"The Voice of the New Due Process Army" ————– Musings on Events in U.S. Immigration Court, Immigration Law, Sports, and Other Random Topics by Retired United States Immigration Judge (Arlington, Virginia) and former Chairman of the Board of Immigration Appeals Paul Wickham Schmidt. To see my complete professional bio, just click on the link below.
Liem v. Attorney General, 3d Cir., 04-19-19, published
PANEL: HARDIMAN, SCIRICA, and RENDELL, Circuit Judges
OPINION BY: Judge Rendell
KEY QUOTE:
Because the BIA did not explain its conclusion and did not meaningfully consider much of the evidence presented by Liem, we will grant his petition for review, vacate the denial of his second motion to reopen, and remand to the BIA for further proceedings consistent with this opinion. In doing so, we do not decide whether Liem has shown materially changed conditions in Indonesia warranting reopening of his removal proceedings. Rather, we conclude that the abovementioned evidence contradicting the BIA’s determination is strong enough to require the BIA to afford it more thorough consideration. We remand for the BIA to meet its heightened duty and meaningfully consider all of the evidence, which may or may not yield a different result.
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Welcome tho the world of today’s BIA, where it’s all about numbers — who cares about analysis.
And, Barr fully and contemptuously intends to make it even worse — stuff it down the throats of the Article IIIs — by encouraging more use of non-analytical “summary affirmances” at the same time that Immigration Judges are being pushed to enter more “idiot orders” denying relief without any real reasoning. Then, he’s going to count on “Trump’s Chumps” among the Article IIIs to “Chevron” and “Brand X” themselves right out of existence.
So, we’re about to find out how much integrity the Article IIIs really have. Will they resist and appropriately “stuff” Barr’s blatant, unethical attempt to shift the “backlog” to them by “just saying no” and returning these cases en masse? Will they finally step up to the plate and rule this entire Immigration “Court” farce unconstitutional, halting most removals until Congress establishes a Due Process compliant independent system?
Or, as Trump, Sessions, and now Barr count on, will they function as “Trump’s Chumps,” mere “stationmasters on the deportation railroad” whose job it is to count the cattle cars of humans heading south? Folks in robes willing to “go along to get along” with the “new Jim Crows” by tanking their responsibility to enforce the Constitution for migrants. Just “defer” to non-existent analysis and parodies of court proceedings because we’re dealing with the vulnerable who can’t fight back.
History will be watching how they perform. So far, Trump & Co. haven’t been completely right, particularly about the lower Federal Court judiciary. They have encountered quite a few judges appointed by both parties ready and willing to stop the Administration’s all out assault on the rule of law and our Constitution.
But, the Trumpsters haven’t been completely wrong about the higher Federal Courts either. The totally disingenuous performance of the “Trump Chump Five” during oral argument this past week at the Supremes on the “Census Case” — a “no brainer” teed up by the lower courts that an impartial and functional Court would have used to deliver a resounding 9-0 rebuke of Trump’s “DOJ Legal Sycophant Ethics-Free Team” — could have been scripted by Stephen Miller with a little help from Steve Bannon.
The big problem here is that folks in the “ivory tower” of the U.S. Circuit Courts and the Supremes operate outside the real world. They don’t seem to be able to picture themselves or their families or loved ones in the cattle cars heading south on the railroad. Indeed, unlike trial judges, they don’t even have to face the folks they are disenfranchising, dehumanizing, and whose legal rights they are trashing.
Their failure to connect the law with humanity, human rights, moral values, and simple fundamental fairness may well be the downfall for all of us. At some point, they might find that the “Liar-in-Chief” and his toadies no longer need their stationmasters — that complicit judges have become as dispensable as the humans whose lives and rights they have failed to protect.
The left might try to defame this White House by insisting its hard-line immigration policies are motivated by nativism or even white-nationalist sympathies. But the administration has made its true motives perfectly clear: It has not adopted a “zero tolerance” policy toward undocumented immigrants out of animus for foreign people but simply out of reverence for American law.
“In a Trump administration, all immigration laws will be enforced,” Trump promised a crowd in Phoenix two months before his election. “Anyone who has entered the United States illegally is subject to deportation — that is what it means to have laws and to have a country.”
Trump has repeatedly invoked this absolutist commitment to the law when seeking to justify unpopular immigration policies. The president never offered an affirmative argument for canceling the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which provided temporary work permits to 700,000 undocumented immigrants who were brought to this country as children. To the contrary, almost immediately after terminating DACA, the president claimed he supported protections for Dreamers in principle and implored Congress to write such protections into legislation. He didn’t want to hurt Dreamers — or use them as bargaining chips in negotiations with Democrats — he just felt the Executive branch did not have the authority to make immigration policy unilaterally. Sure, past Republican presidents (and the federal courts) might have considered deferred action to be within the Executive branch’s purview. But Trump was a stickler about the Constitution’s separation of powers. We are a nation of laws, not men. On such grounds, the president would later justify making America into the kind of nation that punishes migrant mothers by separating them from their children.
Of course, the white-collar-criminal-in-chief’s professed devotion to law and order was always a transparent fraud (this is a man who has publicly insisted that the attorney general’s job is to subordinate the law to the president’s personal interests). But even by this administration’s standards, its latest efforts to crack down on “illegal immigration” are gobsmacking in their hypocrisy.
Last week, the White House purged many of its own appointees from the Department of Homeland Security, suggesting that the president was looking to go in a “tougher” direction. Subsequent reporting has clarified that tougher was a euphemism for “lawless.”
Under U.S. law, any foreign national who sets foot on our nation’s soil has a legal right to seek asylum from persecution or violence in that person’s home country — if he or she can pass an initial screening conducted by asylum officials. And Congress designed such screenings with an eye toward minimizing the number of genuinely endangered people whom America sends back into harm’s way (rather than minimizing the number of economic migrants whom our asylum courts are forced to process). As a result, about 90 percent of those who claim asylum make it past the initial screening.
As violence and instability in Central America have sent hundreds of thousands of migrant families to our border, this law has created logistical problems for the Trump administration. Litigating asylum claims can take months, even years. And the United States does not have the resources to detain every asylum seeker who makes it past the initial test. Thus the White House finds itself in the position of releasing asylum seekers into the United States, likely allowing some number to slip into the country and thereby become undocumented immigrants.
In a separate conversation, President Trump implored then–DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen to ban migrants from seeking asylum.
It is abundantly clear, then, that the Trump administration’s fanatical opposition to illegal immigration is not rooted in a commitment to upholding U.S. law but rather in some other concern it does not wish to speak in public.
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Duh!
Like policies driven by White Nationalism and racism. Or, maybe “malicious incompetence.” That’s why it’s important for Dems not to be hoodwinked into abandoning or wrongly watering down (under the guise of a bogus “compromise”) the laws that offer refugees and migrants at least some legal protections in response to Trump’s self-created crisis that doesn’t threaten U.S. security but does threaten the lives and rights of refugees and other migrants.
Indeed, the best short-term solution to the Southern Border would be to work in a competent, cooperative, and good faith manner to fairly administer the asylum and other protection laws that we currently have on the books.
