Attorney General William Barr – Page 49

RETIRED MILITARY LEADERS SPEAK OUT AGAINST TRUMP’S WANTON DESTRUCTION OF U.S. RFUGEE PROGRAM — “When we slam the door on refugees, we encourage other nations to do the same, contributing to a less compassionate and more dangerous world, one in which our military will increasingly be called to provide stability.”

Admiral Robert J. Natter — United States Navy Official photo of ADM (Line) [Now Retired] Robert J. Natter, Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Plans, Policy and Operations N3/N5. As of August 1999.

Lt. Gen. Mark P. Hertling — Lt. Gen. (Ret.) Mark P. Hertling
U.S. Army

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/09/08/cutting-refugee-admissions-will-have-severe-consequences-us-military/

Admiral (Ret.) Robert J. Natter & Lt. General (Ret.) Mark P. Hertling write in WashPost:

Robert J. Natter is a retired U.S. Navy admiral who served as commander of the U.S. Atlantic Fleet and U.S. Fleet Forces from 2000 to 2003. Mark P. Hertling is a retired lieutenant general who served as commanding general of U.S. Army Europe from 2011 to 2012.

America was founded as a safe haven to persecuted people and a beacon of hope, liberty and freedom to people around the world. Those themes reflect our values, and the welcoming of refugees to our shores is one of our proudest legacies and a fundamental part of who we are as a nation.

As military leaders, we spent nearly four decades defending these values. But today, a core American legacy is at risk, as the Trump administration is reportedly considering issuing severe, unprecedented cuts — potentially even zeroing out — the bipartisan U.S. Refugee Admissions Program, the established legal means of entry for these deserving people.

This week, we joined a group of 27 retired generals and admirals — all of whom have been operational leaders in military conflicts and exhibited courage in defending our values on the battlefield — in writing to President Trump expressing grave concerns about the direction of this vital program.

That’s because for many of us, welcoming refugees is not just a matter of smart policy and a reflection of our national values; it is also personal. Many of us know these refugees: They worked for and with us in our fight against terrorists and insurgents. The tangible and significant improvements we were able to make in the lives of millions as well as efforts to protect our own soldiers, sailors and Marines would not have been possible without the dedicated efforts of thousands of Iraqi and Afghan interpreters, logisticians, engineers and others.

Many of those individuals were targeted because of their assistance to us. They and their families have often been threatened for working with coalition forces, yet they bravely continued in their service at every level from translating conversations at the infantry squad level to contributing to task-force-level diplomatic missions. They may claim different cultures and speak different languages, but they have all put their lives on the line along with our citizens as part of our team.

Many of our partners continue to live in fear, given the continued hazardous situations in various parts of the world. In Iraq alone, more than 100,000 await entry to the United States. We promised our Iraqi partners support and safety when they were shoulder to shoulder with us fighting a despicable enemy. If today we turn these people away, or reduce the numbers who are allowed entry, it will be extremely difficult to ask others to assist us in the future.

Providing safety to people who assist American troops is a core function of our refugee program, but it does not stop there. We are living in a moment of unprecedented global displacement. Of the nearly 26 million refugees across the globe, most are hosted by low- and middle-income countries bordering the unstable areas that people are fleeing. A small proportion of the most vulnerable — less than 5 percent — are selected for resettlement. In addition to humanitarian assistance, resettling refugees is a concrete way that the United States offers support to these countries, while also strengthening regional stability and reducing the risk that people will be forced to return to conflict zones.

We know firsthand that both the humanitarian and strategic consequences of conflicts in Iraq, Syria, the Balkans and East and West Africa would be much worse had neighboring countries closed their borders. We also know that conflicts can restart when refugees are sent home prematurely. Of the 15 largest returns of refugees since 1990, a third have resulted in the resumption of conflict and the slaughter of innocents.

When we slam the door on refugees, we encourage other nations to do the same, contributing to a less compassionate and more dangerous world, one in which our military will increasingly be called to provide stability.

Over the past 40 years, the United States has welcomed about 3 million refugees from around the world who have gone on to contribute to and strengthen this country in immeasurable ways. The average refugee admission level across both Republican and Democratic administrations is 95,000 annually. Yet in the last two years, admissions have plummeted 75 percent.

In the next two weeks, the president will decide how many refugees we will admit in 2020. That decision will determine whether we uphold America’s legacy as a haven for the persecuted, and it will send a powerful message to the world about who we are as a people. We strongly recommend that this lifesaving humanitarian program be restored to historic bipartisan-supported levels.

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“We also know that conflicts can restart when refugees are sent home prematurely. Of the 15 largest returns of refugees since 1990, a third have resulted in the resumption of conflict and the slaughter of innocents.”

So much for the Trump Administration’s “solution” of returning refugees and other forced migrants to danger zones in their own countries or to countries that are equally or more dangerous. Killing and abusing forced migrants through improper returns and “deterrents” intended to make them “die in place” is reminiscent of other types of “final solutions” that were disastrous for humanity. Only, this time, the U.S. is the “leader of the pack” downward rather than one of those fighting to save humanity.

A thoroughly cowardly performance by Trump and his White Nationalist gang.

Also, for the more than four decades I have been involved in immigration and refugee issues, overseas refugee admissions have received overwhelming bipartisan support. What has happened to the GOP which suddenly has “swallowed the whistle” in the face of Trump’s cowardly White Nationalism?

It appears that retired military leaders, like former U.S. Immigration Judges, can make a “full time job” out of speaking out against the stupid, counterproductive, and inhumane policies of the Trump Administration.

PWS

09-10-19

TED HESSON @ POLITICO: Is Trump Winning The Border Battle?

Ted Hesson, Immigration, Pro — Staff mugshots photographed Feb. 20, 2018. (M. Scott Mahaskey/Politico)

Someone using POLITICO for iPad wants to share this article with you:

Trump’s plan to stem border crossings gets results

Ted Hesson

President Donald Trump’s plan to force Mexico to stem the flow of migrants across the southwest border of the U.S. appears to be working. Border arrests, a metric for illegal crossings, plummeted to 51,000 in August, according to preliminary government fig…

READ ON POLITICO.COM

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Follow POLITICO on Twitter: @POLITICO

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Trump’s “methods” are highly problematic in terms of human lives and legal requirements. Also, since the “enforcement only” approach fails to deal with the causes of forced migration, I doubt that the “success” will be sustainable in the long run.

PWS

09-08-19

THE U.S. REFUGEE PROGRAM IS A SMASHING SUCCESS THAT SAVES LIVES WHILE PROMOTING THE NATIONAL INTEREST IN MANY WAYS — NOW, TRUMP & HIS STUPID & CRUEL WHITE NATIONALIST GANG WANT TO COMPLETELY SHUT OUT REFUGEES AT A TIME OF THE WORLD’S GREATEST NEED AND WHEN AMERICA NEEDS MORE IMMIGRANTS!

Julie Hirshfeld Davis
Congressional Reporter
NY Times

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/06/us/politics/trump-refugees-united-states.html

Julie Hirshfeld Davis & Michael D. Shear report for The NY Times:

By Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Michael D. Shear

Sept. 6, 2019

WASHINGTON — The White House is considering a plan that would keep most refugees who are fleeing war, persecution and famine out of the United States, significantly cutting back a decades-old program, according to current and former administration officials.

One option that top officials are weighing would cut refugee admissions by half or more, to 10,000 to 15,000 people, but reserve most of those spots for people from a few countries or from groups with special status, such as Iraqis and Afghans who work alongside American troops, diplomats and intelligence operatives abroad. Another option, proposed by a top administration official, would reduce refugee admissions to zero, while leaving the president with the ability to admit some in an emergency.

Both options would all but end the United States’ status as a leader in accepting refugees from around the world.

The issue is expected to come to a head on Tuesday, when White House officials plan to convene a high-level meeting to discuss the annual number of refugee admissions for the coming year, as determined by President Trump.

“At a time when the number of refugees is at the highest level in recorded history, the United States has abandoned world leadership in resettling vulnerable people in need of protection,” said Eric Schwartz, the president of Refugees International. “The result is a world that is less compassionate and less able to deal with future humanitarian challenges.”

For two years, Stephen Miller, Mr. Trump’s top immigration adviser, has used his considerable influence in the West Wing to reduce the refugee ceiling to its lowest levels in history, capping the program at 30,000 this year. That is a more than 70 percent cut from its level when President Barack Obama left office.

The move has been part of Mr. Trump’s broader effort to reduce the number of documented and undocumented immigrants entering the United States, including numerous restrictions on asylum seekers, who, like refugees, are fleeing persecution but cross into the United States over the border with Mexico or Canada.

Now, Mr. Miller and allies from the White House whom he placed at the Departments of State and Homeland Security are pushing aggressively to shrink the program even further, according to one senior official involved in the discussions and several former officials briefed on them, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to detail the private deliberations.

White House officials did not respond to a request for comment.

John Zadrozny, a top official at United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, made the argument for simply lowering the ceiling to zero, a stance that was first reported by Politico. Others have suggested providing “carveouts” for certain countries or populations, such as the Iraqis and Afghans, whose work on behalf of the American government put both them and their families at risk, making them eligible for special status to come to the United States through the refugee program.

Advocates of the nearly 40-year-old refugee program inside and outside the administration fear that approach would effectively starve the operation out of existence, making it impossible to resettle even those narrow populations.

“Pulling the rug out from under refugees and the resettlement program, as is reported, is unfair, inhumane and strategically flawed for the United States,” said Nazanin Ash, the vice president for global policy and advocacy for the International Rescue Committee. “This is a program that is reserved for, and vital to, the most vulnerable refugees.”

Now, officials at the advocacy groups say the fate of the program increasingly hinges on an unlikely figure: Mark T. Esper, the secretary of defense, who they are hoping will save the program by protesting the cut and recommending that Mr. Trump set a higher refugee ceiling.

Barely two months into his job as Pentagon chief, Mr. Esper, a former lobbyist and defense contracting executive, is the newest voice at the table in the annual debate over how many refugees to admit. But while Mr. Esper’s predecessor, Jim Mattis, had taken up the refugee cause with an almost missionary zeal, repeatedly declining to embrace large cuts because of the potential effect he said they would have on American military interests around the world, Mr. Esper’s position on the issue is unknown.

The senior military leadership at the Defense Department has been urgently pressing Mr. Esper to follow his predecessor’s example and be an advocate for the refugee program, according to people familiar with the conversations in the Pentagon.

But current and former senior military officials said the defense secretary had not disclosed to them whether he would fight for higher refugee admissions at the White House meeting next week. One former general described Mr. Esper as in a “foxhole defilade” position, a military term for the infantry’s effort to remain shielded or concealed from enemy fire.

