, the forcible injection of antipsychotic medications, the unlawful restraint of children in distress and harsh rules that prohibit even siblings from hugging one another. The shelters in question, several of which are facing lawsuits, are part of a network that has received billions of federal dollars in the past four years alone. That money has continued to pour in even as abuse allegations have multiplied.
Related
For more on detained migrant children
Restraint Chairs and Spit Masks: Migrant Detainees Claim Abuse at Detention Centers
Opinion | The Editorial Board
The Continuing Tragedy of the Separated Children
The administration bears unique responsibility for these violations, in no small part because its disastrous and short-lived separation policy has wreaked havoc on a system that was already rife with problems. Shame alone should have federal officials working hard to undo the damage of that policy and to prevent further harm to the children under their charge, never mind that it’s the right thing to do under any number of international agreements and norms.
But their latest plan is more likely to exacerbate existing problems than to resolve them. The proposed regulations would eliminate the standing requirement that detention centers submit to state inspections and would narrow the scope of relatives to whom children can be released to only parents and legal guardians — no aunts, uncles or other extended family members. It would also trigger a proliferation of new facilities: The administration projects that Immigration and Customs Enforcement-run family detention would increase from 3,000 beds to 12,000. The number of shelters for unaccompanied immigrant minors may also grow.
The proposals will be open to public comment for the next 60 days before they can be finalized. Readers who wish to register their concern can do so on the Federal Register’s website.
After that period, the issue is almost certainly headed to court. Observers say the same judge who has ruled against past attempts to undermine Flores is likely to thwart this attempt as well.
Which paints a stark reality for what’s motivating this move and what it ultimately means: The administration surely knows what a long shot this proposal is, but it will undoubtedly excite President Trump’s political base as the midterm elections approach. So while the administration plays politics, the well-being of thousands of children who came to America seeking protection and safety will be put at risk — today and, developmentally, for the rest of their lives.
The Trump administration wants no limits on how long it can detain migrant kids and their parents.
Of all the appalling things the Trump administration has done, the cruelest has to be arresting and detaining asylum seekers, and separating them from their children. Seeking to deter desperate families from entering the United States by detaining parents for weeks or months apart from their children is so hard-hearted it shocks the conscience. The cruelty has been compounded by ineptitude, as hundreds of migrant children have been stranded in the United States without their parents, who have been deported.
Thankfully, the administration’s callousness has been held in check by a court order left over from President Clinton’s second term. The 1997 settlement agreement in Flores vs. Reno requires, among other things, that children facing deportation be held in detention for no more than 20 days, and in the least restrictive environment possible. Courts later extended the agreement to include families with minors in detention centers. (The government has been sued at least five times for allegedly violating the order.)
Now the Trump administration wants to scrap the agreement entirely by instituting even more draconian regulations that would allow it to detain families with minors as long as it may take to resolve their deportation cases. That’s beyond the pale.
Migrant children seeking permission to remain in the U.S. should not be detained regardless of whether they have a parent to accompany them in confinement. It’s especially troubling that one of the administration’s stated reasons for doing so is to send a threatening message to other families who might seek asylum in the U.S. from dangerous circumstances in their home countries.
Of course, the government has the right and duty to set immigration laws and enforce them. And we have a system for that, broken as it might be. Current U.S. law allows asylum to be granted to people facing persecution because of their race, religion, nationality, political opinion or “membership in a particular social group.” If immigration courts rule that applicants don’t meet those requirements, or reject appeals by people seeking permission to stay on humanitarian grounds, the government is entirely within its rights to send them to their home countries. But it should not (and may not, under international agreements) incarcerate them — especially when they are children — unless there is good cause to think the migrants are a flight risk or pose a threat to public safety.
Remember, most of these families arrive seeking official permission to stay, so they have a powerful incentive not to skip their court hearings or break the law: doing so only leads to deportation orders. Advocates argue that most of the aslyum seekers who do miss court dates never received an appearance notice, often because the process takes so long that their addresses change and official records don’t catch up. As for public safety, a raft of studies has found that immigrants, regardless of their status, commit crimes at lower rates than native-born Americans.
If no-shows truly are the administration’s concern, it inherited a new Family Case Management Program from the Obama administration that matched eligible asylum-seeking families with housing, healthcare, schooling for the children and legal advice to help navigate the immigration court system. Families in that program had a 99% show-rate for court hearings. But Trump killed it last year.