But, a fair and efficient administration of the laws already on the books undoubtedly would result in more refugees from Central America (and elsewhere) being granted asylum or some other form of protection. And, since that could be done by adjudication and judicial officials, the Border Patrol could go back to protecting the borders from real threats.
But, that’s the result that Trump and his White Nationalist cronies don’t want. That’s why they are working so hard to make the mess worse while shifting blame to the victims. Pretty much the definition of official bullying and cowardice.
(1) Matter of X-K-, 23 I&N Dec. 731 (BIA 2005), was wrongly decided and is overruled.
(2) An alien who is transferred from expedited removal proceedings to full removal proceedings after establishing a credible fear of persecution or torture is ineligible for release on bond. Such an alien must be detained until his removal proceedings conclude, unless he is granted parole.
KEY QUOTE:
Because Matter of X-K- declared a sizable population of aliens to be eligible for bond, DHS indicates that my overruling that decision will have “an immediate and significant impact on [its] detention operations.” DHS Br. 23 n.16. DHS accordingly requests that I delay the effective date of this decision “so that DHS may conduct necessary operational planning.” Id. Federal circuit courts have discretion to delay the effective dates of their decisions, see Fed. R. App. P. 41(b), and I conclude that I have similar discretion. I will delay the effective date of this decision for 90 days so that DHS may conduct the necessary operational planning for additional detention and parole decisions.
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Short Takes:
An increase in mandatory detention is sure to mean more “Aimless Docket Reshuffling” (“ADR”); as more detained cases are moved to the front of the docket, they will displace lower priority (but “ready to try”) non-detained cases which will be “shuffled off to Buffalo” thus increasing the already overwhelming backlog; as more Immigration Judges are sent to detention facilities near the border, they will “leave behind” already full dockets creating even more chaos in an already dysfunctional system;
A federal appeals court said Friday that the Trump administration could temporarily continue to force migrants seeking asylum in the United States to wait in Mexico while their cases are decided.
A three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit issued a stay of a lower-court ruling four days earlier that blocked the administration’s protocol. The appeals court will consider next week whether to extend that stay — and allow the Trump administration policy to remain in effect for longer.
The administration in December announced its new policy, called the migration protection protocols, arguing that it would help stop people from using the asylum process to enter the country and remain there illegally. President Trump has long been angered by so-called catch and release policies, under which asylum seekers are temporarily allowed in the United States while they wait for their court hearings.
On Monday, Judge Richard Seeborg of the United States District Court for the Northern District of California issued an injunction against Mr. Trump’s new protocols, saying that the president did not have the power to enforce them and that they violated immigration laws.
Michael D. Shear, Miriam Jordan, and Manny Fernandez report for the NY Times:
. . . .
American diplomats say the best way to confront that kind of lawlessness is with the hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign aid that has been flowing to Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras for several years, designed to bolster the rule of law and improve the economy.
Image
At the Good Neighbor Settlement House in Brownsville, migrants rest, exhausted, after a meal.CreditIlana Panich-Linsman for The New York Times
Last week, Mr. Trump abruptly abandoned those efforts, ordering the State Department to scrap about $500 million in aid to the three countries. Mr. Trump’s decision has been criticized by members of both parties, who call it shortsighted.
Likewise, critics say that Mr. Trump’s repeated denigration of Mexico over the years — including his insistence on building a border wall — risks undermining Mexico’s willingness to help to keep Central American migrants from traveling to the United States.
“This is the first Mexican administration that has even been oriented toward doing that,” Ms. Meissner, the Clinton administration immigration commissioner, said.
But blaming other countries and painting those coming across the border from Mexico as a national security threat has never failed to animate Mr. Trump’s core supporters — the ones who helped deliver him the White House in 2016.
“It’s an invasion,” Mr. Trump declared in February, after Congress denied him money to build a wall. “We have an invasion of drugs and criminals coming into our country.”
In fact, the migrants are mostly victims of the broken immigration system. They are not, by and large, killers, rapists or gang members. Most do not carry drugs. They have learned how to make asylum claims, just as the law allows them to do. And nearly all of them are scared — of being shipped off to Mexico, separated from their children, sent to prison. Scared, especially, of going home.
Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Caitlin Dickerson contributed reporting.
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This is just the conclusion of the much longer article that you can read at the above link.
Unless and until the U.S. recognizes the situation for what it is — Forced Migration —- there can be no effective solutions.
Tone-deaf (and worse) legislators and policy makers (mostly in the GOP) refuse to recognize the fundamental truth — Forced Migrants are Forced Migrants — they ultimately won’t be deterred by harsh laws, malicious prosecutions, biased judges, unfair “expeditious returns,” inhumane imprisonments, racist rhetoric, or any of the other often tried always failed enforcement policies that this Administration and its supporters so love.
The other fundamental truth that Trump ignores is that refugees, asylees, and other forced migrants overall have a positive impact on receiving countries. They are a human force that should be regulated but not generally avoided. Indeed, that’s a “win-win” formula for success that should replace our current Administration’s insistence on intentionally turning migration situations from opportunities for success into otherwise avoidable “lose-lose” situations.
What will work is dealing with the root causes of forced migration; providing feasible alternatives to coming to the U.S.; fairly and timely adjudicating applications for protection; assimilation; and in some cases truly voluntary, interest-based decisions to return to a country of origin after conditions improve (not expulsion or forced returns).
Targeting human smugglers, drug smugglers, persecutors, and other types of criminals through sophisticated, intelligence-biased undercover-type operations could also be effective.
International cooperation and involvement of the UNHCR and other humanitarian NGOs is also essential.
Better government produces better results; that’s not “rocket science.”
President Donald Trump’s dramatic purge of Homeland Security leaders is about more than personnel: It helps clear the way for him to take controversial new steps to curb illegal immigration, including an updated version of his furiously criticized family separation policy.
Leading the new charge is Trump’s top White House immigration aide Stephen Miller, who wants tent cities to house migrants on the border and is pressing to extend the amount of time U.S. immigration officials can detain migrant children beyond the current 20-day limit imposed by a federal judge. Miller wants to force migrant parents arrested at the border to choose between splitting apart from their children or remaining together indefinitely in detention while awaiting court proceedings, according to five people familiar with the plans.
Those hard-line policies could get new traction after a major staffing shakeup at the Homeland Security Department over the past several days. Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen resigned Sunday and Secret Service Director Randolph Alles was ousted Monday. Those moves came after the White House on Friday unexpectedly withdrew its nominee for director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Ronald Vitiello. Other officials could be on the chopping block in coming days, according to three other people familiar with the White House’s considerations.
The dramatic proposals and leadership purge are politically risky — family separation has sparked more political anger than almost any other issue in Trump’s presidency — and come as Trump has alarmed his fellow Republicans with abrupt threats to kill Obamacare and to shut down the border. But Trump is determined to make immigration central to his reelection push, betting that he can once again energize his core conservative voters on a promise to secure America’s borders.
Trump and Miller have become increasingly frustrated as the number of Central American migrants massing at the southwest border surges to levels not seen in a decade. Now Miller — who’s even started calling mid-level federal officials to demand they do more to stem the influx — will have a new opportunity to pursue his tougher approach amid the leadership vacuum at DHS.