Image

For two years, Stephen Miller, Mr. Trump’s top immigration advisor, has used his influence to reduce the refugee ceiling to its lowest levels in history.

Credit

Erin Schaff/The New York Times

A senior Defense Department official said that Mr. Esper had not decided what his recommendation would be for the refugee program this year. As a result, an intense effort is underway by a powerful group of retired generals and humanitarian aid groups to persuade Mr. Esper to pick up where Mr. Mattis left off.

In a letter to Mr. Trump on Wednesday, some of the nation’s most distinguished retired military officers implored the president to reconsider the cuts, taking up the national security argument that Mr. Mattis made when he was at the Pentagon. They called the refugee program a “critical lifeline” to people who help American troops, diplomats and intelligence officials abroad, and warned that cutting it off risked greater instability and conflict.

“We urge you to protect this vital program and ensure that the refugee admissions goal is robust, in line with decades-long precedent, and commensurate with today’s urgent global needs,” wrote the military brass, including Admiral William H. McRaven, the former commander of United States Special Operations; General Martin E. Dempsey, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; and Lt. General Mark P. Hertling, the former commanding general of Army forces in Europe.

They said that even the current ceiling of 30,000 was “leaving thousands in harm’s way.”

Gen. Joseph L. Votel, who retired this year after overseeing the American military’s command that runs operations in the Middle East, also signed the letter. In an interview, he noted that the flows of refugees leaving war-torn countries like Syria was one of the driving forces of instability in the region.

“We don’t do anything alone,” General Votel said of American military operations overseas, which are regularly helped by Iraqi citizens who become persecuted refugees. “This is not just the price we pay but an obligation.”

Mr. Mattis privately made the same arguments in 2018 and 2019 as he tried to fight back efforts by Mr. Miller to cut the refugee cap, which had already been reduced to 50,000 by Mr. Trump’s travel ban executive order.

Joined by Rex W. Tillerson, who was then the secretary of state, and Nikki R. Haley, the United Nations ambassador at the time, Mr. Mattis succeeded in keeping the cap at 45,000 for 2018. The next year, Mr. Miller tried to persuade Mr. Mattis to support a lower number by promising to ensure the program for the Iraqi and Afghans would not be affected. But Mr. Mattis refused, pushing for the program to remain at 45,000 refugees. But with Mr. Tillerson gone, Mr. Miller succeeded in persuading the president to drop the ceiling to 30,000.

In his announcement last year, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo argued that because of a recent surge of asylum seekers at the southwestern border, there was less of a need for the United States to accept refugees from abroad.

“This year’s refugee ceiling reflects the substantial increase in the number of individuals seeking asylum in our country, leading to a massive backlog of outstanding asylum cases and greater public expense,” Mr. Pompeo said at the time.

Now, a year later, Mr. Miller and his allies have repeatedly made that same argument in urging that the number go even lower.

Barbara Strack, who retired last year as chief of the Refugee Affairs Division at the federal Citizenship and Immigration Services, said the United States used to be a model for other countries by accepting refugees from all over the globe. After America began accepting Bhutanese refugees from Nepal, she said, other countries followed suit.

“Very often, that leadership matters,” she said. “That is something that is just lost in terms of who the United States is in the world and how other governments see us.”

The State Department was once the main steward and champion of the refugee resettlement program, but under Mr. Trump, that has changed, as the president and Mr. Miller have made clear that they view it with disdain. The top State Department official now in charge of refugees is Andrew Veprek, a former aide of Mr. Miller’s at the White House Domestic Policy Council who — with Mr. Zadrozny — was a central player in 2017 in efforts to scale back refugee resettlement as much as possible.

That has left the Defense Department as the last agency that could potentially preserve the refugee program. Its proponents inside the administration say they feel a sense of desperation waiting to see whether Mr. Esper will become its advocate.

“The strength of D.O.D.’s argument would really make a difference,” Ms. Strack said. “There just needs to be an acknowledgment that this administration would be walking away from a longstanding, bipartisan tradition of offering refuge to the most vulnerable people around the world.”

That sense of foreboding has intensified in recent weeks, as Mr. Miller has locked down the process for determining the refugee ceiling, to guard against leaks and cut down on opportunities for officials to intervene to save it. Normally, cabinet-level officials would be informed in advance of the options to be discussed at a meeting like the one scheduled on Tuesday.

This time, officials have been informed that their bosses will learn what numbers the White House is proposing only when they sit down at the table and are asked to weigh in.

Correction: September 6, 2019

An earlier version of this article misstated the age of a refugee program. It is 40 years old, not 50 years old.

Helene Cooper and Thomas Gibbons-Neff contributed reporting.

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Here’s a recent post featuring Don Kerwin of Center for Migration Studies (“CMS”) highlighting the many successes of our national refugee program and how it serves the national need.

https://immigrationcourtside.com/2019/07/21/don-kerwin-cms-refugees-helped-make-america-great-now-unpatriotic-trump-administration-plans-to-completely-abandon-worlds-refugees-at-their-time-of-greatest-need-rich/

As someone who worked on the enactment and initial implementation of the Refugee Act of 1980, I find Trump’s actions to be shockingly un-American and short sighted. The Refugee Program is there for very good reasons — to implement our obligations under the U.N. Convention & Protocol Relating To The Status of Refugees in an orderly and transparent manner with needed participation from both Congress and the Executive.

While no program is “perfect,” the Refugee Admissions Program under the Refugee Act of 1980 is about as close to a perfect program as you can get. It has fostered nearly unprecedented cooperation among the U.S., other signatory countries, and NGOs who do much of the “footwork” at minimal costs to the Government in relation to the program’s long-term contributions to saving lives and promoting the national interest. Terminating it is nothing short of insane — the action of diseased and twisted minds overcome by fear, cowardice, and White Nationalist-stoked racism.

Undoubtedly, a future Administration will attempt to restore the program to its important place in the American foreign and domestic policy arenas. But, it won’t be so easy. The success of today’s overseas program is based on years of shared expertise among our government institutions, the NGO community, and the international community. Once that apparatus is “disassembled” and the expertise lost or diverted elsewhere, it will not be easily or quickly restored.

Indeed a much more rational program, recommended by many, would be to substantially increase our refugee admissions, even above Obama Administration levels, and to include a realistically generous and robust program for identifying and accepting for resettlement refugees from the Northern Triangle without forcing them to make the difficult journey to the U.S. border to seek our protection.

Incidentally, since there is an irreducible requirement of “non refoulment,” or “non-return” under Article 33 of the U.N. Convention & Protocol, refugees will continue to seek protection from the U.S. no matter what lengths to which the Trump Administration goes to harass and punish therm. Eliminating existing legal refugee and asylum programs will just make their quest more dangerous and uncertain. It also will force those who succeed in establishing their cases for protection to “remain in limbo” in the U.S. rather than being welcomed and integrated into our society so that they can achieve their full human potential. Talk about a “lose-lose!” But, ultimately, making everybody a loser is about the only real skill that Trump, American’s greatest con-man, possesses.

Every day, the vile characters in the Trump Administration lead our country downward — toward the darkest recesses of failure and despair. We need national leaders who can show us the way upward again, before it’s too late for all of us.

PWS

09-08-19

KIT JOHNSON & NOLAN RAPPAPORT UNITED IN CAUSE OF JUSTICE FOR MARIA ISABEL BUESO — Different Methods, But One Objective: Justice!

Kevin R. Johnson
Dean
UC Davis School of Law

https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/immigration/2019/09/trumps-death-sentence-for-immigrant-who-followed-the-law-merits-private-bill.html

Summary from Dean Kevin Johnson @ ImmigrationProf Blog:

Nolan Rappaport: Trump’s ‘death sentence’ for immigrant who followed the law merits private bill

Thursday, September 5, 2019

Kit Johnson has been blogging on the case of Maria Isabel Bueso, who at age 7 came to the United States for specialized health care for a life-threatening matter and now is threatened with removal — and possible death — by the Trump administration.

Nolan Rappaport on the Hill is more optimistic than Kit on the possibilities for a private bill allowing Bueso to gain lawful immigration status and remain in the United States. He writes, “In 30-some years as an immigration lawyer, I have not seen a more compelling justification for a private bill than the way the administration has treated Maria `Isabel’ Bueso.”

KJ

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Go on over to ImmigrationProf Blog at the link for all the links to the story highlighted by Nolan and Kit.

Sometimes Trump’s immigration policies bring folks together: in united opposition.

Thanks to Nolan and Kit for highlighting this case! Hopefully, unity and publicity will bring success and save lives in this and other cases

PWS

09-07

-19

CATHERINE RAMPELL @ WASHPOST: Trump & His GOP’s Cowardly “War On Children” Should Outrage Every American! — Join The “New Due Process Army” & Fight To Save Humanity!

Catherine writes in the Washington Post:

You’ve heard of the Wars on Drugs, Terror, Poverty, even Women. Well, welcome to the War on Children.

It’s being waged by the Trump administration and other right-wing public officials, regardless of any claimed “family values.”

For evidence, look no further than the report released Wednesday by the Department of Health and Human Services’s own inspector general. It details the trauma suffered by immigrant children separated from their parents under the Trump administration’s evil “zero tolerance” policy.

Thousands of children were placed in overcrowded centers ill-equipped to provide care for them physically or psychologically. Visits to 45 centers around the country resulted in accounts of children who cried inconsolably; who were drugged; who were promised family reunifications that never came; whose severe emotional distress manifested in phantom chest pains, with complaints that “every heartbeat hurts”; who thought their parents had abandoned them or had been murdered.

Such state-sanctioned child abuse was designed to serve as a “deterrent” for asylum-seeking families, as then-Chief of Staff John F. Kelly and other administration officials made clear.

Of course, they failed to recognize just how horrific are the conditions these asylum-seeking children are fleeing — conditions that further decreased HHS’s ability to adequately care for them.

“Staff in multiple facilities reported cases of children who had been kidnapped or raped” back in their home countries, the IG report states. Other children witnessed family members raped or murdered.

But hey, Trump believes these kiddos must be punished further for the crime of seeking refuge — a.k.a., the “invasion” of America.

Despite this and other abundant evidence that government facilities are not able to care for children for extended periods, last month, the administration also announced a new policy that would allow it to keep children (along with their families) in jail-like conditions for longer periods of time.

This is hardly the only way the administration has knowingly enacted policies that harm children.

In August, it finalized a rule that would make it more difficult for immigrants to receive green cards if they have used certain safety-net services they’re legally entitled to — or if government officials suspect they might ever use such services. Confusion and fear about the policy and whom it affects abound. This has already created a “chilling effect” for usage of social services, with immigrant parents disenrolling even their U.S.-citizen children just to be safe.