Under the Flores agreement, the government can hold minors only in state-licensed facilities. But states tend not to license facilities for families, which, the government argues, means that it must release the families while the deportation cases continue.
The new regulations would let the federal government do the licensing of facilities, paving the way for a massive expansion of the detention system. The government currently uses three family detention centers with a total of 3,500 beds. They are secured, dormitory-style facilities with shared bathrooms, common areas, play space and rooms for classes. Trump wants to add 15,000 more beds, but that may just be the start; border agents caught 77,674 people migrating as families in 2016 alone.
It is fundamentally inhumane to incarcerate children — with or without their parents — while immigration courts try to figure out what to do with them. Psychiatrists warn of the damage even from short-term detentions, and some of those who have been held for months have shown signs of severe emotional distress and post-traumatic stress disorder. So in its obsessive quest to stop migrants from seeking asylum, the Trump administration is willing to, in essence, commit child abuse. That’s a stain not just on the presidency, but on the nation.
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The White Nationalist Scofflaws are at it again! Even if were effective as a deterrent (which all reliable data and experience show it isn’t), detention for deterrence would still be illegal.
Join the New Due Process Army and fight to uphold our Constitution and true American values against the White Nationalism, racism, cruelty, xenophobia, and lawlessness of Trump, Sessions, and their cronies! Put an end to Sessions’s “New American Gulag” (“NAG”)!
‘Suicide,’ ‘catastrophe’: Nicaraguans in US terrified of looming end of protections
By Tal Kopan, CNN
Cassandra has lived and worked in the US over 20 years. Threats to her life have been made to her family and friends back in Nicaragua. It would be “suicide” to move back, she says.
But the Trump administration says she and thousands of other immigrants like her must do so by January.
On Jan. 5, roughly 5,300 Nicaraguans who have lived in the US since at least that date in 1999 will lose their protected status. If they have no other immigration status in the US, they will be forced to either return to the country or risk living in the US illegally.
The decision to end temporary protected status for Nicaraguans last November was overshadowed by similar Trump administration decisions to end such protections for hundreds of thousands more immigrants from neighbors Honduras and El Salvador. Nationals of Nicaragua received the shortest time frame of any of those TPS recipients to get their affairs together: 12 months.
But since that decision was made, Nicaragua has plunged into violence and political unrest, with at least 322 people dying there since mid-April, according to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, part of the Organization of American States. By the White House’s own count, the toll is more than 350. The UN Refugee Agency has put out guidance to its member countries asking them to allow Nicaraguans to enter and to apply for asylum once there.
The situation is bad enough that the Trump administration sanctioned three Nicaraguan officials in July for human rights abuses, saying President Daniel Ortega and his vice president “are ultimately responsible for the pro-government parapolice that have brutalized their own people.”
In light of the violence, a bipartisan group of seven bipartisan lawmakers wrote to President Donald Trump, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in late July asking the President to either reconsider ending temporary protected status for Nicaraguans or to designate a new status for them.
“It would be, frankly, I think, unacceptable to then send folks back to that same place that we’re sanctioning,” Republican Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart of Florida, one of those who signed the letter, told CNN. “It’s a barbaric regime that’s literally murdering people in the streets. … It would be a catastrophe, and it’s one that can be avoided.”
Diaz-Balart said he has not gotten a response from the administration to the letter, though he remains hopeful it will reverse course.
The Department of Homeland Security ignored repeated requests for comment from CNN about whether it’s considering extending further protections to Nicaraguans.
Hundreds of immigrant kids remain separated from parents
By Tal Kopan, CNN
Hundreds of children separated from their parents at the US-Mexico border remain separated from their parents, including 497 in government custody, according to a new court filing Thursday.
The figure includes 22 children under the age of five still in government care. Six of those are 4 years old or younger whose parents were deported without them.
A total of 1,937 children have been reunified with parents, up only 14 from last week.
The numbers have changed only slightly from last week, as the court filing from the Justice Department and the American Civil Liberties Union case describes a slow and laborious process to try to connect the families that have been separated.
It remains unclear exactly how many parents were deported without their children, though it’s in the hundreds. By the government’s latest count, there are 322 deported parents who have children still in custody.