Trump said Sunday that Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Kevin McAleenan would become acting DHS secretary. Other top DHS positions currently filled by acting officials will be the deputy secretary, ICE director, inspector general and administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Three of those jobs lack a nominee from the White House.
Miller did not respond to a request for comment.
A federal judge on Monday temporarily blocked a plan to send certain non-Mexican asylum seekers back to Mexico while they await a resolution to their case. The order will not be effective until Friday evening, which allows the administration a chance for a quick appeal.
Still, Miller has a set of new policies he wants to try, according to the five people familiar with the plans, including a “binary choice” between separation or joint detention for families, an idea that first surfaced in the run-up to the midterm elections. Miller also wants to fast-track the regulation that would allow migrant children to be detained for longer than the 20-day limit. He’s eager to finalize the so-called public charge rule, which could block immigrants from obtaining a green card if they’ve received public benefits in the past or are deemed likely to do so in the future.
In addition, Miller has pressed for the federal government to set up tent cities along the border, so that cases can be swiftly resolved — and migrants with non-meritorious claims can be deported.
He’s also pushing for the purge at DHS to continue.
“If you lose Claire, and John, and Francis, I don’t know where that leaves us. But it’s not in a good place,” this person said.
At least some of the personnel moves are getting pushback from immigration restrictionist groups, who like Cissna’s approach.
Roy Beck, president of NumbersUSA, a grassroots organization that seeks lower levels of immigration, said he’s confounded by reports that Cissna may be removed from his post at USCIS.
“He’s great. He’s worked in this issue for years, he’s extremely knowledgeable,” Beck said. “He’s exactly the type of person who needs to be in DHS in leadership.”
But Miller has pressed Cissna, unsuccessfully, to launch more experimentally and legally questionable policies, according to three people familiar with the situation.
Cissna’s defenders contend that he tried to adhere to the law while Miller pressed to overstep legal boundaries.
“If they push out the uber-competent guy that the left hates because he’s getting things done within the law and the right loves because he’s actually being faithful to the president’s campaign promises, they’re even bigger idiots than we already know,” one former DHS official said.
Eliana Johnson, Gabby Orr, Josh Gerstein and Daniel Lippman contributed to this report.
The fight against the White Nationalist Kakistocracy has just begun. Their supply of vile, racist plots, illegal schemes, cruelty, and hate is almost endless.
But, in the end, justice and the NDPA will prevail!
Ex-ICE head: Trump had ‘single dumbest idea I’ve ever heard’
New Day
Former Acting Director of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement John Sandweg says President Trump’s suggestion to eliminate immigration judges is “the single dumbest idea I’ve ever heard” in terms of dealing with border crossings.
Go to the link and watch the short video interview with John.
I totally agree that the answer here is to provide both the Asylum Officers and Immigration Judges necessary to make the system work. However, to really address the problem, we also need to work on the causes of forced migration and embrace wholeheartedly the international mechanisms available through the UNHCR and the U.N. Convention to work on refugee issues cooperatively with other signatory counties.
Nevertheless, I do take issue with John’s implicit assumption that the current 20-25% grant rate for Northern Triangle countries represents reality. This Administration in particular, but also previous Administrations, worked hard to unfairly skew the asylum system against asylum seekers from the Northern Triangle.
This includes:
Limiting opportunities for representation by counsel (counsel increases success rates by at least 4X);
Using detention in a coercive and punitive way to discourage claims and punish those who pursue them;
Skewing the law to make gender-based and gang-based claims, which could fairly easily be fitted into the conventional asylum framework, unnecessarily complicated and hard to establish;
Hiring mostly former prosecutors as Immigration Judges and then sending them a “deny and remove” message through the Attorney General, who unethically and in violation of any common sense concept of Due Process controls the Immigration Courts;
Failing to provide proper training and guidance to Immigration Judges through precedent decisions on how asylum claims can and should be granted;
Tolerating Immigration Judges who have shown bias toward asylum seekers and almost never grant asylum;
Intentionally making asylum law overly legalistic and focused on finding reasons to deny and remove, rather than protect.
One need look no further than two of my recent posts about judges who never grant asylum to see how sick, biased, and unfair the Immigration Court system has become to asylum seekers.
And make no mistake — the racist scofflaws who have assumed control of immigration policy under Trump intend to eradicate asylum, the rule of law, and our Constitution. Don’t think that just because you might happen to be a U.S. citizen or even a Trump supporter you will be immune from the destruction of the foundations of our republic and your individual rights. Some day, your turn will also come. Who will defend and speak up for those who have watched the rights and the lives of the vulnerable among us be trampled?
For much of my tenure at the Arlington Immigration Court the asylum grant rate hovered around 70% with few DHS appeals. As someone who worked on the Refugee Act of 1980 and has been involved in the administration and application of U.S. asylum laws for decades, from all sides, that high grant rate was completely warranted. Those finding reasons to deny at rates approaching 100% are not fairly, impartially, and correctly applying asylum law in accordance with Due Process and the actual legal standards. For too long we have tolerated gross abuses of asylum seekers — it has been taken to a new level under this Administration.
It’s illegal, it’s unconstitutional, it’s unethical, and it must stop!
TRUMP’S MALICIOUS INCOMPETENCE IS THE REAL “SOUTHERN BORDER CRISIS” — AND, A GENUINE HUMAN TRAGEDY — The Legal Tools To Address The Crisis In The Northern Triangle Causing A Refugee Flow Exist; This Administration Stubbornly Refuses To Use Them!
By Paul Wickham Schmidt
United States Immigration Judges (Retired)
In short, families are coming to ports of entry and crossing the border to turn themselves in to be screened for credible fear and apply for asylum under our existing laws. That’s not a “border crisis;” it’s a humanitarian tragedy. It won’t be solved by more law enforcement or harsher measures; we’re actually quite fortunate that folks still believe in the system enough to voluntarily subject themselves to it.
Most don’t present any particular “danger” to the U.S. They are just trying to apply for legal protection under our laws. That’s something that has been denied them abroad because we don’t have a refugee program for the Northern Triangle. This Administration actually eliminated the already inadequate one we had under Obama.
Certainly, we have enough intelligence to know that these flows were coming. They aren’t secret. There was plenty of time to plan.
What could and should have been done is to increase the number of Asylum Officers and POE Inspectors by hiring retired Asylum Officers, Inspectors, adjudicators, and temps from the NGO sector who worked in the refugee field, but no longer have anything to do overseas since this Administration has basically dismantled the overseas refugee program.
A more competent DOJ could also have developed a corps of retired Immigration Judges (and perhaps other types of retired judges who could do bond setting and other functions common to many judicial systems) who already “know the ropes” and could have volunteered to go to the border and other places with overloads.
Also, working closely with and coordinating with the NGOs and the pro bono bar would have helped the credible fear process to go faster, be fairer, the Immigration Courts to function more fairly and efficiently, and would have screened out some of the “non viable” cases.
For some, staying in Mexico is probably a better and safer option, but folks don’t understand. Pro bono counsel can, and do, explain that.