Last fall, for instance, I interviewed a green-card-holding mother who decided not to enroll her underweight newborn in a program that would have provided free formula (even though the program in question was not mentioned in the rule, and the baby is a U.S. citizen). Huge recent declines in children’s Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program enrollment are also believed to be at least partly a result of fears about this policy change.

If Your Dog Does This, It Could Be Them Signaling A Warning

And lest you think only immigrant or brown children are being targeted in this war: U.S. servicemembers’ children, of all sorts of backgrounds, are being hurt, too.

The Trump administration is siphoning billions from various defense projects to fund border wall construction, despite promises that Mexico would pay for it. This might sound unlikely to affect kids, but somehow the Trump administration found a way. Among the projects losing funds are schools for the children of U.S. servicemembers based in Kentucky, Germany and Japan, and a child-care center at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland.

Trump’s proposed federal budgets have likewise axed funding for other programs that serve children, such as subsidized school meals and Medicaid. Indeed, both federal and state GOP officials more broadly are still working to kill the Medicaid expansion, as well as other Affordable Care Act provisions that benefit kids.

The GOP has likewise ignored the pleas of children who want their lives protected from gun violence, or who want their futures protected from a warming planet.

A year ago, I offered a suggestion : that Democrats make children the theme of their midterm campaign. They mostly ignored me and still did okay. Nonetheless, I’m re-upping it.

Because even without Trump’s baby jails and proposed Medicaid cuts, our country’s emphasis on children’s well- being is seriously deficient.

Last year, for the first time on record, we spent a greater share of the federal budget servicing the national debt than we did on children, according to an analysis out next week from First Focus on Children. Spending on children as a share of the federal budget is also expected to shrink over the coming decade, crowded out by both debt service and spending on the elderly.

This is despite the fact that spending on children (especially low-income children) has among the highest returns on investment of any form of government spending.

Whatever the opposite of Trump’s War on Children is, that’s what Democrats should be running on.

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Thanks, Catherine, for speaking out so clearly and articulately about what has become our #1 National Disgrace: Trump’s War On Human Decency & Future Generations and its sleazy cast of supporting characters like Pence, Kelly, Miller, Nielsen, “Big Mac With Lies,” Homan, Albence, Morgan, “Cooch Cooch,” “Gonzo Apocalypto,” Barr, Cotton, Graham, and others with their glib immorality and disregard for truth, our Constitution, the rule of law, and basic human values.

Who thought the U.S. would ever stoop so low — to use our government’s power and might to abuse defenseless, already traumatized, and highly vulnerable children. (Catherine’s article does’t even get into how, with the help of scofflaw Attorneys General Sessions and Barr and some complacent Article III Judges, the Administration has manipulated asylum law and Immigration “Court” procedures to deny children and other asylum seekers the legal protection to which they are entitled under U.S. and international laws.)

There are many groups out there in the “New Due Process Army” fighting every day against this kind of outrageous behavior by our elected leaders, their corrupt cronies, and their many “go along to get along” enablers in the bureaucracy. Join or donate to one today!

The war to save America and humanity from Trump’s vile and cowardly agenda is one that we can’t afford to lose: For the sake of future generations!

PWS

09-06-19

TAL @ SF CHRON TAKES US INSIDE EOIR’S LATEST ASSAULT ON DUE PROCESS: Lack Of Live Interpretation Causing Confusion, Delays, Misinformation, & Denials Of Fundamental Fairness In U.S. Immigration Courts — Bogus “Court” System Continues To Make Major Changes Diminishing Due Process Without Consulting Judges, Attorneys, Or The Affected Individuals!

Tal Kopan reports for the SF Chron:

https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/Confusion-delays-as-videos-replace-interpreters-14414627.php

Confusion, delays as videos replace interpreters at immigrants’ hearings

By Tal Kopan

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration has been slow to implement its new policy replacing in-person interpreters with informational videos at immigrants’ initial hearings, but the switch is causing delays and confusion where it has been introduced, including in San Francisco, observers say.

The Justice Department informed immigration judges in late June that it would replace in-person interpreters at the first court appearance for immigrants facing deportation with videos advising them of their rights. The switchover began in July.

So far, the policy has been rolled out to courts in just four cities: San Francisco, Los Angeles, Miami and New York.

It’s not clear when the policy will expand. A spokesman for the Justice Department division that oversees the courts said the agency “is taking into consideration all feedback before additional translation videos are created and the program is rolled out to further immigration courts.”

Judges and attorneys observing the courts say the change has mostly served to delay proceedings, by adding lengthy steps and information that is not necessary for all migrants to hear.

After the videos are shown, each immigrant is called up for his or her individual hearing and may have questions for the judge. Although judges are now barred from scheduling in-person interpreters for the hearings, at times interpreters can be found on short notice in the courthouses. When none is available, judges must try a telephone service to reach an interpreter.

At issue are what are called master calendar hearings — immigrants’ first appearance in courts that determine whether they can remain in the U.S. The typically rapid-fire sessions serve to inform migrants of their rights and the process they will go through. Judges also schedule their next hearings.

Many immigrants in the system are Spanish speakers, but it’s also common for Chinese, Creole, and several indigenous languages from Central America and around the world to be spoken in courtrooms.

Judges in courts that have made the change are required to play either a Spanish-dubbed or English-language video for immigrants who do not have attorneys representing them. The 20-minute video runs through a lengthy list of technical legal advisories. Videos in other languages are not yet available, but the Justice Department has plans to introduce them.

Most of the dozens of immigrants going through their initial hearings Tuesday in San Francisco were shown the video. Many of them had attorneys present who translated, and others were able to use a Spanish-speaking interpreter who was on hand. Languages spoken in court included Spanish, Punjabi, Hindi, Mandarin and Fijian.

One hearing in the courtroom of Judge Arwen Swink involved a Mongolian woman who needed translation. After about five minutes, Swink was able to secure an interpreter in her language through the telephone service Lionbridge.

Swink asked the interpreter to introduce himself to the woman, who did not have an attorney, to ensure that she understood him. The interpreter said he had trouble hearing, but court staffers brought the microphone closer to the woman and the session was able to proceed.

With an interpreter in the room, such a hearing can take five minutes or less. The woman’s case took 15 minutes.

The Chronicle has obtained transcripts of the separate videos that are played for immigrants who are in detention and not in detention, as well as an FAQ handout they receive.

Roughly a fifth of the videos are devoted to a discussion of “voluntary departure,” under which immigrants can go back to their home country without being penalized if they try to come back someday. The videos also warn immigrants of the criminal consequences of trying to re-enter the country illegally after being deported.

Legal experts and veteran immigration judges say neither topic was commonly brought up in initial hearings before the videos were introduced because they are most relevant at the end of cases, if migrants do not prevail in their bid to remain in the U.S. Several said they feared the emphasis on voluntary departures and criminal penalties could prompt immigrants with valid claims to stay in the U.S. to waive their right without fully understanding what they’re doing.

The Justice Department did not consult with the union that represents immigration judges before making the change, and has proceeded despite ongoing bargaining with the group. The result is “lots of confusion, constantly changing parameters of the program by the agency and frustration among many judges,” said Ashley Tabaddor, president of the National Association of Immigration Judges and an immigration judge in Los Angeles.

Tabaddor added that courts in New York and Miami have had trouble securing help by phone, and that cases have been delayed in the Los Angeles court because of shortages of interpreters.

Amiena Khan, the union’s executive vice president and a judge in New York, said the videos make for a “really long day” for unrepresented immigrants who have to wait through proceedings for all migrants who have attorneys before watching a 20-minute video. She finds herself repeating or adding key advisories when immigrants are called before her.

“There was no problem that needed to be solved by the introduction of the video,” Khan said. “What I think really bothers me is that it’s mandatory. I think if it was discretionary as a tool for the judge to use, it could be helpful. (But) it takes away our judicial independence as to what method to employ to best get through the day’s docket.”

Khan and former immigration Judge Jeffrey Chase, who reviewed the transcripts, also noted that the videos do not include information that would be important for immigrants, including that they have only one year to formally apply for asylum in the U.S.

“The information provided is misleading in a way that can lead to a noncitizen’s removal,” said Chase, who now volunteers for organizations that provide legal assistance to immigrants.

Laura Lynch, senior policy counsel for the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said the transcripts show that the videos use “scare tactics” instead of informing immigrants of their rights. The videos warn immigrants against filing frivolous asylum claims, but don’t explain what asylum is, she noted.

“The videos provide an overwhelming amount of information that no one can easily digest in one setting,” Lynch said. “What’s more disturbing is that the content itself only tells one side of the story.”

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

Click on the link for Tal’s full story with links to actual transcripts of this “parody of justice.”

This is DOJ/EOIR’s “malicious incompetence” in action. Accurate interpretation is essential to Due Process and fundamental fairness as well as the hallmark of a competently and professionally run court system. Somewhere along the line, the money for interpreters was frittered away by what passes for “management” at DOJ/EOIR. And, let’s not even think about the waste of money on absurd “Immigration Judge Dashboards” while the two decades old overwhelming need for a functional nationwide e-filing system goes unmet.

Right now, Congress is paralyzed. When are the Article III Courts going to wake up, get some backbone, and enforce the U.S. Constitution by putting an end to this so-called “court system” run by prosecutors that provides not even a semblance of fair and impartial (and at least minimally competent) adjudication? No more “Clown Court!”🤡

PWS

09-05-19

GOV’S OWN WATCHDOG CONFIRMS IT: Trump Administration Abused Migrant Children With Impunity!

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/adolfoflores/separated-immigrant-children-suffered-mental-trauma-ptsd

Adolfo Flores reports for BuzzFeed News:

A government watchdog report published Wednesday said immigrant children who were separated from their parents at the border by the Trump administration last year suffered increased post-traumatic stress and trauma.

Some unaccompanied immigrant children who end up at government facilities already experienced physical or sexual abuse in the countries they fled, or violence on the journey to the US, the report said. The trauma was only made worse by the “zero tolerance” policy that led to thousands of children being systematically separated from their parents by immigration authorities in the spring of 2018.

Separated children experienced heightened levels of anxiety, fear, and PTSD compared with children who were not taken from their parents, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Office of Inspector General said. Its report looked at facilities funded by HHS’s Office of Refugee Resettlement, which had custody over children who were separated from their parents or who arrived in the US unaccompanied by an adult.

“Some separated children expressed acute grief that caused them to cry inconsolably,” the report said. “Children who believed their parents had abandoned them were angry and confused. Other children expressed feelings of fear or guilt and became concerned for their parents’ welfare.”

The report offered additional details on the effects the Trump administration’s systematic family separations had on immigrant children and how the trauma was made worse by federal agencies’ lack of preparedness and poor record-keeping.