But the ACLU, which filed the lawsuit on behalf of separated parents, says the administration has previously given it a list of deported parents that includes 70 additional cases. The administration said, according to the ACLU, that some of the discrepancy is due to kids being released from care. It’s not clear what will happen to those families.
US District Judge Dana Sabraw will hold a status hearing on the case Friday.
So, we send good folks who have been contributing to our economy and society back to likely harm at the hands of the repressive leftist Government of Nicaragua basically because they are Latinos. Of course, almost all of them have very plausible asylum, withholding, CAT, or cancellation of removal claims. So, more than 5,000 cases will needlessly be thrown back into our already overwhelmed Immigration Court system. No wonder the backlog continues to mushroom under Sessions’s White Nationalist policies! Racist-driven policies always come at a high cost!
In the meantime, Sessions continues publicly to thumb his nose at Federal Judges, while making less than impressive efforts to comply with their lawful orders. And, families and children continue to suffer from Sessions’s White Nationalist agenda.
The U.S. government expects children as young as 18 months to represent themselves in immigration court. Lawyers in Miami made a coloring book to help kids understand what they’re facing.
The U.S. government expects children, as young as 18 months and unable to speak, to represent themselves in immigration court to fight against their deportation. Lawyers in Miami made a coloring book to help kids understand what they’re facing.Image by Alfredo De Lara
Media coverage of the border crisis has heavily focused on separated parents and children. But migrant children’s nightmares are just beginning once they set foot here, as documented in the video above. Every child that crosses the border without permission has an immigration court case to fight, but there is no right to free counsel in that court.
So children, who sometimes speak only an indigenous language, are going up alone against government lawyers to fight to stay in the United States. If that sounds absurd, that’s because it is. Congress has the power to change this.
After President Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy went into effect, we at Americans for Immigrant Justice began to see an increase in young children needing legal representation. We thought: How do we get toddlers to understand the gravity of their situation?
We created a coloring book to explain to these children their rights. It explains concepts such as what a country is, who is an immigrant and what a judge does. We read the book to separated and unaccompanied children as part of our “know your rights” presentations and have them act out scenarios from the story.
The kids in this video op-ed are the lucky ones. They were released from a children’s shelter run by the Office of Refugee Resettlement to family members in Miami. We are representing them in court free. But for many children we engage with at the shelters, the coloring book is the only legal advice they receive.
The stakes are high: Over half of all children in immigration court are unrepresented. Nine out of 10 of them will be ordered deported. If we as a country are truly invested in protecting children, the bare minimum that we can do is ensure access to a lawyer for immigrant children who cannot afford one.
Jennifer Anzardo Valdes is the director of the Children’s Legal Program at Americans for Immigrant Justice, a nonprofit law firm based in Miami.
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Click the above link and watch the video by Leah Varjacques.
Under Jeff Sessions, intentional child abuse has become a norm and the operation of the Immigration Courts with little or no regard for Due Process, common sense, and human decency is a national disgrace. When will it end? How many will suffer needlessly and be abused to feed Sessions’s White Nationalist myth? Where is justice?
Join the New Due Process Army and fight to hold Jeff Sessions accountable for all of his illegal and immoral actions!
A federal court has given the Trump administration until Friday, Aug. 10, to figure out a plan for the 28 immigrant children still detained at the Shiloh Treatment Center in southeast Texas. Any child who is not deemed to pose “a risk of harm to self or others” must be transferred to a less restrictive facility, per Judge Dolly Gee’s July 30 ruling in a lawsuit filed earlier this year. She also addressed the lawsuit’s claims that residents at Shiloh have been given forced injections and prescribed antidepressants, mood stabilizers, and antipsychotic drugs without consent. The government must stop this practice, she determined, and make sure that psychotropic drugs are given to detainees at Shiloh only in accordance with Texas child welfare laws and regulations.