By treating it as a humanitarian tragedy, which it is, rather than a “fake law enforcement crisis,” the Administration could have united the private sector, border states, communities, and Congress in supporting the effort; instead they sowed division, opposition, and unnecessary litigation. I’m actually sure that most of the teams of brilliant “Big Law” lawyers helping “Our Gang of Retired Judges” and other to file amicus briefs pro bono would just as soon be working on helping individuals through the system.
A timely, orderly, and fair system for screening, adjudicating, and recognizing refugee rights under our existing laws would have allowed the Administration to channel arrivals to various ports of entry.
I think that the result of such a system would have been that most families would have passed credible fear and the majority of those would have been granted asylum, withholding, or CAT.
Certainly, others think the result would have been mostly rejections (But, I note even in the “Trump Era” merits approval rates for Northern Triangle countries are in the 18-23% range — by no means an insignificant success rate). But, assuming “the rejectionists” are right, then they have the “timely rejection deterrent” that they so desire without stomping on anyone’s rights. (Although my experience over decades has been that rejections, detention, prosecutions, and harsh rhetoric are ineffective as deterrents).
No matter who is right about the ultimate results of fair asylum adjudication, under my system the Border Patrol could go back to their job of tracking down smugglers, drug traffickers, criminals, and the few suspected terrorists who seek to cross the border. While this might not satisfy anyone’s political agenda, it would be an effective and efficient use of law enforcement resources and sound administration of migrant protection and immigration laws. That’s certainly not what’s happening now.
Lawyers slam ‘Wild West’ atmosphere in Texas immigration court
(CNN)Judges at an immigration court in El Paso, Texas, are undermining due process, making inappropriate comments and fostering a “culture of hostility” toward immigrants, according to a new complaint.
The administrative complaint, sent to the Justice Department on Wednesday and obtained by CNN, slams a number of allegedly recurring practices at the El Paso Service Processing Center court, which hears cases of immigrants detained at several locations near the border.
“El Paso feels like the Wild West in terms of the immigration system,” said Kathryn Shepherd, national advocacy counsel for the American Immigration Council’s Immigration Justice Campaign and one of the complaint’s authors. “There’s so little oversight. No one is talking about how bad it is.”
The complaint comes at a time of mounting criticism of the Justice Department-run courts that decide whether individual immigrants should be deported. And it comes as officials warn the number of cases those courts are tasked with handling is rapidly increasing with an influx of more undocumented immigrants crossing the border.
Among the allegations:
• Judges at the El Paso Service Processing Center court have “notably high rates of denial,” the complaint says, noting that the court granted less than 4% of asylum applications heard there between fiscal year 2013 and fiscal year 2017. Nationally, 35% of asylum cases in court are granted, according to the latest data from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University.
• The complaint accuses judges in the court of making inappropriate comments that “undermine confidence in their impartiality” and are part of “a culture of hostility and contempt towards immigrants who appear” at the court. While hearing one case, a judge, according to the complaint, described the court as “the bye-bye place,” telling a lawyer, “You know your client is going bye-bye, right?” Another judge allegedly told court observers that “there’s really nothing going on right now in Latin America” that would provide grounds for asylum.
• Rules limiting evidence that can be presented at this court strip away due process, the complaint says. One judge’s standing order, for example, limits the length of exhibits that can be submitted to 100 pages. “This order is particularly harmful for individuals seeking protection whose cases are more complex or where country conditions are at issue,” the complaint says.
The Justice Department’s Executive Office for Immigration Review, which oversees US immigration courts, declined to comment on the allegations. Spokeswoman Kathryn Mattingly confirmed that the office received the complaint letter on Wednesday.
An overwhelmed system
The allegations come amid mounting criticism of US immigration courts.
There are more than 60 immigration courts in the United States, and about 400 judges presiding over them. Immigration judges are hired directly by the attorney general and are employees of the Justice Department. They’re required to be US citizens, to have law degrees, to be active and licensed members of the bar and to have at least seven years of post-bar experience with trials or hearings, among other qualifications.
Both immigrant rights advocates and immigration hard-liners agree the court system is struggling under a crush of cases — but they diverge widely in their proposals for fixing it.
The Trump administration has moved to hire more judges and to pressure them to finish cases more quickly, accusing immigrants and the lawyers who represent them of gaming the system and overloading it with frivolous cases.
Advocates say the existing system denies due process and harms vulnerable people who have legitimate claims to remain in the United States but face an overwhelming number of obstacles to make their case. They’ve argued a major overhaul is necessary, proposing the creation of an independent court system that’s not part of the Justice Department.
In recent congressional testimony, Executive Office for Immigration Review Director James McHenry said his department had increased its number of case completions for the third consecutive year. And he said that every day, the office decides immigration cases “by fairly, expeditiously and uniformly interpreting and administering the nation’s immigration laws.”
‘The worst court in the country’
Lawyers argue the El Paso Service Processing Center facility is both a window into wider problems of the immigration system and a particularly egregious example.
“Immigration courts across the nation are suffering from many of the issues identified here,” the complaint alleges, “including the use of problematic standing orders, reports of inappropriate conduct from (immigration judges), and highly disparate grant rates which suggest that outcomes may turn on which court or judge is deciding the case rather than established principles and rules of law.”
But one reason advocates focused this complaint on this El Paso court, the American Immigration Council’s Shepherd said, was that it had the lowest asylum grant rate in the nation, based on statistics compiled from Justice Department reports over a five-year period.
Those figures, from annual fiscal year reports from 2013-2017, show the percentage of cases granted in the El Paso court has fluctuated in recent years, decreasing slightly from 2014-2016 and increasing slightly from 2016-2017. But for years, the figure has hovered at or under 5% — significantly below the national rate.
“If you look at the numbers, it’s the worst court in the country. But we wanted to understand really why that was the case,” she said. “What about El Paso, and what about how the judges conduct business in the court, makes it so hard to prevail?”
After researching that question and outlining their findings in the complaint, with the help of court observers and lawyers who regularly practice in the court, now Shepherd says they’re calling for the Justice Department to conduct its own investigation into the El Paso Service Processing Center court and other courts with similar problems.
Suggestions for improvement
An administrative complaint is a step in a formal grievance process used to bring issues to officials’ attention, Shepherd said, but does not trigger legal proceedings.
The complaint recommends a series of corrective measures, including providing more training on appropriate conduct for judges and requiring the Executive Office for Immigration Review to post publicly online any standing orders individual judges have issued.
No matter how officials respond, Shepherd said she hopes the complaint will be a jumping-off point for further research into how the court’s practices have affected people who were ordered deported there.
“It’s pretty overwhelming, actually,” she said, “if you think about the thousands of people who have passed through this immigration court and haven’t really had a chance to fight their case in a meaningful way.”
CNN’s Maegan Vazquez and Abby Phillip contributed to this report.
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This isn’t Due Process! This isn’t justice! This is a farce, a fraud, and a parody of justice going on with the active encouragement and incompetent management of a Department of Justice that has abandoned due process and the rule of law in favor of restrictionist “deny ‘em all, deport ‘em all” policies actively promoted by Trump, former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, and adopted by current Attorney General Bill Barr.