One 7- or 8-year-old boy who was separated from his father believed his dad had been killed and that he would also be killed. The child ended up in emergency psychiatric care.

dical director said separated children felt physical manifestations of their psychological pain and made statements like “every heartbeat hurts” or “I can’t feel my heart.”

The increased mental health issues were made worse by the difficulty in finding the parents of separated children and being able to set up phone calls with the kids — due to the government’s lack of record-keeping for separated children.

During the height of family separations at the border, statements from federal authorities revealed the Trump administration had little to no planning for how the children and parents would eventually be reunited.

At a court hearing in 2018 before a judge who ordered the Trump administration to reunite separated children, Justice Department attorneys acknowledged that the government is uncertain it knows the whereabouts of all the parents of 101 children under the age of 5. Around the same time, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar told reporters that the agency was scrambling to be sure it knew the location of all the children who’d been separated from their parents.

Program directors at facilities holding separated children said the process for reuniting children covered by the judge’s order changed frequently and with little notice, adding to the stress and mental health needs of these kids.

Some reunifications were scheduled with little notice, were suddenly canceled, or were delayed. In one case, a girl was moved from a facility in Florida to a facility in Texas to be reunited with her father, but after making several trips to the detention center, she was sent back to Florida “in shambles” without ever seeing her dad.

Another HHS OIG report, the result of 45 visits to facilities and a review of some employee files last year, found that some facilities holding unaccompanied immigrant children didn’t have proof of employees’ FBI fingerprint or Child Protective Services background checks.

Half of the facilities allowed employees to start working with children before getting the results of either the FBI fingerprint check or the CPS check, or both, the report said. Ten employees worked with children for a year or more with no prior FBI criminal background check.

Amy Frontz, assistant inspector general for audit services, said that for the employees that they were able to eventually get background information, no disqualifying factors were found. And an OIG spokesperson said, “We don’t have information at this time that the lack of background checks resulted in any specific abuse or assault cases.”

“However, some employees when we completed our work did not have have an FBI background check or CPS check,” Frontz said.

Frontz noted that in 2018, HHS OIG released a memo that staff at the “tent city” in Tornillo, Texas, that was holding hundreds of immigration children, were not undergoing FBI fingerprint checks. After more than 1,500 employees had their background checks conducted following the memo, 26 people were terminated because of their results, Frontz said.

An OIG statement was updated to reflect they don’t have information at this time that the lack of background checks resulted in any specific abuse or assault cases.

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

Donald Trump, Jeff “Gonzo Apocalypto” Sessions, Kirsten Nielsen, Stephen Miller, and a host of other dangerous child abusers, some masquerading as U.S. Government officials, remain at large. They should be considered armed with lies, false narratives, illegal schemes, and toxic White Nationalist restrictionist agendas and extremely dangerous to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

PWS

09-05-19

9TH CIR/TRUMP “KILL ‘EM IN MEXICO PROGRAM” ENDANGERS ASYLUM SEEKERS & THOSE WHO ASSIST THEM —Judicial Disgrace Continues To Destroy Lives, Mock Humanity, Undermine The Rule of Law! — “Extortion-minded mobs view vulnerable migrants as walking ATMs.“

https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2019-09-01/kidnapping-of-pastor-in-mexican-border-town-dramatizes-threats-to-migrants

Patrick J. McDonnell

Mexico City Bureau Chief

LA Times

NUEVO LAREDO, Mexico — The kidnappers came to the shelter near the U.S.-Mexico border looking for Cuban migrants, favored targets because relatives in the United States are known to pay exorbitant ransoms to free abducted loved ones.

In cartel-dominated Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, a gateway to the United States, it’s a lucrative racket: Snatch a migrant from Cuba, Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, Venezuela or elsewhere; commandeer their cellphones; then call U.S. relatives demanding thousands of dollars.

No need to spell out the consequences of nonpayment in the lawless Mexican border state of Tamaulipas, known for mass graves and massacres of migrants — including hundreds slain by gunmen of the Zetas cartel outside the town of San Fernando in 2010-11.

(Los Angeles Times)

On Aug. 3, when the Rev. Aaron Mendez, an evangelical pastor and head of the Amar shelter, refused the kidnappers’ demands, the thugs took him away.

The pastor entered the twilight world of Mexico’s “disappeared” — officially 37,000 and growing, with Tamaulipas state leading Mexico in the grisly statistic. Federal and state police are investigating what happened to Mendez, said Ivan Moyle, a spokesman for the Tamaulipas prosecutor’s office, who declined to comment further.

The case has dramatized the systematic fashion of abductions and shakedowns faced by migrants and others at an especially sensitive time — when U.S. authorities have been expelling tens of thousands of Central Americans, Cubans and others back to Mexico’s crime-ridden border cities under the Trump administration’s Migrant Protection Protocols, known informally as “Remain in Mexico.”

Under the program, rolled out in January in the border cities of Tijuana and San Diego — and later expanded to other U.S.-Mexico crossings — more than 37,500 U.S.-bound migrants have been returned to Mexico to wait for U.S. court hearings. Many intend to seek political asylum in the United States.

More than 3,000 have been dispatched across the Rio Grande to Tamaulipas — both to Nuevo Laredo, opposite Laredo, Texas; and to Matamoros, sister city to Brownsville, Texas — since the program was extended in July. Mexican authorities provide little housing or other aid to the returnees, who are often left on the streets to fend for themselves.

Extortion-minded mobs view vulnerable migrants as walking ATMs. They are easy prey, lacking family ties in Mexico and known to have U.S. relatives with access to dollars. Mob halcones — hawks, or lookouts — watch bus stations and other strategic spots, eyeing potential quarry.

Though drug trafficking provides the bulk of cartel income, Mexico’s organized crime groups are multibillion-dollar conglomerates that also control migrant smuggling, kidnapping and other illicit ventures, working in cahoots with corrupt police and politicians.

“There is no protection,” said Father Julio Lopez, a Catholic priest who runs the Casa de Migrante Nazareth shelter in Nuevo Laredo.

Three Honduran migrant families who returned to Mexico under the Migrant Protection Protocols recently recounted in interviews with the Los Angeles Times how gangsters kidnapped them, obliging relatives in the United States to pay ransoms. All three said they had alerted U.S. immigration officials that they had been abducted in Mexico — but were nonetheless sent back to Mexico.

U.S. authorities say multiple factors are considered when determining whether apprehended migrants should be sent back to Mexico, including whether they face persecution or torture. Claims by migrants are documented, authorities said, but fear of being kidnapped does not necessarily disqualify detainees from being sent back to Mexico.

“One of our main priorities in the U.S. Border Patrol is the safety and the well-being of the people that we apprehend,” said Jose A. Martinez, acting assistant chief Border Patrol agent in Laredo, Texas.

The State Department has slapped its highest security alert on Tamaulipas, noting that “armed criminal groups target public and private passenger buses as well as private automobiles traveling through Tamaulipas, often taking passengers hostage and demanding ransom payments.”

Beti Suyapa Ortega, 36, said she was unaware of the extent of the danger when she boarded a Mexican public bus last month headed for the U.S. border with her son, Robinson Javier Melara, 17. The single mother of five from the northern Honduran state of Yoro said she was fleeing maras, or gangs, that demanded weekly extortion payments at her family’s grocery store.

“The maras in Honduras are bad, but here I think they are even worse,” Ortega said.

Ortega spoke in a sweltering ground-floor waiting room in the concrete compound of Mexico’s immigration agency in Nuevo Laredo, where she and others fearful of going outside lingered for hours on plastic chairs and mats strewn on the floor.

On Aug. 4, Ortega said, she and her son were on a bus when a group of about 10 men flagged the vehicle down on the outskirts of Nuevo Laredo. The gangsters demanded that passengers produce identification and forced all foreigners off the vehicle, she said.

“We control this area!” one of the toughs declared, saying that he and the others were from the Northeast Cartel — the dominant gang in Nuevo Laredo and splinter faction of the hyper-violent Zetas mob.

Ortega and her son were taken to a house where about a dozen other migrants were being held, she said, and the kidnappers grabbed her phone. They found the number of her younger brother, Kevin Joel Ortega, 25, who had arrived in Atlanta a few months earlier. The captors snapped photos of Ortega and her son and dispatched the images to her brother, demanding $8,000 for their release, she said.

“If he didn’t pay, they said they would turn us over to ‘other people,’” Ortega said, trembling as she recalled the ominous phrasing. “My brother said it would take him time to raise the money, that he had just arrived, but please not to do anything to us.”

Ortega and her son were held for two weeks in a room with others, sleeping on the floor, receiving two daily meals — mostly beans and rice — and spending much of the time bored and watching a large flat-screen TV, she said. Her jailers did not physically harm anyone, she said, but angrily called the captives’ relatives in the United States daily, insisting on the payments.

“A time finally comes when one is not afraid anymore,” said Ortega, who was barefoot as she kept a close eye on her teenage son, the eldest of her five children, resting on the mat in the grimy Mexican immigration outpost. Her other four kids remained in Honduras.

Her brother in Atlanta was instructed to deposit the funds electronically in five different U.S. bank accounts, Ortega said.

On Aug. 18, when the money had been paid, Ortega said, she and her son were driven to a spot along the Rio Grande, where the cartel strictly controls illicit crossings, and taken across the river in an inflated tire tube.

Ortega and her son were detained in U.S. custody in Texas for two nights, she said, before being released with a court date of Dec. 10 in San Antonio.

“We told them [U.S. immigration authorities] we had been kidnapped, but they didn’t believe us,” Ortega said.

On Aug. 20, U.S. Border Patrol officers returned Ortega, her son and 18 other distraught migrants on foot to Nuevo Laredo across the Juarez-Lincoln International Bridge that spans the Rio Grande, in a sullen procession repeated here daily beneath the blazing sun. Many clutched transparent plastic bags emblazoned with the seal of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and containing notices to appear in immigration court.

But Ortega, like the others huddled in the Mexican immigration depot, said she had no intention of sticking around Nuevo Laredo. She was too frightened. She and fellow migrants were waiting for bus transport to Tapachula, a Mexican city near the Guatemalan border. The one-way rides are a Mexican government initiative that serves a double purpose — removing discouraged migrants from the perilous border zone, while also diminishing the chances that they will make the long and hazardous trip back for U.S. court dates.

“We’ve had enough,” Ortega said.

Also waiting for the bus was Maria Suyapa Rodriguez, 35, and her 12-year-old son. She and her son, she said, had also been kidnapped — on Aug. 15 at the Nuevo Laredo bus terminal, one of the most treacherous spots in town. The two were released two days later when her sister in New York agreed to pay a ransom, said Rodriguez, who did not know the amount. The pair subsequently crossed the Rio Grande, she said, and surrendered to the Border Patrol, which returned them to Mexico.