For weeks now, this misuse of psychiatric medications has been cited as a prime example of the White House’s “despicable,” “reprehensible,” “inhumane and unconscionable” border policies. “President Donald Trump’s zero tolerance policy stands to create a zombie army of children forcibly injected with medications,” said the article from the Center for Investigative Reporting that first brought the allegations to light. “The president has to be ordered not to give children psychotropic drugs, but I’m the one that’s tripping?” one Democratic candidate for Congress said a few days ago, in defending progressives’ call to defund U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The standard gloss on this medication scandal—that the Trump administration isn’t merely ripping children from their parents but turning all those children’s brains to mush—is substantially misleading. It makes it sound as though the problem was created by our current president when the blame could just as well be placed on the Obama administration. Unaccompanied immigrant children first arrived at the Shiloh Treatment Center in 2009, according to the Center for Investigative Reporting, despite the fact that three children had already died at Shiloh and affiliated centers while being physically restrained by staffers. These were not the only horrific incidents on record. Another time, for example, staff encouraged a group of girls with cognitive disabilities to fight each other gladiator-style for after-school snacks. And while Trump is now responsible for the children in federal custody, and certain medication-related abuses appear to have continued under his watch, most of the cases of abuse included in the lawsuit occurred before he set foot in the Oval Office.
If a child can be diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, then medications aren’t likely to be the most useful form oftreatment.
The suspect framing of the Shiloh scandal as a cause for partisan anti-Trump outrage also serves to minimize the problem. When commentators link the overmedication of child immigrants to Trump’s zero tolerance policy at the border, they imply that the children who were forcibly separated from their parents earlier this year are the only ones at risk for this abuse—or, at the very least, that these kids are at higher risk than others in residential treatment. That’s wrong. The 2,500 kids subject to family separation are just a subset of the children held around the country by the Office of Refugee Resettlement. ORR already oversees the placement of some 10,000 minors who arrived at the border on their own, without parents or guardians—and the Shiloh Treatment Center has been housing, treating, and potentially abusing detainees from this larger population for about a decade now.
But even that doesn’t capture the full scale of the problem, which affects not just immigrants but kids throughout the nation’s child welfare system. The court exhibits from the recent lawsuit suggest a scene out of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest: In addition to receiving forced injections of antipsychotic drugs to calm them down, former residents say they were dosed with as many as nine different pills at a time without being told what they were taking or why. These medications were allegedly prescribed without consulting the children’s parents or their other adult relatives or otherwise securing a court order. Children who refused to swallow their pills, the lawsuit says, were physically made to do so or were coerced in other ways. “They told me … that the only way I could get out of Shiloh was if I took the pills,” one child explained. “I have not refused taking the pills because I was told that … would make me stay at Shiloh longer,” said another.
As awful as these details sound, they’re not unique. Experts on the use of psychotropic drugs in foster care and residential treatment settings say overmedication is widespread. Studies find that foster kids are given psychotropic drugs at least twice as often as other children served by Medicaid, despite a lack of solid evidence for these drugs’ efficacy in children and little knowledge of what long-term hazards they might pose to developing brains. (Most such medications are FDA-approved only for adults, so their use with children is off-label.)
The prescription of several different psychotropic drugs to children at the same time doesn’t represent some new perversion of psychiatry cooked up by the Trump administration or put in place by reckless doctors at a converted trailer park in Texas. Rather, “polypharmacy” is a mainstream approach to medicating children in residential treatment settings. In responding to the recent lawsuit, an ORR official informed the court that Shiloh follows Texas state guidelinesfor the use of such drugs in foster care—which means, she said, that they “strive to use no more than four [psychotropic] medications concurrently.” Again, there’s a lack of data to support this standard practice. “Very few studies have shown safety and efficacy for two or more psychotropics used concurrently in children, and none, virtually, have shown safety or efficacy using three or more,” says Erin Barnett, an assistant professor of psychiatry at Dartmouth who studies evidence-based practices for traumatized children. “Yet this kind of bad treatment is going on all over the country.”
There are some specific ways in which the methods reportedly used by Shiloh Treatment Center do stand apart. Even when a given child’s parents were reachable, the lawsuit says, the center did not bother to reach out to them regarding the use of drugs. (This apparent indifference to informed consent provoked a major portion of the judge’s recent ruling.) In practice, though, adherence to the rules on consent does not prevent the overuse of medications in residential treatment settings. Many parents and guardians acquiesce to polypharmacy when it’s recommended by a doctor, and officials tasked with overseeing wards of the state may also sign off on a smorgasbord of psychotropics provided that a child has been diagnosed with several different mental health conditions.