This national disgrace and existential threat to our entire justice system and constitutional order will not end until the Immigration Courts are removed from the Department of Justice and reconstituted as an independent, fair, impartial court system dedicated to insuring fairness and due process for all, including the most vulnerable among us.
President Trump reiterated a threat to close the U.S.-Mexico border after a meeting at the White House on Tuesday, saying he stands ready to take drastic action if the country doesn’t do more to curb illegal immigration. He also railed against the U.S. immigration system and said he wants to “get rid” of immigration judges who hear migrants’ cases.
“Security is more important to me than trade,” Mr. Trump said when asked about the severe economic impact of closing the border. “We’ll have a strong border or we’ll have a closed border.”
The president spoke after meeting in the Oval Office with Jens Stoltenberg, the secretary general of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
Last week, Mr. Trump tweeted threats to close the border if Mexico doesn’t do more to cooperate with the U.S. and slow the flow of migrants. But the commander-in-chief appeared to shift that timeline Tuesday, saying Mexico is assisting the U.S. more than it was even a few days ago. The president said he’s still “totally prepared” to close the border if necessary.
Along with a list of frustrations over immigration, however, Mr. Trump included immigration judges. U.S. immigration court backlogs are at all-time highs, with not enough judges to adjudicate the cases. That problem was exacerbated by the government shutdown earlier this year.
“We need to get rid of chain migration, we need to get rid of catch and release and visa lottery, and we have to do something about asylum. And to be honest with you, have to get rid of judges,” Mr. Trump said in his laundry list of frustrations with the U.S. immigration system.
Mr. Trump also walked back his insistence that the Republican Party will imminently introduce a new health care plan. Overnight, the president tweeted he would wait to hold a vote on his yet-to-be-envisioned health care plan until after the 2020 election. On Tuesday, the president said he will bring forth a plan “at the appropriate time.”
“We don’t have the House,” Mr. Trump said about the delay, which came after he said the Republican Party will become the “party of health care.”
Republicans failed to repeal and replace Obamacare in the two years they held the House and Senate.
Stoltenberg’s visit came as Mr. Trump tries to decrease the U.S. footprint abroad with his “America First” foreign policy. Mr. Trump has urged other NATO nations to increase their defense spending to agreed-upon levels, a stance many see as positive, but on Tuesday the president said defense spending will need to go higher than 2 percent. Currently NATO members agree to spend at least 2 percent of GDP on defense, but Mr. Trump, in a meeting alongside the secretary general, said that figure “may have to go up.”
Meanwhile, Mr. Trump’s close relationships with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and Russian President Vladimir Putin while criticizing U.S. allies has made some ally NATO nations distance themselves from the U.S. Last year, for instance, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Germany can’t rely “on the superpower of the U.S.” any longer to bring order to the world.
Before he became president, Mr. Trump declared NATO “obsolete.” He later revised that statement, saying he no longer believes that to be the case.
When NATO was founded in 1949, there were 12 ally nations. Now there are 29. Last month, Mr. Trump suggested perhaps Brazil could be a part of NATO, though Brazil is largely in the southern hemisphere.
Trump simply doesn’t care about the Constitution or Due Process of law (except where he, his family, and their corrupt cronies are involved). Migrants seeking to apply for legal protections under our laws aren’t a security problem; Trump is! And, the idea that closing the border wouldn’t cause both an economic catastrophe and threaten our security just shows what an absurdist presidency Trump has foisted on the majority of Americans who did not want him in office in the first place.
Ted Hesson, Immigration, Pro — Staff mugshots photographed Feb. 20, 2018. (M. Scott Mahaskey/Politico)
Ted Hesson reports for Politico:
The border crisis that President Donald Trump used to justify declaring a national emergency was never real, but a different crisis at the border is now starting to escalate as immigration officials hold hundreds of parents and children in makeshift facilities, including a parking lot.
During a press conference in El Paso, Texas, Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Kevin McAleenan argued Wednesday that a surge of incoming Central American migrants has pushed the U.S. immigration system to a “breaking point” and that all available resources should be devoted to manage it.
But Democrats and advocates contend that the Trump administration’s response is exacerbating the problems.
Rep. Veronica Escobar (D-Texas), a freshman lawmaker who represents El Paso, fumed Thursday over the border situation — which she also described as a crisis — during an interview after leaving the House floor.
“They knew that the numbers would increase,” she said. “Why were they not planning?”
Here’s what’s really happening now at the border:
The president’s frequent claims that unprecedented numbers of undocumented migrants are streaming into the country remain untrue. (Twice as many came during the 1990s and early 2000s.) And President Trump’s caricature of border-crossers as violent criminals is still belied by study after study showing that immigrants in general, and undocumented immigrants in particular, commit fewer crimes than the native-born.
“We have a capacity crisis, if you want to think of it that way,” Rep. David Schweikert (R-Ariz.) told POLITICO. “We don’t have capacity to deal with the populations that they’re getting at the border right now.”
Border Patrol anticipates that it will apprehend more than 55,000 family members in March, by far the highest monthly total since such record-keeping began in fiscal year 2012. The warmer spring and summer months ahead will likely bring even higher numbers.
The adult men from Mexico who a decade ago constituted most border migrants were able to be returned more swiftly, often simply by walking them across the border. While they were detained, the men required comparatively little in the way of social or medical services.
Furthermore, a 2008 federal law and related bilateral agreement allowed the U.S. to repatriate Mexican unaccompanied minors rapidly. The law, called the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, does not similarly authorize quick deportation for children from Central America.
By contrast, the greater volume of children among the new Central American migrants imposes on immigration agencies a need for more psychologists, nutritionists, educators and a host of others. Border officials contend that with the rise in families and children, more migrants have health issues than in the past.
“We are doing everything we can to simply avoid a tragedy,” McAleenan said at the border Wednesday. “But with these numbers, with the types of illnesses we’re seeing at the border, I fear that it’s just a matter of time.”
Federal court orders in recent years have limited to 20 days the time children can be kept in detention, which means border agents often must release families into the interior. Such releases speed up processing, but demoralize agents and may encourage more migration, McAleenan argued.
The current migratory flow is also different because of the greater proportion of asylum applications at the border in recent years. Central American families arriving at the border frequently seek such refuge, which puts them into an immigration process that can take years to resolve.
The Trump administration argues that the asylum claims largely lack merit, but immigration court statistics don’t back that up. Roughly 25 percent of defensive asylum applications were approved by an immigration judge in fiscal year 2017, with 41 percent denied and 34 percent resolved in another manner, such as a withdrawn application.
Still, immigration hard-liners contend that lax asylum laws have been a magnet for Central Americans.
Mark Krikorian, director of the restrictionist Center for Immigration Studies, compared the current influx at the border to Europe’s migratory surge in 2015.
“We are seeing an Angela Merkel-style disaster on the border caused by loopholes in our laws that the Democrats refuse to even consider changing,” he said.
Democrats and advocates argue that the Trump administration’s response has exacerbated problems at the border.
Administration officials have known for months — arguably years — that more migrant families could trek to the United States, yet they appear to have been caught flat-footed.
During McAleenan’s press conference in El Paso Wednesday, reporters observed hundreds of parents and children held in a parking lot converted into a makeshift detention center.