Like Ortega, Rodriguez said she had given up and would forgo her Jan. 10 U.S. court date and return home to Honduras, following the tracks of so many migrants, broke and petrified of Mexican organized crime.

In one case, said Father Lopez, a Guatemalan man swallowed his phone’s SIM card to prevent kidnappers from tracking down relatives. A Honduran kidnap victim recalled flushing papers with the scrawled numbers of U.S. kin down the toilet.

Among the recent clients at Casa de Migrante Nazareth was Rosa Emilia Torrez, 45, her husband and her two children, a 12-year-old son and an infant daughter. Kidnappers grabbed the family at the Nuevo Laredo bus station July 21, Torrez said, two days after U.S. immigration authorities expelled them back to Nuevo Laredo. The family had planned to take a bus to Durango, Mexico, and wait at a relative’s home until their Sept. 25 U.S. court date, Torrez said.

Their captors released the family July 28, according to Torrez, after her brother-in-law in New Orleans paid $16,000, negotiated down from an initial demand of $32,000.

The kidnappers, Torrez said, then insisted on taking the family back across the Rio Grande to Texas, where, Torrez said, the Border Patrol arrested the family again.

Torrez said she tried to explain to the agents that the kidnappers forced them to return to the U.S. side — and that they feared being sent back to Mexico yet again — but no one paid any attention.

“We just take your fingerprints and send you back to Mexico,” the Border Patrol agent told her, Torrez said.

U.S. immigration authorities returned the family to Nuevo Laredo on Aug. 1, said Torrez, who added that her family plans to find safe housing somewhere in Mexico and show up for their immigration hearing in Texas later this month.

“We came this far,” Torrez said. “We aren’t turning back now.”

Times staff writer Molly Hennessy-Fiske in Houston and Cecilia Sanchez of The Times’ Mexico City bureau contributed to this report.

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Patrick J. McDonnell

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Patrick J. McDonnell is the Los Angeles Times Mexico City bureau chief. McDonnell is a native of the Bronx, where he majored in Irish-American studies and N.Y. Yankee fandom. He is a graduate of New York University and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, was a Nieman fellow at Harvard and a 2014 Pulitzer finalist in international reporting for coverage from inside Syria.

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Cowardly tyrants like Trump his lying DHS lackeys like McAleenan & co. count on the complicity of at least some Federal Judges to get away with their program of undermining the rule of law and violating human rights. So far, the Ninth Circuit has obliged them when it comes to declaring “open season” on the world’s most vulnerable individuals seeking, but not finding, justice and fairness under our law.

The “Big Lie” By U.S. Border Patrol:

“One of our main priorities in the U.S. Border Patrol is the safety and the well-being of the people that we apprehend,” said Jose A. Martinez, acting assistant chief Border Patrol agent in Laredo, Texas.

Obviously, Chief Martinez is a liar. The safety and well-being of those apprehended in the U.S. not only is not a “main priority,” it’s not even “on the radar screen.” Indeed, sending folks who have passed credible fear back to Mexico to be abused and possibly Continue reading 9TH CIR/TRUMP “KILL ‘EM IN MEXICO PROGRAM” ENDANGERS ASYLUM SEEKERS & THOSE WHO ASSIST THEM —Judicial Disgrace Continues To Destroy Lives, Mock Humanity, Undermine The Rule of Law! — “Extortion-minded mobs view vulnerable migrants as walking ATMs.“

LABOR DAY @ WASHPOST: The Toxic Hypocrisy Of Trump & The Restrictionists On The Labor Issue!

LABOR DAY @ WASHPOST: The Toxic Hypocrisy Of Tru.mp & The Restrictionists On The Labor Issue!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/these-days-our-debate-over-labor-is-awash-in-hypocrisy/2019/09/01/d57e735c-c9a4-11e9-a4f3-c081a126de70_story.html

By Editorial Board

September 1 at 5:47 PM

A CYNIC, says a character in one of Oscar Wilde’s novels, is someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. If that’s true, then the debate over the state of labor in the United States these days is awash in cynicism — or maybe it could just be called plain old hypocrisy. And in truth, it’s not so much a debate as a shouting match, largely over the inflamed issue of immigration.

Most of the noise comes from restrictionists, encouraged and shamelessly egged on, for the first time in memory, by a president of the United States. Such people recite figures they have assembled regarding the costs of immigration: its effects on wages, government spending and, of course, our “culture,” which some might take as a cover word for race or ethnicity or religion. But a lot of these compilations are questionable, both in their origins and their conclusions.

And beyond that, there is a great contradiction in such reasoning: It fails to take account of the work immigrants do in this country — the fruits of their labor, which are shared by the entire society. The skylines of metropolitan areas such as ours have been transformed over the past quarter-century by new construction, with immigrants providing a considerable share of the labor. Many of our hospitals, clinics, day-care centers, hotels, homes for the elderly and other institutions could not exist without immigrant employees, who made up about 17 percent of this country’s workforce in 2018, according to a government report.

A quarter of immigrants, in turn, are thought to be unauthorized. Although they are regularly slandered — by the president, among others — as a source of crime and as living off the dole, they are, for the most part, as law-abiding as the general population and are eligible for few government benefits. Not many people with personal knowledge of the matter would question their work ethic. Their labors in farm and field help feed the country; replacing them there would be a daunting task. They serve in some of the most demanding and often unpleasant jobs in our society: slaughtering animals, working long hours outdoors in punishing heat and cold, caring for the elderly, sick and mentally ill, cleaning four or five homes a day.

Strangely enough, this sort of thing is rarely discussed in any serious way on the cable outlets and social media. There is much in the way of insult and calumny toward impoverished immigrants (they “make our country poorer and dirtier,” said one popular TV opinionizer) but little constructive thought on how this country, with a static and aging native population and a tightening labor market, can continue to prosper without a reasonable amount of immigration.

Although unauthorized immigrants are routinely demonized by some in Congress and the media, there is a sizable part of the country, perhaps a majority, that does not consider their presence here to be criminal, that in fact sympathizes with them. There aren’t many other kinds of lawbreakers of whom that can be said. The recent immigration raid on agricultural processing plants in Mississippi, in which nearly 700 workers were rounded up, brought forth a wave of help and support for the workers and their families from people around the country, including churches and neighbors in Mississippi.

Practical and intelligent proposals are being made for dealing with the problems of immigration and work. But nothing can be done unless more of this country pays attention to the realities in working America in the coming election year and not to the dark maundering of demagogic doomsayers.

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

Yup.

Largely what I’ve been saying all along on “Courtside.” The solution to the largely manufactured “immigration crisis” is staring us in the face.

Legalize those already in the labor force, so that they can be fully protected from exploitation by minimum wage, wage and hour, and OSHA laws, and reach their full economic potential in our society (which would also maximize tax revenues and Social Security contributions).

Then, provide many more legal immigration opportunities for workers and families, both permanent and temporary, to keep America great and prevent us from suffering the type of economic stagnation that has hit Japan and other “low immigration” countries.

The main things standing in the way of such rational and practical solutions are Trump and the hard core GOP restrictionists who prop him up.

Sadly, it also appears that some, not all, within the massive DHS bureaucracy have become invested in cruel and futile immigration enforcement which requires endless taxpayer money and bodies to maintain its cycle of inevitable, yet sometimes politically advantageous, “enforcement-only” failures.

PWS

09-02-19

NATIONAL IMMIGRANT JUSTICE CENTER: A Timeline Of The Trump Administration’s Cruel Attack on The Right Of Asylum & The Rule Of Law!

https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/immigration/2019/08/a-timeline-of-the-trump-administrations-efforts-to-end-asylum.html

A Timeline of the Trump Administration’s Efforts to End Asylum

Last updated: August 2019

United States law enshrines the protections of the international Refugee Convention, drafted in the wake of the horrors of World War II. The law provides that any person “physically present in the United States or who arrives in the United States … irrespective of such alien’s status, may apply for asylum….”1 Since President Trump’s inauguration, the federal government has unleashed relentless attacks on the United States asylum system and those who seek safety on our shores. Internal memos have revealed these efforts to be concerted, organized, and implemented toward the goal of ending asylum in the United States as we know it.2 This timeline highlights the major events comprising the administration’s assault on asylum seekers.

Date and Event Policy Description and Status

July 2019

Asylum Ban 2.03 (barring migrants who cross through another country prior to arriving at the U.S. border from asylum eligibility)

√ The administration published an Interim Final Rule banning all people, including children, who have traveled through another country to reach the United States from applying for asylum.

√ Status: The rule is partially in effect and partially blocked. A federal district court judge in California issued a Temporary Restraining Order on July 16, 2019 in California in East Bay Sanctuary Covenant et al. v Trump, finding the ban to likely violate the asylum provisions of U.S. federal law and raising concerns regarding the administration’s failure to allow for notice-and- comment rulemaking.4 The government appealed to the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which kept the injunction in place only with regard to the geographic region covered by the Ninth Circuit (California and Arizona) and allowed the government to implement the rule across the rest of the southern border. On August 26th, the government

petitioned the Supreme Court to intervene and allow implementation of the rule nationwide during the remainder of the litigation. That petition remains pending.5

All undocumented immigrants in the interior become targets for arrests and deportation through new Interim Final Rule expanding procedures that expedite deportation6

√ Pursuant to another major regulatory change implemented as an Interim Final Rule, any undocumented individual who cannot prove to have been continuously present in the U.S. for at least two years can be placed in a fast-track deportation process, without the opportunity to plead their case in front of an immigration judge or get the help of an attorney.7 Expedited removal proceedings do allow individuals to seek referral to an immigration court proceeding to seek asylum, but the program has been consistently criticized for officers’ failure to identify legitimate asylum seekers, resulting in the return of many to harm.8

√ Status: Because of its issuance as an Interim Final Rule, the expansion of expedited removal is already in place. A lawsuit challenging this inhumane rule was filed on August 6, 2019.9

Attorney General Barr certifies yet another case to himself and further diminishes grounds of asylum – Matter of L-E-A-10

√ Attorney General Barr reversed yet another BIA decision, this time strictly limiting asylum eligibility for individuals targeted and harmed due to their family membership.11

√ Status: This ruling effectively limits, or in some cases eliminates, the possibility of even presenting a claim for asylum for individuals who are fleeing harm on the basis of their membership in a particular family.

New pilot program gives border patrol officers the authority to conduct credible fear interviews12

√ Stephen Miller has been promoting the implementation and expansion of a pilot program that would allow CBP officers, rather than trained asylum officer working under USCIS supervision, to conduct credible fear interviews. Requiring asylum seekers, recently arrived and fleeing fresh trauma, to articulate their fear of return to uniformed CBP officers will certainly mean that many asylum seekers will be forcibly returned to harm and death.