It’s also not enough to have a relative’s informed consent when treating psychiatric issues in these settings. The kids themselves should also give “assent” to treatment, which means they’re willing to accept the drugs. That’s often not the case in residential treatment settings, though. Kids who have been placed in these facilities tend to have long, complicated histories of treatment and may be suspicious of whatever care they’re being offered. When they do refuse their medication, their behavior is often chalked up to emotional problems—an “oppositional defiant disorder,” perhaps. According to both Barnett and Robert Foltz, a clinical psychologist and member of the board for the Association of Children’s Residential Centers, health care providers will at times cajole these children into taking meds, perhaps by threatening to “remove their privs”—which is to say, depriving them of activities they enjoy. Barnett cites a study of 50 adolescents taking psychotropic drugs, which found that nearly half reported feeling “forced or pushed” to take their medications.
The use of psychotropic drugs with kids detained at the border raises unique concerns. For one thing, we might guess that these children’s mental health issues stem, in large part, from whatever troubling events led them to leave their home countries, combined with the stress of being held in custody and—for those detained this year under Trump’s family-separation policy—the trauma of having been pried away from their parents. If it is possible to identify clear environmental causes of their distress, or if a child can be diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, then medications—even when they’re ethically applied—aren’t likely to be the most useful form of treatment. According to Foltz, psychotropic drugs barely work for PTSD and are not considered front-line treatments; the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry recommends cognitive behavioral therapy instead. Another problem arises from the fact that, in most cases, health care providers for these children won’t have access to their patients’ detailed case histories, so whatever psychiatric diagnoses they make will be off the cuff.
There are many reasons to be furious and fretful over what’s gone on at Shiloh and how the alleged abuse of children there could and should have been avoided. Over the past nine years, the federal government has paid tens of millions of dollars to house troubled detainees at a residential treatment facility with a well-earned, highly suspect reputation. But if there’s any bigger lesson to what happened at this 43-bed facility in rural Texas, it’s not that Trump’s border policies are inhumane. (There are plenty of other, better ways to come to that conclusion.) Nor does it suggest that “anti-child” ideologues have somehow come to power in Washington. No, this ugly scandal spanning two administrations should be taken as a sign of what can happen to the nation’s most damaged and defenseless kids no matter who’s in power.
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There’s more than enough blame to go around on this one. But, blame solves nothing. What needs to happen is for a bipartisan Congress to step up to the plate and end the abuse that Executive officials of two consecutive Administrations have lacked the ethics, common sense, and human decency to do the right thing and stop.
Catherine Rampell reports for the Washington Post:
Once again, the Trump administration is looking to punish immigrants. And once again, innocent children are getting hurt in the process.
This time, however, many of those innocent children are likely to be U.S. citizens.
On Tuesday, NBC News reported that the Trump administration is readying a new rule that should make your blood boil. The initiative, in the works for more than a year, would make it harder for legal immigrants to receive either green cards or citizenship if they — or anyone in their households — has ever benefited from a long list of safety-net programs. These include the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), food stamps or even health insurance purchased on the Obamacare exchanges.
Three points are worth emphasizing here.
First is that, again, this policy would apply to immigrants who are in the country legally . It’s not about punishing people for “sneaking across the border,” that apparently unforgivable transgression that Trump officials have previously used to justify state-sanctioned child abuse. And, in any case, undocumented immigrants are already excluded from nearly all federal anti-poverty programs.
As such, the proposal fits into President Trump’s agenda to dramatically cut levels of legal immigration, despite his rhetorical focus on the undocumented.
Second, this rule is ostensibly about making sure immigrants are self-sufficient and not a drain on public coffers. But NBC reports that the rule could disqualify immigrants making as much as 250 percent of the poverty level.
Moreover, an immigrant’s past use of benefits does not necessarily mean he or she will need them forever. Even the immigrant populations that you might expect to have the most trouble achieving economic self-sufficiency have proved to be a good long-term investment for the nation’s fiscal health.
For instance, refugees initially cost the government money; they need a lot of help, after all, given that they often arrive penniless and without proficient English-language skills. But over time, their work and wage prospects improve and, by their fifth year here, they pay more in taxes than they received in benefits on average, according to a government report commissioned and subsequently suppressed by the Trump administration last year. (The report eventually leaked to the New York Times.)
Third, and most important, is that under the proposal, it’s not only immigrants who must forgo safety-net benefits if they don’t wish to be penalized by the immigration system. It is everyonein a given immigrant’s household.