“That’s their solution? That’s not a solution,” Escobar said. “In my community when these families are released, the community … scrambles and works hard to create hospitality centers, to feed these people, to help get them to their final destination. If we can do it with a fraction of the resources and power of the federal government, surely DHS can find a better solution.”
Escobar said DHS hasn’t taken adequate steps to deal with a long-term trend of more family and child arrivals. Border Patrol often uses small concrete cells that were better suited to the earlier populations of single men, many of whom would be sent back to Mexico in a day’s time, she said.
“They’ve been acting and responding in the same way over the last five years despite the change in the migration pattern,” she said.
The spending package approved by Congress in February included $192 million to construct a large processing center for migrant families in El Paso. The facility will house multiple agencies that deal with families in one building, but will take six months to a year to become functional, according to Escobar.
In the meantime, the Texas Democrat argues that if Trump truly deems immigration a national emergency, he should work harder to house and care for incoming migrants, perhaps with Federal Emergency Management Agency trailers or Red Cross assistance.
Under a January 2017 Trump executive order, federal immigration officials remain tasked with arresting and detaining as many migrants as possible, without a system of prioritization. Advocates contend the enforcement push has sapped resources that could be used to address the care and custody of newly arrived migrant families.
“They just detain any grandpa or mom that they find in the interior and they don’t prioritize who they should be putting in detention,” said Kerri Talbot, a director with the Washington, D.C.-based Immigration Hub. “They don’t need any more money, they need a new strategy.”
Under its “zero tolerance” strategy, the Trump administration sought to prosecute all suspect border crossers for illegal entry. Children couldn’t travel with their parents to criminal detention facilities, so they were reclassified as “unaccompanied” and transferred to the custody of the Health and Human Services Department. Thousands of families were split apart from April until June, only to see Trump reverse the policy and a federal judge order families reunited.
The administration also has sought to keep asylum-seeking migrants in Mexico for longer periods of time.
Using a practice known as “metering,” border officials have forced families to wait in Mexico, only accepting a certain number of asylum applicants at ports of entry each day.
A September report by the DHS inspector general’s office found evidence that forcing migrants to wait at ports actually encouraged more people to cross illegally. The report cited a Border Patrol supervisor and accounts of several migrants who said they attempted to enter illegally after being turned away at a port.
“They’re afraid of waiting in Mexico until they can get in at the port,” said Theresa Cardinal Brown, director of immigration and cross-border policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center. “They’re balancing that against their desire to do it legally. And I definitely think its emboldening the smugglers to go to those who are waiting.”
McAleenan acknowledged during a December Senate committee hearing that metering could lead to an increase in the number of people attempting to cross the border illegally, saying it’s “certainly a concern.”
Still, the Trump administration has moved forward with a separate policy to keep asylum seekers in Mexico for extended periods of time.
The administration’s “remain in Mexico” policy — announced in late December and now implemented in several areas along the border — forces certain non-Mexican asylum seekers to wait in Mexico during the duration of an asylum case.
At the same time, the administration has moved slowly to disperse funding to address root causes of migration in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras.
POLITICO reported this week that hundreds of millions in aid dollars remain stalled at the White House budget office as aides wonder how seriously to take Trump’s threats to cut the funding.
“Mexico is doing NOTHING to help stop the flow of illegal immigrants to our Country. They are all talk and no action,“ Trump tweeted Thursday. “Likewise, Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador have taken our money for years, and do Nothing. The Dems don’t care, such BAD laws. May close the Southern Border!“
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Trump’s unwise threat to “close” the Southern Border could turn a humanitarian situation into a self-created international crisis. And, Trump continues to be the “best friend” of smugglers, cartels, and gangs.
There is a clear and present threat to our national security. It’s not desperate refugees (mostly women, children, and families) seeking to exercise their legal rights; unfortunately, it’s our President.
CBP COMMISSIONER McAleenan Is At It Again — Blaming Victims & The Smugglers He Empowers For His Own Incompetence & Lack Of Courage To Stand Up For Human Rights, The Real Rule Of Law, & Legitimate Law Enforcement — Don’t Let Him Get Away with His Latest False Narrative!
By Paul Wickham Schmidt
CBP Commissioner McAleenan is at it again: declaring a self-created “border emergency” and blaming smugglers (whom he aided and empowered with “designed to fail” policies) and lax asylum laws for the problem.
No mention of wasting time on walls and barbed wire, zero tolerance, child separation, mindless detention, Migrant Protection Protocols, bogus “Regional Compacts” that don’t address the problems, illegal regulations, overloading the courts, wrong credible fear advice, failing to deal with root causes, eliminating the Central American Refugee program, slow walking asylum applications, overloading the Immigration Courts with cases that never should have been brought, deporting gang members without considering the consequences, failing to work cooperatively with attorneys and NGOS, failing to focus on conditions in the Northern Triangle, intentional misinterpretation and bias in asylum adjudication, bogus statistics, false narratives about crime, or any of the other many failed Administration “enforcement only” policies that created this perfectly foreseeable “crisis.” While it is a legitimate humanitarian tragedy, it is not a “law enforcement crisis.”
Apparently, the only solution according to McAleenan is for Congress to eliminate rights of asylum seekers and kids so that the Border Patrol can just arrest them and toss them back across the border without any process at all. (No mention, of course, of how that might affect folks turning themselves in — why wouldn’t smugglers just do a “quick reset” and smuggle everyone to the interior? Too deep a thought for the Commish, apparently).
Problem is that in the absence of knowledge and an understandable “counter-message and solutions” McAleenan’s idiotic restrictionist views are getting traction with the press. Indeed, they were reflected in Nielsen’s equally idiotic and dishonest request to Congress for permission to abuse and threaten the lives of the most vulnerable of the vulnerable — children.
Seems like it would be prudent for some group with expertise and credibility to push back against this latest offensive. And, it would also be critical to get folks to the House Dems with the information and facts they need to resist what is sure to be a new offensive by the Administration and GOP for harsh laws basically eliminating asylum status, claiming quite falsely that it’s the only way to secure the border. Or perhaps, the declaration of a “New Border Emergency” suspending asylum laws and the Fifth Amendment.
Indeed, the best way of securing the border would be the immediate removal of Trump and the rest of the “malicious incompetents” who make up his Kakistocracy. But, that’s not going to happen any time too soon.
Trump has failed yet again. That means that his victims and the “usual suspects” — asylum applicants, kids, women, lawyers, NGOs, reporters, Dems — are going to have to pay “big time” for his latest failure. Might as well get ahead of the curve.
WASHINGTON — Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen will ask Congress for the authority to deport unaccompanied migrant children more quickly, to hold families seeking asylum in detention until their cases are decided and to allow immigrants to apply for asylum from their home countries, according to a copy of the request obtained by NBC News.
In a letter to Congress, Nielsen said she will be seeking a legislative proposal in the coming days to address what she called the “root causes of the emergency” that has led to a spike in border crossingsin recent weeks. The letter has not yet been sent.
The legislative proposal would have to clear the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives, which is likely to respond with strong opposition.