√ Status: Unclear when this proposal will be formally implemented. Mark Morgan, Acting Chief of CBP, testified to Congress in July 2019 that CBP officers are currently undergoing training in order to conduct these types of interviews.13

2

The administration √ announces it has reached a deal with Guatemala to

halt the flow of Central American migrants to the U.S.14

In July the U.S. government announced it had reached an agreement with the government of Guatemala. Although the details are uncertain, the administration seems to consider the agreement to set the stage for a “safe third country” agreement that would require all asylum seekers arriving at the southern border who passed through Guatemala, other than Guatemalans, to be transferred to Guatemala to present an asylum claim there. The announcement of the agreement has prompted widespread condemnation in both countries, as it appears to constitute a back-door sealing of the southern border to asylum in the U.S. and would likely prompt an unmitigated political and humanitarian crisis in Guatemala, one of the most dangerous countries in the world.15

√ Status: Unclear whether or when the regulations and agreements necessary to implement the agreement will be finalized.

May 2019

USCIS issues a memo16 √ attempting to undercut protections provided to unaccompanied children during the asylum process

The memo undermines the few but essential protections provided to unaccompanied children in their asylum proceedings, including exemption from the one-year filing deadline and non-adversarial asylum interviews with an asylum officer, by requiring immigration adjudicators to continually re-adjudicate a child’s designation as unaccompanied.17 These new procedures undoubtedly impact children’s ability to effectively access their right to asylum by stripping away protections specifically designed to reflect the vulnerability of children who arrive at a border alone.

√ Status: The memo became effective June 30, 2019. In August 2019, a federal district court issued a Temporary Restraining Order prohibiting USCIS’s implementation of the memo.18

April 2019

The White House releases a memo calling for regulations that would

√ Such regulations would include adding fees to the asylum application and work permit application, precluding asylum seekers from working lawfully during their asylum proceedings, and placing a 180 day limit for cases to be completely adjudicated with an immigration court, among others.20

3

. . . .

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Read the full document with citations at the above link.

Attacking the most vulnerable.How cowardly and disgusting.

PWS

09-01-19

FAILED STATE: Trump & “Big Mac” Claim Guatemala Is A “Safe Third Country” For Asylum Seekers — They Lie! — The Truth Is Ugly: “Guatemala in grip of ‘mafia coalition’, says UN body in scathing corruption report!”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/aug/28/guatemala-corruption-mafia-coalition-jimmy-morales?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

From the Guardian:

Cicig says in final report before mandate expires corruption ‘cannot be solved without profound restructuring of the state’

Associated Press in Guatemala City

Published:

17:09 Wednesday, 28 August 2019

A UN commission that spent the last 12 years investigating graft in Guatemala has described the country as “captured” by corruption in its final report, days before it is set to wrap up operations after President Jimmy Morales refused to renew its mandate.

The commission, known as Cicig for its initials in Spanish, said in its final report that there is a “mafia coalition” among members of government, the business community and private individuals that is “willing to sacrifice Guatemala’s present and future to guarantee impunity and preserve the status quo”.

The commission chief Iván Velásquez, a Colombian lawyer who has been barred by Morales’ government from entering Guatemala, said via video conference from Colombia that the report would be the commission’s last public act.

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“We almost got to the nucleus of the structures that have captured the state,” Velásquez said. “This cannot be solved without a profound restructuring of the state.”

The commission began its work in Guatemala in 2007 at the request of then-president Óscar Berger and was given responsibility for dismantling illegality in the wake of the country’s 1960-1996 civil war.

Morales accused the body of overreaching its authority last year, after the commission brought investigations against him, some of his relatives and his inner circle. He was protected from prosecution as a sitting president and has denied wrongdoing.

While many observers praised the commission for its work, which resulted in the prosecution of more than 400 people, including the former president Otto Pérez Molina, his vice-president and much of his cabinet, Morales decided that Cicig had run its course, setting up its impending departure on 3 September.

Critics saw Morales’ refusal to renew the commission’s mandate as an attempt to protect himself and those close to him.

The report said the “impunity of power” in Guatemala dates to colonial times.

Guatemala elections show corruption rampant four years after uprising toppled president

One of the reasons why corruption networks persist today, it said, is that “they have distorted democratic institutionality in their favor and they have molded the political system and designed mechanisms that allow them to occupy positions of power, manipulating legislation.”

“Between 2012 and 2015, an illicit, political-economic network took over the executive (branch), subordinated the legislative, manipulated and interfered in the election of judges to high courts and, in addition to looting the state, promoted laws and policies favoring private companies to the detriment of competition and the citizenry,” the report continued.

All that benefited drug trafficking networks, it added.

Together with Guatemalan prosecutors, the commission took down 70 organized crime networks. Those targeted for prosecution have included public officials, lawmakers, judges, businesspeople and other civilians.

It also investigated Morales’ National Convergence Front for alleged illegal political financing.

The report said illicit political money is “present in the majority of campaigns and parties” and comes from criminal organizations including drug traffickers seeking territorial control and political protection, as well as businesspeople seeking influence.

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Seems like the life threatening lies and misuse of Government authority should be enough to remove both of these congenital liars from office.

PWS

08-31-19

IMMIGRATION COURTS: “MALICIOUS INCOMPETENCE ON STEROIDS” — With Court System Reeling & Asylum Applicants Suffering, Administration Plans Another Round Of Massive “Aimless Docket Reshuffling” (“ADR”), Reports Hamed Aleaziz @ BuzzFeed News!

https://apple.news/A3UINub7KSjuOLcKAHDJMLw

Hamed Aleaziz reports for BuzzFeed News:

A Surge Of Immigration Judges Are Expected To Handle The Cases Of Thousands Forced To Wait In Mexico

“This will wreak havoc on court dockets across the country,” said one immigration court official.

Hamed Aleaziz

BuzzFeed News Reporter

A 10-month-old boy, whose family fled violence in El Salvador, waits in a tent in Tijuana, Mexico, for an immigration court hearing in the US.

Department of Homeland Security officials expect about 150 immigration judges from across the US will be selected to handle cases involving asylum-seekers forced to remain in Mexico while their cases proceed, according to a source with knowledge of the matter, a massive potential increase in assignments that threatens to overwhelm an already struggling court system.

Around a dozen judges currently presiding over courts in San Diego and El Paso, Texas, handle the cases of people referred under Migration Protection Protocols, the controversial Trump administration policy forcing asylum-seekers to remain in Mexico as their cases move through the immigration system. While the cases can take months or years to be scheduled, the number of individuals included in the program has expanded to more than 35,000, according to figures obtained by BuzzFeed News.

The Trump administration hopes to change that by soon opening facilities along the border to handle the cases. Officials plan to open two border courts in Texas — in Laredo and Brownsville — by the middle of September, in which they will hear up to 20 cases per day, according to a government briefing document obtained by BuzzFeed News. A DHS spokesperson said the date the facilities would open was still to be determined.

On Tuesday, Rep. Lucille Roybal-Allard, who chairs the House DHS Appropriations Subcommittee, revealed in a letter that the agency had plans to transfer $155 million in federal disaster funds to Immigration and Customs Enforcement to help fund the new facilities.

The cases heard at the border are expected to be conducted primarily via video teleconferencing, allowing for more judges across the country to be brought into the process. Assistants, working on contract, will help organize the hearings by taking roll call, send case documents to judges in other locations, and operate the video systems, according to a separate DHS planning document obtained by BuzzFeed News.

Judges assigned these cases could be forced to delay other asylum and deportation hearings that had already been scheduled, causing a ripple effect and further growing an already bloated court backlog of hundreds of thousands of cases.

People wait inside an immigration court in Miami.

“Once again immigration judges from courts across the country will have to push their home court dockets aside to preside televideo at border courts,” said one immigration court official who could not speak publicly on the matter. “This will wreak havoc on court dockets across the country.”

At a San Diego court that has presided over many “Remain in Mexico” cases for months, judges have been told to prioritize the hearings over others, according to a source with knowledge of the change. As a result, some immigrants who have waited for months or years for their previously scheduled cases will likely have their hearings delayed.

“The prioritization of MPP cases will place a huge burden on the immigration courts,” said a DOJ official involved with immigration matters. “Additionally, the postponement of previously scheduled cases will cause the backlog to grow even more, as the completion of these cases will be further delayed for months or even years.”

Rebecca Jamil, a former immigration judge under the Trump administration, said that the cases on judge’s dockets don’t go away when they are assigned new cases.

“Those families have been waiting for years to have their cases heard, and now will wait another two or three years, and due process is denied by the delay — evidence becomes stale, witnesses die, country conditions change,” she said.

The Department of Justice, which oversees the Executive Office for Immigration Review, which manages the nation’s immigration courts, is prepared to meet the demands from the DHS on any hearings, an agency spokesperson said.

The potential changes come as data revealed by Syracuse University indicates that asylum-seekers forced to wait in Mexico rarely have legal representation; just 1% of individuals are accompanied by attorneys at their hearings.

The Remain in Mexico program is one of the few hardline Trump immigration policies that has thus far survived a court injunction. While a federal court judge in San Francisco blocked the policy earlier this year, a 9th Circuit Court of Appeals panel allowed it to continue as a legal challenge works its way through the court process.

Asylum-seekers who were returned to Mexico under the Trump administration have faced consequences of remaining there, according to advocacy group Human Rights First. The group found more than 100 cases of people returned under the program alleging rapes, kidnappings, sexual exploitation, or assault, according to a report released this month.

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This is the result of the complete abdication of duty by the Ninth Circuit in Innovation Law Lab v. McAleenan, that lifted a proper, life-saving U.S. District Court injunction and allowed the Administration’s patently illegal and immoral “Kill ‘Em in Mexico Program” to proceed.

The solution: There is no such thing as a “fair” asylum denial under this program. Yes, not everyone meets the criteria. But, everyone is entitled to a fair chance to present a claim, free from duress, coercion, and biased judging, which is not happening.

Advocates must flood the Ninth Circuit and the other border circuits with petitions for review and other types of court actions forcing these complicit Article III “Ivory Tower Judges,” who believe they have removed themselves from the fray, with the human carnage resulting from their gross dereliction of duty to enforce the statutory and Constitutional rights of asylum seekers.

The disgusting and spineless performance of the Article IIIs in light of the Administration’s bogus, illegal actions to “deter” legitimate asylum seekers is nothing short of a national disgrace. If not corrected, it will rightfully tarnish the reputation of the Federal Courts and the individual judges involved for generations to come.