That includes — based on an earlier leaked draft of the proposal published by The Post — an immigrant’s own children, even if those children are U.S. citizens who independently qualify for safety-net benefits.
That’s right. Legal-immigrant moms and dads may soon face a choice between (A) guaranteeing their U.S.-born children medical care, preschool classes and infant formula today, or (B) not threatening their own ability to qualify for green cards or citizenship tomorrow.
The universe of U.S.-citizen children who could be affected is large. The Kaiser Family Foundation estimates that, in Medicaid and CHIP enrollment alone in 2016, about 5.8 million citizen children had a noncitizen parent.
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The rule has not yet been issued. Butvariousversionsofit have leaked over the past year and a half. These have received coverage in foreign-language media, and fears about changes to immigration policy already appear to be discouraging participation in services meant to help low-income American children.
Including, perhaps most distressingly, the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC), a critical lifeline that provides access to food, prenatal care, breast pumps and other services for low-income mothers and children. WIC was listed in the draft rule published by The Post, and it’s not clear whether it remains in the latest version; but, either way, some immigrant parents and parents-to-be are already unenrolling, just in case.
“I had one family come and tell me, ‘Please remove us from WIC program, all services, medical, dental, everything,’ ” says Aliya S. Haq, the nutrition services supervisor at International Community Health Services in Seattle. The family had a child less than a year old who needed medical attention, but Haq could not convince them the benefits outweighed the risks of staying in the program.
Another patient, who is pregnant, asked to stop receiving prenatal assistance because she’s applying for citizenship.
Haq said the clinic’s WIC enrollment has fallen by about 10 percent over the past year; she worries daily about whether infant and maternal mortality rates will worsen, and whether there will be a negative effect on the brain development and long-term health of newborns.
Any policy that discourages, even a little bit, poor families’ use of such services is not just heartless. From an economic perspective, it is foolish. We need healthy, well-nourished, well-educated children to become healthy, well-nourished, productive workers.
But once again, children and the economic future they represent are the casualties of Trump’s casual cruelty.
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Catherine is being too kind to the Trumpsters. So, I’ll lay it on the line for you. This isn’t just “casual cruelty.” It’s intentional racist, xenophobic cruelty of the kind that Trump, Sessions, and Miller have promoted throughout their sordid careers.
We need regime change. In the meantime, here’s hoping that the New Due Process Army will keep these outrageous, racist, irrational, and unneeded regulations changes tied up in litigation until the White Nationalist regime can be thrown out of office.
The rate of non-immigration prosecutions at the southern U.S. border was down 57 percent in June compared to March as federal officials changed focus under the Trump administration’s zero-tolerance immigration policy, according to a new report.
In March 2018, non-immigration prosecutions accounted for one in seven (14 percent) of all total prosecutions at the southern border’s five federal districts.
That rate fell steadily over the next several months, and by June the ratio had fallen to one in seventeen (or six percent) of all prosecutions, according to an analysis of government data by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University.
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In March 2018, non-immigration prosecutions accounted for one in seven (14 percent) of all total prosecutions at the southern border’s five federal districts. By June the ratio had fallen to one in seventeen (or six percent) of all prosecutions
‘Unless crimes are suddenly less prevalent in the districts along the southwest border, the odds of being prosecuted for many federal offenses have declined,’ the report found.
The timing of the change coincides with the Trump administration’s April 6 announcement that the government was taking a zero-tolerance approach to immigration at the southern U.S. border.
Statisticians at TRAC concluded that the push to prioritize prosecuting illegal border crossers had taken focus away from other crimes that federal prosecutors are charged with enforcing – including narcotics trafficking, weapons offenses and pollution crimes, among other things.
‘There are these capacity issues; everything can’t be your top priority,’ said Susan Long, a statistician for TRAC. ‘I think it’s difficult to believe that the stepped-up immigration prosecutions were just happenstance and didn’t have anything to do with policy.’
Former immigration judge Paul Wickham Schmidt agreed, saying most illegal immigration cases are misdemeanors that result in time served – typically 2-3 days.
‘Courts have limited capacity, prosecutors have limited capacity and when you prioritize one thing that means deprioritizing something else,’ he said. ‘In this case, what they’ve deprioritized is absolutely insane. There are real crimes out there.’