Since February, Customs and Border Protection has seen a jump in the number of undocumented immigrants attempting to cross the border each day.
Daily border crossings have recently hit a 13-year high, leading immigration agents to release immigrants from their custody rather than transferring them to prolonged detention. The influx has left many charities in the U.S. and Mexico scrambling to provide care and has left many asylum seekers waiting in dangerous areas without shelter on the southern side of the border.
Under current law, children who enter from non-contiguous countries, which effectively means children from Central America, are transferred to the custody of the Department of Health and Human Services, which works to reunite them with a relative or sponsor in the United States. And under a federal court agreement, immigrant families with children cannot be detained longer than 20 days. The Trump administration has previously tried to reverse the court decision through executive action, but has so far been unsuccessful.
In the letter, Nielsen makes the case that the law’s limitations on DHS’s ability to deport migrant children is serving as “another dangerous ‘pull’ factor.”
“The result is that hundreds of Central American children come into our custody each day, await transfer to (Health and Human Services) care, and, ultimately are placed with a sponsor in the United States,” Nielsen said in the letter, which is expected to be sent to members of Congress on Thursday night.
The letter also indicates that the Trump administration will be requesting emergency funds to deal with the migrant flow, including what Nielsen predicts to be thousands of shelter beds for unaccompanied migrant children.
Kirstjen Nielsen, from center, Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, tours the border area with San Diego Section Border Patrol Chief Rodney Scott at Borderfield State Park along the United States-Mexico Border fence in San Ysidro, California on Nov. 20, 2018.Sandy Huffaker / AFP – Getty Images file
HHS, the agency responsible for sheltering children who arrive at the border without a parent, “is still approaching its maximum capacity and will very likely require thousands of additional beds in the coming weeks and months,” the letter said.
Nielsen said in the letter that the exact dollar amount of the request is still being worked out with the Office of Management and Budget, but a senior administration official told NBC News the request is likely to be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The funding would also cover more medical teams and vehicles to transport immigrants, following the deaths of immigrants in the custody of CBP agents who were not able to provide care in time.
Julia Ainsley
Julia Ainsley is a national security reporter for NBC News.
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Every day demonstrates the complete “malicious incompetence” of the Trump Kakistocracy! Clearly DHS needs (but won’t get) competent management at all levels that knows how to deal with humanitarian situations in some way other than rolling out more gimmicks and bogus requests in an attempt to turn a refugee situation into a fake law enforcement crisis.
There is no real law enforcement crisis with refugees turning themselves in to assert their legal rights under our laws. Indeed, a more competent Administration with all this advance notice could have channeled most folks to designated ports of entry where they should have been guaranteed prompt, fair, and humane processing. Instead they mindlessly wasted time and money on unneeded troops, dumb walls, and illegal gimmicks that haven’t and won’t “deter” forced migrants (but do encourage, empower, and enrich smugglers).
Why not rehire retired Asylum Officers, Refugee Officers, and other retired personal at the USCIS Office of International Operations? Why not use VOLAGS involved in overseas refugee processing who now under Trump’s destruction of refugee programs have nothing to do overseas? Why not ask for processing help from the UNHCR? Why not use some of the bloated DHS enforcement and detention budgets to hire temporary Asylum Officers from the private sector? Why not offer grants to Catholic Conference, LIRS, HIAS and other experienced refugee resettlement agencies to aid in temporary placement of those who pass credible fear? Why not beef up accreditation programs for non-attorney representatives working for charitable organization to meet representation needs? Why not simply recognize gender-based persecution as a subset of “particular social group” rather than forcing slow and intensive re-litigation of gender-based issues in ever case with inconsistent results and no guidance for parties or adjudicators.
There are lots of things a competent Administration dedicated to fairly administering refugee and asylum laws could do to handle this humanitarian situation. But, that won’t happen without “regime change” and removal of the Kakistocracy.
Indeed, the most likely outcome of the Trump Admonistration’s “malicious incompetence” will be complete loss of faith in our legal system. Folks will do what they have to do to save their lives — even if it means abandoning a system that has betrayed Due Process and fundamental fairness.
Then, we finally will have a Trump-caused “law enforcement crisis.” While the presence of more refugees in the U.S. presents more of an opportunity than a security problem, the disappearance of our Constitutional protections and intentional destruction of our legal system will be a lasting problem for all of us.
Is It Time to Bring the Nation’s Immigration Courts Under the Judicial Branch?
U.S. immigration courts face an “existential crisis.” The American Bar Association says it has a solution.
The American Bar Association is renewing calls for lawmakers to overhaul the nation’s overwrought immigration court system by making the courts independent from the Department of Justice, and therefore from the Trump administration. The association is joined by a broad array of legal workers in accusing the administration of enacting policies that pressure immigration judges to ramp up deportations, with no apparent concern for due process or the rule of law.
The United States immigration court system is not part of the judicial branch, but rather is governed by the Department of Justice’s Executive Office for Immigration Review. The office was created to oversee the courts in 1983; previously they were under the control of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, also under the Department of Justice. Last week, the ABA identified an “existential crisis” within this system, finding it subject to “political interference,” to “policies and practices that threaten due process,” and to “longstanding and widespread under-resourcing.” It calls for a Congressional vote to establish the courts as an independent entity per Article I of the Constitution—also known as an Article I Court.
Shortly after President Donald Trump’s inauguration, his administration told the press that it would work to slash an overwhelming backlog of immigration court cases, restoring an overburdened, sclerotic system to working shape. What followed were a seriesofpolicies—among which were quotas on case closures—that observers blame for threatening due process in an effort to facilitate mass-deportation of immigrants, and for exacerbating the immigration court backlog by funneling unprecedented numbers of immigrants into the system.
The Department of Justice did not respond to a request for comment.
Ashley Tabaddor, president of the National Association of Immigration Judges, expresses her organization’s support for an independent immigration court. The ABA, NAIJ, and other organizations, including the Federal Bar Association, began to call for an independent immigration court system long before the Trump administration, during the presidency of Barack Obama.
“We hope that this administration and those mindful of a reasonable approach realize this isn’t a right-wing or left-wing answer; it’s an American answer that protects both efficiency and integrity of the courts,” Tabaddor says. “It hasn’t only been this administration that has pushed back on the idea of an independent [immigration court system]. Unfortunately, part of human nature is it resists what it perceives as giving up power. It means the executive branch would lose direct influence over how [the courts are] used.”
Although the Trump administration has repeatedly acknowledged the backlog and overwhelming challenges faced by immigration judges, it has also opposed an independent immigration court system. James McHenry, director of the Department of Justice office that oversees the courts, told a Senate committee in April that independent courts would not “address any of the core challenges facing the immigration courts.” McHenry repeatedly maintained that all immigrants are afforded due process.
Legal analysts argue, by contrast, that the current status of immigration courts as under the purview of the Department of Justice has politicized their work. “Our current system permits the political branches of government to yield tremendous power over immigration enforcement policies and practices,” says Kathleen Kim, an immigration law professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. “Without an independent judiciary, our system of government provides no check on abuse of that power and immigration court decisions suffer from the taint of impartiality.”