PWS

08-30-19

IMMIGRATION COURTS: After Two Years Of Trump Administration Anti-Immigrant Shenanigans At EOIR, The Backlog Has Mushroomed To 975,298, Morale Has Hit Rock Bottom, & Due Process Is Mocked Every Day — There Is A Solution, But Will Our Republic Survive Enough To Reach It?

https://www.themarshallproject.org/2019/08/28/is-it-time-to-remove-immigration-courts-from-presidential-control

Julia Preston reports for The Marshall Project:

By JULIA PRESTON

A string of directives from President Donald Trump’s Justice Department that have reduced the authority of immigration judges and limited their control of their courtrooms has given new urgency to calls for a complete overhaul of the immigration courts.

Those courts now exist within the Justice Department and answer to the attorney general. Proposals for Congress to exercise its constitutional powers and create separate, independent immigration courts have long been dismissed as costly pipe dreams. But under Trump, judges and others in the court system say they are facing an unprecedented effort to restrain due process and politicize the courts with the president’s hard line on immigrants and demands for deportations.

“It’s time for the Department of Justice and the immigration courts to get a divorce,” said Jeremy McKinney, an attorney who is a vice-president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association.

In a letter in July, the immigration lawyers joined the American Bar Association, the Federal Bar Association and the immigration judges’ union to call on Congress to “establish an independent court system that can guarantee a fair day in court.” The idea is percolating in the Democratic presidential contests, with three candidates—Julián Castro, Beto O’Rourke and Sen. Elizabeth Warren—presenting specific plans. Another candidate, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, drafted a bill last year to make the change.

The chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Rep. Jerrold Nadler, a Democrat from New York, said he will hold hearings on the proposals this fall. There is little chance such a plan would have traction in the Republican-controlled Senate.

Under the proposals, the immigration courts would become a stand-alone agency that would not be run or controlled by outside officials, with the goal of insulating judges from political pressure by any administration.

Department of Justice officials say they are working on a fast track to modernize courts that have been relegated to institutional backwaters. They oppose any plan to separate the courts, saying it would create a bureaucratic and legal morass that would do little to resolve massive backlogs and other chronic problems.

The costs and logistical hurdles “would be monumental and would likely delay pending cases even further,” said Kathryn Mattingly, a Justice Department spokeswoman. The proposals present “significant shortcomings, without any countervailing positive equities,” she said.

But several judges, including three who spoke anonymously because they are not authorized to make public statements, said the Trump administration has pushed the courts too far. The latest salvo emerged from a thicket of legal language in a rule issued Monday by the Justice Department. In a major change, it gives the official in charge of running the courts, who is not a sitting judge, the last word in appeals of some immigration cases. It also gave that official—the director of the Executive Office for Immigration Review, the formal name of the immigration court agency—expanded power to set broadly-defined “policy” for the courts.

The judges’ union reacted with alarm. Judge Ashley Tabaddor, president of the National Association of Immigration Judges, said the rule “removes any semblance of an independent, non-political court system.”

The judges’ association was already reeling after receiving what amounted to a declaration of war on Aug. 9, when the Justice Department filed a decertification petition that would bar judges, who are department employees, from being represented by the union.

Former Attorney General Jeff Sessions used his authority extensively, eliminating judges’ ability to close deportation cases and narrowing the path to asylum for migrant families from Central America fleeing domestic abuse, gang violence and cutthroat cartels. In a recent decision, Attorney General William Barr went further to deny families asylum, overruling long-standing opinions by judges.

Late last year the current director of the courts, James McHenry, under pressure from the White House, ordered judges in 10 busy courts to give priority to cases of families seeking asylum, pushing those cases to the front of their dockets while postponing others. Many judges are frustrated with the “rocket dockets,” finding that they deny many immigrants time to prepare for hearings while unreasonably delaying other cases, further stretching out backlogs.

In recent months McHenry, citing budget constraints, began to limit the availability of language interpreters for initial hearings, where judges see immigrants who speak many different languages. Translators have been replaced with videos providing boilerplate explanations of an immigrant’s rights. Judges said the videos are befuddling to immigrants in their first encounter with the court, and take away time for judges to address each person individually.

What really antagonized many judges was the imposition of quotas for finishing cases, tied to their performance reviews. Since last October, judges must complete at least 700 cases a year, with less than 15 percent of decisions being sent back to them by appeals courts. Time limits were set for many other decisions.

To remind judges of their standing, Justice officials designed a speedometer that sits on judges’ computer screens, with green marking numbers of decisions that meet the metrics and stoplight red indicating where they are lagging.

“So you sit down and you see that dashboard staring at you, updated every day, and you have 50 motions on your desk to decide whether to continue a case,” said Denise Noonan Slavin, who retired as an immigration judge in March after 24 years on the bench. The metrics, she said, inevitably discourage judges from granting more time for cases, even if an immigrant presents a valid argument.

“If judges get into that red, they can lose their job,” Slavin said.

Last October the Justice Department initiated performance metrics for immigration judges (referred to as IJs), setting benchmarks that they must complete at least 700 cases a year and finish other decisions within certain time limits. Speedometers sit on judges’ computer screens, with green showing they are on track with their cases and red signaling they are far behind. U.S. DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE, EXECUTIVE OFFICE FOR IMMIGRATION REVIEW

Most proposals to reconfigure the courts would have Congress act under Article One of the Constitution. The courts would become a separate agency governed by judges, but would remain within the executive branch. There is no appetite for the vast costs and litigation it would take to move the courts to the federal judiciary.

Reformers cite the example of the tax court, which Congress set up in 1969 to have independent judges deciding federal tax disputes, taking them out of the grip of the Internal Revenue Service. Similarly, Judy Perry Martinez, president of the American Bar Association, said in an interview that the immigration courts cannot be fully impartial while they are subordinate to the attorney general, the nation’s top prosecutor.

The Federal Bar Association, which has written a model bill for the transformation, insists it would not be as daunting as it sounds. The bill is drafted “with the idea of simply lifting the courts,” and their budget, out of the Justice Department, said Elizabeth Stevens, chair of the organization’s immigration law section. Under this plan, the courts would remain in existing facilities and current judges would continue to serve for four years before being re-appointed by Senate-confirmed appeals judges to serve in the new system.

Proponents have a harder time explaining how the transition would avoid even more of a bureaucratic sinkhole than existing courts, where the backlog stands at more than 930,000 cases. But Slavin said independent judges would take back their ability to manage cases efficiently, which she said micromanagement under Trump had eroded.

Advocates have few illusions that Trump and a Congress locked in immigration feuds will address their complaints soon. But they want to get the issue on the election year agenda, contending that Democrats and some judicial conservatives among Republicans could vote for an eventual bill.

The Justice Department can be expected to resist. But McKinney, from the lawyers association, said that with the sense of siege in the courts, “Suddenly something that was a dream or a theory is becoming something that could become a reality.”

Julia Preston covered immigration for The New York Times for 10 years, until 2016. She was a member of The Times staff that won the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for reporting on international affairs, for its series that profiled the corrosive effects of drug corruption in Mexico. She is a 1997 recipient of the Maria Moors Cabot Prize for distinguished coverage of Latin America and a 1994 winner of the Robert F. Kennedy Award for Humanitarian Journalism.

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

Lost in the shuffle: With all the money poured down the drain on mindless schemes to DENY DUE PROCESS rather than enhance it, after 19 years of “study and development,” EOIR IS STILL WITHOUT A FUNCTIONAL E-FILING SYSTEM!

Plenty of money for absurd “Judicial Dashboards;” none for even minimally competent court administration. And, how about the reduction in essential interpreter services mentioned in Julia’s article? Talk about “malicious incompetence” in action!

Also, the 975,298 “docketed” cases in the backlog (according to TRAC, as of 07-31-19) DOES NOT include most of the approximately 330,000 “Administratively Closed” cases that Sessions and Barr have idiotically tried to “force” back on the already-backlogged dockets. This week, the Fourth Circuit “called out” this illegal nonsense by emphatically rejecting Sessions’s scofflaw ruling in Matter of Castro-Tum, 27 I&N Dec. 271 (AG 2018). This development was reported in “Courtside” yesterday. https://immigrationcourtside.com/2019/08/29/gonzo-apocalyopto-slammed-unanimous-panel-of-4th-cir-rejects-matter-of-casto-tum-exposes-irrationality-of-biased-unqualified-restrictionist-former-ag/.

Unfortunately, however, the Fourth Circuit’s ruling in Zuniga Romero v. Barr currently only applies in the Baltimore, Arlington, and Charlotte Immigration Courts. This leaves the rest of the country in the type of mass confusion and uncertainty that the Trump Administration strives to create.

It’s past time for the Article III Courts to do their duty, put this patently unconstitutional mess out of its misery, and appoint a “Special Master” to restore at least some semblance of Due Process, fundamental fairness, impartiality, quasi-judicial independence, and competent court management to this system pending Congressional reforms to comply with the Constitution.

Most important: judicial intervention might save some human lives that will otherwise be lost as a result of the “malicious incompetence” with which the Trump Administration regularly has abused the “captive” U.S. Immigration Courts.

PWS

08-30-19

JUSTICE FARCE: BARR PACKS APPEALS BOARD WITH “JUDGES” KNOWN AS ANTI-ASYLUM ZEALOTS! — Body Charged With Insuring Impartiality & Due Process Now Serves As “Chief Persecutor” Of Asylum Applicants — This Is America?

https://apple.news/A4TEHyWG1TfmB-yGzUmx3YA

Noah Lanard reports for Mother Jones:

The Trump Administration’s Court-Packing Scheme Fills Immigration Appeals Board With Hardliners

In his first six years as an immigration judge in New York and Atlanta, from 1993 to 1999, William Cassidy rejected more asylum seekers than any judge in the nation. A few years ago,Earle Wilson overtook Cassidy as the harshest asylum judge on the Atlanta court, which has long been considered one of the toughest immigration courts in the country.

Now both men have been elevated to the Board of Immigration Appeals, which often has the final say over whether immigrants are deported, as part of a court-packing scheme by the Trump administration that is likely to make it even more difficult for migrants fleeing persecution to gain asylum.

Between 2013 and 2018, the average immigration judge in the country approved about 45 percent of asylum claims. The sixjudges newly promoted to the board have all approved fewer than 20 percent. Cassidy granted 4.2 percent of asylum claims. Another appointee, Stuart Couch, approved 7.9 percent. For Wilson, the figure was just 1.9 percent.

Paul Schmidt, who chaired the Board of Immigration of Appeals from 1995 to 2001, says the administration’s goal is to build a “deportation railway” in which cases move through the system as quickly as possible and then get “rubber-stamped by the Board.”

Until last year, the board had 17 members. The Trump administration expanded the board to 21 members, arguing it was necessary to handle an increase in appeals. That has allowed Attorney General William Barr to fill the panel with immigration hardliners. It’s reminiscent of President Franklin Roosevelt’s ill-fated 1937 effort to overcome Supreme Court resistance to the New Deal by adding up to six additional justices—only immigration courts are part of the Justice Department, giving the department the power to expand the Board and fill the new openings with judges sympathetic to the administration’s immigration crackdown.