The TRAC report also bolsters assertions by San Diego-based Justice Department prosecutor Fred Sheppard that the zero-tolerance policy would be ‘diverting staff, both support and attorneys, accordingly’ from non-immigration cases, according to a June report by USA Today.
Sheppard warned border authorities that prioritizing immigration cases would ‘occupy substantially more of our resources,’ according to an email obtained by the paper.
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Clearly, Sessions’s obscene, irrational, xenophobic fixation on brown skinned asylum seekers (who, in most cases should just be taken to the nearest port of entry and processed civilly through the credible fear/removal system) is destroying the U.S. Justice system. His insane program ignores the fundamental truth of law enforcement in any system: putting minor first offenders of regulatory laws in court displaces the cases of major offenders.
That’s why no well functioning justice system does it! What would you think if your local courts and prosecutors were so busy processing jaywalking cases that they couldn’t investigate and prosecute burglaries and bank robberies? But, that’s essentially what Sessions is doing here.
Moreover, the Federal Prosecutors, Federal Judges, and Federal, Magistrates who have failed to use their independent authority to put an end to these abuses are also complicit.
While much has been written about the supposed “resilience” of our democratic institutions and their ability to stand up to Executive abuses and tyranny, in this case it’s not happening. The system is essentially letting Sessions “get away with murder.” As Americans we should all be both outraged and appalled by this failure!
Stop the abuses! Stand up for Due Process, humanity, and rationality!
AS ONE strolls the stately streets of Washington, D.C., taking in the breathtaking scale and august architecture of the federal government’s multifarious departments, agencies and commissions — more than 430 of them, by some estimates — one can only stand in awe of the sheer size, resources and power of the . . . American Civil Liberties Union. That, in a nutshell, was the stance the Justice Department seemed to take in court last week. It argued that the ACLU, not the U.S. government, is capable of cleaning up the ongoing mess stemming from the Trump administration’s brief but incalculably damaging campaign to separate hundreds of migrant children from their parents.
As the government said in court filings, the ACLU, which represents the parents, should use its “considerable resources” and network of advocacy groups, lawyers and volunteers to reunify hundreds of families that remain sundered despite U.S. District Judge Dana M. Sabraw’s order that they be reunified. The judge was having none of it. “This responsibility is 100 percent on the government,” he said.
Edging away from his characteristic understatement, Mr. Sabraw, a Republican appointee, went further. “The reality is that for every parent that is not located, there will be a permanently orphaned child and that is 100 percent the responsibility of the administration,” he said.
The ACLU says it is ready to help reunite families, but it’s preposterous that the government would try to outsource the job and shed its own responsibility. When considering the tragedy visited upon hundreds of families by the heedless, ham-handed cruelty of the Trump administration’s family-separation foray, the statistics may mask the depth of suffering inflicted on individual children, including toddlers and tweens, by President Trump, Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen.
They devised the separation policy, specifically intending to deter future migrants. In the face of public outrage, Mr. Trump reversed the “zero tolerance” policy six weeks after it was proclaimed. But the damage is lasting. Despite Mr. Sabraw’s order that more than 2,500 children be returned to their parents by late July, more than 400 of them, whose parents were deported, remain in government shelters. Federal officials, who had no plan for reuniting families, also have no plan for locating parents, most of them in Guatemala and Honduras , who have already been removed.
A measure of the administration’s callous recklessness is that officials often failed to collect contact information for deported mothers and fathers — cellphone numbers, addresses — that could facilitate reunions with their children. In some cases, government forms list deportees’ addresses in Central America as “calle sin nombre” — street without a name. Very useful.
Mr. Sabraw ordered the administration to appoint an individual to oversee what will be the painstaking process of tracking down deported parents. In the meantime, administration lawyers might take a refresher course on the meaning of accountability and personal responsibility. Of course, ultimate responsibility lies with administration leaders who cared so little for the human beings who are now paying such a high price.
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Simply breathtaking lack of accountability, personal responsibility, morality, and human decency by the government officials responsible for this abuse. And, some stunning ethical lapses by the DOJ attorneys who presented this insulting, demonstrably untrue, nonsense in Federal Court. But, the key is that only the victims of the abuse suffer. The perpetrators walk free to strike again, emboldened by having gotten away with a mere slap on the hand for abusing children and insulting a Federal Judge and the opposing party.