And with a court beholden to the president’s political agenda, immigrant lives—and the Constitution’s guarantees of fair trials—hang in the balance. “As we have seen in the anti-immigrant rhetoric of the Trump administration, the rights of immigrants have become a political football,” says Margaret Russell, a constitutional law professor at Santa Clara University. “Only independent immigration courts can provide a fair forum, as free from partisan politics as possible.”
“Just one day observing in immigration court would highlight how inherently unfair the system can really be for someone fighting for their case,” says Julia I. Vázquez, an immigrant rights professor at Los Angeles’ Southwestern Law School.
Late last year, Pacific Standard reported the story of a Guatemalan woman whose asylum petition had been denied even before a judge had an opportunity to review documents in support of her case, including her initial asylum declaration.
Despite the administration’s promises to help improve the immigration court system, analysts have decried a number of policies that they say have undermined the courts. In April of 2018, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions required that immigration judges close at least 700 cases a year—with a low rate of appeal—in order to receive a favorable performance review. The move, ostensibly aimed at reducing the backlog, pressured the judges to plow through their caseloads, analysts have said, threatening due process for immigrants. And the move backfired: Rushed rulings are frequently appealed, further compounding the backlog.
In another similar measure in May, Sessions stopped the use of administrative closures, in which immigration judges withhold judgment on a case while immigrants make formal petitions for legal status. Administrative closures had helped judges to prioritize their dockets and avoid getting bogged down with lower-urgency cases.
Coupled with the administration’s unprecedented push to arrest undocumented immigrants with no criminal record, these decisions have made the court’s backlog grow nearly 50 percent under the Trump administration, according to the Syracuse University non-profit data research center, Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. In November, there were over 768,000 outstanding cases.
Even with overwhelming concerns over backlog and broader questions about due process, it remains highly improbable that the immigration courts will become independent under a divided Congress and the Trump administration. “Keeping immigration courts within the executive branch will ensure adherence to the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant policy objectives,” Kim says.
What’s more, control of the immigration courts will enable the Trump administration to continue to ramp up deportations without the approval of a split Congress. “The opposition [to independent courts] is likely to defend executive branch oversight of immigration courts as the best antidote to Congressional inaction,” Russell says.
NAIJ’s Tabaddor says that, while it is not likely that immigration courts will be made independent anytime soon, there’s growing awareness among lawmakers from both parties of the problems with the system.
“As we see the expansion of the groundswell of support [for independence], it’ll be difficult for Congress not to act,” she says. “Of course, you always have to have hope in life, otherwise it’s not worth it.”
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EOIR’s “no problem” response to the unfolding disaster which, under DOJ political direction, its own bureaucrats have helped engineer “doesn’t pass the straight face test.”
Of course, giving control of Immigration Court dockets back to the judges who actually have to hear and decide cases is the necessary first step in rationalizing the system, ending the DOJ/EOIR’s “Aimless Docket Reshuffling,” and establishing priorities based on fundamental fairness to all parties and overall judicial efficiency, not solely the “DHS enforcement priority of the day.”
Nobody can solve overnight all the problems in our Immigration Courts that have built up and been allowed to fester over decades. But, placing the courts under apolitical, professional judicial control, like all other successful courts, would be a necessary first step from which “best practices” and other efficiencies that are consistent with Due Process would flow.
San Diego (CNN)Twelve asylum seekers required to stay in Mexico for the duration of their immigration hearings presented themselves one by one before an immigration judge over nearly four hours Wednesday. Each case appeared to raise a similar set of questions about the new policy for Judge Jonathen Scott Simpson, and the hearing culminated in a dose of skepticism from the judge.
“Several things cause me concern,” Simpson said toward the end of the hearing, as he weighed whether four asylum seekers who weren’t present should be removed in absentia.
The migrants who appeared at the San Diego immigration court on Wednesday fall under the Migrant Protection Protocols program, informally known as “Remain in Mexico.” The program, which was initially rolled out in January at the San Ysidro port of entry, roughly 18 miles from the court, requires some asylum seekers to stay in Mexico to await their immigration hearings. Immigration and Customs Enforcement manages transportation to and from the border and court appearances.
The requirement that some of those seeking asylum stay in Mexico as they await their US court dates marks an unprecedented change in US asylum policy. As such, it has raised a host of questions among lawyers, advocates and now, immigration judges.
The first spate of hearings, which got underway this month, have underscored outstanding issues with the new program, including the challenge of obtaining legal representation while in another country and providing notification of court dates to an individual without a fixed address. They have also revealed glitches in the system, in which conflicting dates are causing confusion among migrants over when to appear at a port of entry for a court appearance.
The largest group to attend court so far came Wednesday. The 12 asylum seekers — five with attorneys, seven without — participated in a master calendar hearing, the first hearing in removal proceedings.
In one case, a man seeking asylum who did not have a lawyer said he had been provided with a list of legal service providers by the government but had trouble understanding it.
“I was confused,” he told the judge. “I don’t know how to read and write. It becomes difficult.” He added: “In Mexico, it’s even more complicated. It’s more complicated than if I were here.”
“I understand it’s more difficult,” Simpson replied. “It’s not lost on me.”
All asylum seekers whose cases were scheduled for Wednesday were set up with merits hearing dates, where individuals provide evidence to substantiate their claims to remain in the US, or are given additional time to find legal representation. The dates were scattered among April, May and July.
In some instances scheduling issues arose, as Simpson explained that his afternoons for the next several months are dedicated to master calendar hearings for Migrant Protection Protocols. Merits hearings, therefore, would need to be scheduled for the mornings.
Given that asylum seekers must wait in Mexico, however, and therefore need time to be processed by US Customs and Border Protection before going to their hearings, mornings were out of the question.
“Immigration officers need four hours,” said Robert Wities, an ICE attorney.
“I can’t do an entire master calendar in the afternoon and merits hearing,” Simpson responded, later asking the ICE attorneys to explain in writing why it wouldn’t be possible for the asylum seekers to attend morning hearings.
In February, a coalition of immigrant advocacy groups asked a federal judge for a restraining order that would block the Trump administration from forcing asylum seekers to stay in Mexico while their cases make their way through the immigration courts. The hearing on the motion is scheduled for this Friday.
In the meantime, the administration may clarify or resolve those issues in the future in documents provided to the immigration court. But for now, immigration hearings for those asylum seekers waiting in Mexico are set to move forward.
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Can you imagine what would happen if the ICE Assistant Chief Counsel Robert Wities told a U.S. District Judge when he or she could or couldn’t schedule hearings? What if a private attorney said he or she would only appear in the afternoon? What kind of “court system” doesn’t give its own judges flexibility to set their own court schedules in the manner they believe will be most fair, effective, and efficient? Why has the statutory contempt of court authority that Congress conferred on U.S. Immigration Judges more than two decades ago never been implemented by the DOJ?
A real court would examine both the legality and the procedures that the DHS unilaterally, and apparently incompetently, put in place for their “Stay in Mexico” program. Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein’s rewriting of the oath of office notwithstanding, U.S. Immigration Judges, like other Federal employees, swear an oath to uphold our Constitution (e.g., Due Process) not an oath of loyalty to the Attorney General, the President, or the DOJ.