The promotions of the six judges this month, first reported by the San Francisco Chronicle, are part of an intensifying effort to reshape immigration courts. Earlier this month, the Justice Department moved to eliminate the immigration judges’ union, which has been highly critical of the administration’s policies. On Monday, a regulation took effect that gives the head of the immigration courts, a political appointee, the power to decide appeals if judges do not hear them quickly enough. A rule that gives board members more authority to summarily deny appeals without issuing a full opinion takes effect on Tuesday.

Lawyers who have appeared before Cassidy, Couch, and Wilson say all three have intense tempers. All of them had many of their asylum denials reversed by the Board of Immigration Appeals. Now they’ll be the ones deciding those appeals. (The Justice Department’s Executive Office for Immigration Review, which oversees the immigration court system, did not respond to a request to comment on details in this story.)

Cassidy is most associated with his decision to deport Mark Lyttle, a US citizen who did not speak Spanish, to Mexico during a mass deportation hearing. One Georgia attorney I spoke to blamed Immigration and Customs Enforcement for Lyttle’s removal, but Lyttle asserted that he told Cassidy twice about his US citizenship.

Glenn Fogle, an Atlanta immigration attorney, concluded in 2001, “You could have Anne Frank in front of him and he would say it was implausible that she could have hidden in the house for years and not be caught.” Now he says his feelings about Cassidy haven’t changed. He described a recent case in which Cassidy rejected a Congolese client who said he had scars on his back from being persecuted in his home country. Cassidy, presiding via an aging video system, asked the man to lift up his shirt and show the scars, then said he couldn’t see them. “Judge, how on earth could you see anything with this video?” Fogle recalls asking. Cassidy denied the asylum claim, noting in his decision that he couldn’t observe the scars.

Peter Isbister, a senior attorney with the Southern Poverty Law Center, says Cassidy sometimes writes orders denying bond requests while Isbister is still opening his argument. If he tries to finish, Cassidy can get frustrated and say something like, “You can take it up with the board. We’re done!”

In 2010, Cassidy had an asylum denial overturned because he had written the ruling before the hearing even began. The next year, Cassidy sat down in another judge’s courtroom in his judicial robe. In what one observer described as a “surreal” scene, Cassidy then raised his hand and told how the judge how the case should be handled. Assistant Chief Immigration Judge Deepali Nadkarni admonished Cassidy for his “inappropriate conduct.” In 2016, Cassidy compared an immigrant arriving at the border to “a person coming to your home in a Halloween mask, waving a knife dripping with blood.”

Cassidy and Couch have both suggested that asylum seekers are dishonest and trying to scam their way into the country. A Charlotte immigration attorney, who requested anonymity because Couch is now handling appeals, heard Couch say he believes 85 percent of asylum seekers are lying, that 10 percent are telling the truth but not eligible for protection, and that 5 percent are both honest and eligible for asylum. Couch is also skeptical of lawyers. When an out-of-state lawyer couldn’t make it to a hearing because of a funeral, Couch called the funeral home to verify the claim, according to the Charlotte attorney.

In 2004, Couch, then a military prosecutor, attracted widespread attention for refusing to prosecute a Guantanamo detainee because he had been tortured. But as an immigration judge, Couch has almost always ruled against people who say they’ve been persecuted. He is best known among immigration attorneys for his 2015 decision to deny asylum to a woman who said she had been repeatedly physically and sexually abused by her ex-husband. One year later, the Board of Immigration Appeals overturned Couch’s ruling and ordered him to grant her asylum. But Couch again declined to do so. The case gained prominence when Jeff Sessions, then the attorney general, used it to issue a sweeping precedent that made it much harder for asylum seekers to claim domestic violence as a reason for asylum. (Couch isn’t uniformly anti-immigration—Jeremy McKinney, a North Carolina attorney and the vice president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, saw him lobby North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis to greatly expand Central Americans’ access to temporary visas—but has a narrow view of who qualifies for asylum.)

Wilson has the highest asylum denial rate of the six new appointees. His most notable habit is leaning back in his chair while respondents are testifying and closing his eyes so that it looks like he’s sleeping. In one case, according to an observer from Emory University’s law school, Wilson leaned back with his eyes closed for 23 minutes as an asylum seeker described the murder of her parents and siblings.

Like the others, Wilson has often been overturned by the appeals board he is now a part of. In one case, he ruled against a victim of domestic violence partly on the grounds that she had been able leave her abuser and reach the United States. “We disagree,” the Board decided. “Although the respondent did ultimately come to the United States to escape her abuser, by definition, any person applying for asylum in the United States has fled the harm that they experienced.”

Under the regulation that goes into effect Tuesday, Board members will have more authority to summarily deny appeals without providing any justification. Charles Kuck, an Atlanta attorney and former president of the American Immigration Lawyers Associations, expects that to lead to an assembly-line system like the one that existed under the George W. Bush administration, when Board members sometimes issued more than 50 decisions a day.

Two decades later, one Cassidy case still sticks with Fogle. His client was a former Ethiopian government official. As he was telling his story, Fogle remembers, Cassidy jumped up, turned off the court’s audio recorder, and yelled, “Bullshit!” His client insisted he was telling the truth.

Fogle says it was among the most unprofessional behavior he has ever seen from a judge. “I’ve been around,” he says. “I will never forget that.” He adds, “That’s the guy that’s going to be adjudicating appeals from other immigration judges.

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Sounds like a Third World kakistocracy to me. And, over my years working on asylum cases, I became familiar with many of those. Never imagined the U.S. would hit these depths.

PWS

08-29-19

“GONZO APOCALYPTO” SLAMMED: UNANIMOUS PANEL OF 4TH CIR. REJECTS MATTER OF CASTO-TUM — Exposes Irrationality Of Biased, Unqualified Restrictionist Former AG — “ADR” Outed — “Although one of its purported concerns is efficient and timely administration of immigration proceedings, it would in fact serve to lengthen and delay many of these proceedings by: (1) depriving IJs and the BIA of flexible docketing measures sometimes required for adjudication of an immigration proceeding, as illustrated by Avetisyan, and (2) leading to the reopening of over 330,000 cases upon the motion of either party, straining the burden on immigration courts that Castro-Tum purports to alleviate.”

Zuniga Romero – CA4 Decision (8-29-2019)

ZUNIGA ROMERO V. BARR, NO. 18-1850, 4th Cir., 08-29-19, published

PANEL: AGEE, FLOYD, and THACKER, Circuit Judges.

OPINION BY: Judge Agee

KEY QUOTE:

In the absence of Auer deference, the weight given to a BIA decision “hinges on the thoroughness evident in [the BIA’s] consideration, the validity of its reasoning, its consistency with earlier and later pronouncements, and all those factors which give it power to persuade”—that is, whether the interpretation should be afforded Skidmore deference. Zavaleta–Policiano v. Sessions, 873 F.3d 241, 246 n.2 (4th Cir. 2017) (internal quotation marks omitted). And here, a court reviewing Castro-Tum for Skidmore deference would not be persuaded to adopt the agency’s own interpretation of its regulation for substantially the same reasons it is not entitled to Auer deference: because it represents a stark departure, without notice, from long-used practice and thereby cannot be deemed consistent with earlier and later pronouncements. As a result, it lacks the “power to persuade.” Id.; see also Kisor, 139 S. Ct. at 2427 (Gorsuch, J., concurring) (contending that an agency interpretation of a regulation should as an initial matter be “entitled only to a weight proportional to ‘the thoroughness evident in its consideration, the validity of its reasoning, its consistency with earlier and later pronouncements, and all those factors which give it power to persuade’” (quoting Skidmore, 323 U.S. at 140)). Put another way, even under the view set forth by Justice Gorsuch in Kisor, the Attorney General’s interpretation would amount to a failure of proof because the evidence—that is, Castro- Tum—comes too late in the game.

*** *

In sum, the result is that 8 C.F.R. §§ 1003.10(b) and 1003.1(d)(1)(ii) unambiguously confer upon IJs and the BIA the general authority to administratively close cases such that the BIA’s decision should be vacated and remanded.

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

A huge victory for the “New Due Process Army.” The “Roundtable of Former Immigration Judges” actually filed an amicus brief before Sessions in Castro-Tum raising many of the points found determinative by the Fourth Circuit. Our brief was, of course, ignored by “Gonzo,” who undoubtedly had already drafted his decision along the lines dictated to him by some restrictionist interest group.

Finally, an Article III Court “gets” how the DOJ under the Trump Administration is promoting “Aimless Docket Reshuffling” (“ADR”) in an attempt to build the backlog, destroy the system, blame the victims (respondents and their, largely pro bono, attorneys), and dishonestly call upon GOP Legislators to mount a pernicious attack on constitutional Due Process by statute!

The idea that adding 330,000 cases to the already backlogged Immigration Courts was legally required or a good policy idea clearly is a piece of White Nationalist restrictionist propaganda promoted by corrupt public officials like Miller, Sessions, and Barr.

With the Democrats in control of the House, there is no way that Congress will eliminate “Administrative Closing” by statute. And, while the DOJ under the sycophantic Barr might try to change the regulation, this decision makes it very clear that there is no rational basis for doing so. Therefore, any future regulation change is likely to be tied up in litigation in the Article III Courts for years, adding to the confusion and ADR, as well as threatening to immobilize the Article III Courts.

Unless the Article III Courts want their dockets to be totally swamped with immigration appeals, the answer is to end this unconstitutional system administered by an Attorney General clearly unfit to act in a quasi-judicial capacity and place the Immigration Courts under a court-appointed independent “Special Master” to insure fairness, impartiality, and other aspects of Due Process until Congress fixes the glaring Constitutional defect by creating an independent U.S. Immigration Court outside of the DOJ.

PWS

08-29-19

“We also know that conflicts can restart when refugees are sent home prematurely. Of the 15 largest returns of refugees since 1990, a third have resulted in the resumption of conflict and the slaughter of innocents.”

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The war to save America and humanity from Trump’s vile and cowardly agenda is one that we can’t afford to lose: For the sake of future generations!

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The “Big Lie” By U.S. Border Patrol:

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The solution: There is no such thing as a “fair” asylum denial under this program. Yes, not everyone meets the criteria. But, everyone is entitled to a fair chance to present a claim, free from duress, coercion, and biased judging, which is not happening.

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Paul Schmidt, who chaired the Board of Immigration of Appeals from 1995 to 2001, says the administration’s goal is to build a “deportation railway” in which cases move through the system as quickly as possible and then get “rubber-stamped by the Board.”

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