Sexual Harassment – Page 8 – immigrationcourtside.com

WHEN ARTICLE III COURTS FAIL: U.S. “Orbits” Refugee Families To Dangerous Chaos In Guatemala Under Clearly Fraudulent “Safe Third Country” Arrangements As Feckless U.S. Courts Fail To Enforce Constitutional Due Process & U.S. Asylum Laws In Face Of Trump Regime’s Contemptuous Scofflaw Conduct!

yhttps://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/the-us-is-putting-asylum-seekers-on-planes-to-guatemala–often-without-telling-them-where-theyre-going/2020/01/13/0f89a93a-3576-11ea-a1ff-c48c1d59a4a1_story.html

Kevin Sieff reports from Guatemala for WashPost:

By

Kevin Sieff

Jan. 14, 2020 at 4:21 p.m. EST

GUATEMALA CITY — The chartered U.S. government flights land here every day or two, depositing Honduran and Salvadoran asylum seekers from the U.S. border. Many arrive with the same question: “Where are we?”

For the first time ever, the United States is shipping asylum seekers who arrive at its border to a “safe third country” to seek refuge there. The Trump administration hopes the program will serve as a model for others in the region.

But during its first weeks, asylum seekers and human rights advocates say, migrants have been put on planes without being told where they were headed, and left here without being given basic instruction about what to do next.

When the migrants land in Guatemala City, they receive little information about what it means to apply for asylum in one of the hemisphere’s poorest countries. Those who don’t immediately apply are told that they must leave the country in 72 hours. The form is labeled “Voluntary Return.”

“In the U.S., the agents told us our cases would be transferred, but they didn’t say where. Then they lined us up to get on the plane,” said a woman named Marta, 43, from Honduras. She sat in a migrant shelter here with her 17-year-old son, who nursed a gunshot wound in his left cheek — the work, both say, of a Honduran faction of the MS-13 gang.

“When we looked out the window, we were here,” she said. “We thought, ‘Where are we? What are we supposed to do now?’ ”

After the volcano, indigenous Guatemalans search for safer ground — in Guatemala, or the United States

Human rights organizations in Guatemala say they have recorded dozens of cases of asylum seekers who were misled by U.S. officials into boarding flights, and who were not informed of their asylum rights upon arrival. Of the 143 Hondurans and Salvadorans sent to Guatemala since the program began last month, only five have applied for asylum, according to the country’s migration agency.

“Safe third country” is one of the Trump administration’s most dramatic initiatives to curb migration — an effort to remake the U.S. asylum system. President Trump has called it “terrific for [Guatemala] and terrific for us.”

But an Asylum Cooperation Agreement is bringing migrants to a country that is unable to provide economic and physical security for its own citizens — many of whom are themselves trying to migrate. In fiscal 2019, Guatemala was the largest source of migrants detained at the U.S. border, at more than 264,000. The country has only a skeletal asylum program, with fewer than a dozen asylum officers.

Trump wants border-bound asylum seekers to find refuge in Guatemala instead. Guatemala isn’t ready.

As the deal was negotiated, it drew concerns from the United Nations and human rights organizations. But its implementation, advocates say, has been worse than they feared.

“It’s a total disaster,” said Thelma Shau, who has observed the arrival of asylum seekers at La Aurora International Airport in her role overseeing migration issues for Guatemala’s human rights ombudsman.

“They arrive here without being told that Guatemala is their destination,” she said. “They are asked, ‘Do you want refuge here or do you want to leave?’ And they have literally minutes to decide without knowing anything about what that means.”

President Trump and first lady Melania Trump meet in the Oval Office last month with then-President Jimmy Morales of Guatemala. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

The Guatemalan government says that it explains asylum options and that migrants are simply choosing to leave voluntarily.

“Central American people are given comprehensive attention when they arrive in the country, and respect for their human rights is a priority,” said Alejandra Mena, a spokeswoman for Guatemala’s migration agency. “The information provided is complete for them to make a decision.”

In Guatemala, lenders that were supported by USAID and the World Bank are now funding illegal migration.

The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to requests for comment. The United States has signed similar “safe third country” agreements with El Salvador and Honduras, but they have not yet been implemented. In recent days, Trump administration officials have said they are considering sending Mexican asylum seekers to Guatemala to seek refuge.

Human rights groups in Guatemala that have observed the process say migrants here are not given key information about their options — such as what asylum in Guatemala entails and where they would stay while their claims are being processed. Many migrants are aware that Guatemala suffers from the same gang violence and extortion that forced them from their home countries.

Migrants from Guatemala disembark from a raft in Ciudad Hidalgo, Mexico, in June. (Rebecca Blackwell/Associated Press)

Paula Arana observed the orientation as child protection liaison for the human rights ombudsman.

“It’s clear that the government is not providing enough information for asylum seekers to make a decision, especially in the three minutes they are given,” she said. “Instead, they are being pushed out of the country.”

The United States had suggested that it would begin implementing the agreement by sending single men to Guatemala. But less than a month after it began, families with young children are arriving on the charter flights. Last week, Arana said, a 2-year-old arrived with flulike symptoms.

On Thursday, a man named Jorge, 35, his wife and two daughters, ages 11 and 15, landed here. A day later, they were clustered together at the Casa del Migrante, a shelter in Guatemala City where government officials took them in a bus. They had been given the papers with 72 hours’ notice to leave Guatemala, and couldn’t figure out what to do.

The family had fled multiple threats from gangs in Honduras, which started with an interpersonal dispute between Jorge’s wife and one of the gang’s leaders. Jorge was certain that going back would mean certain death. Like Marta, Jorge did not want his last name to be published out of fear for his family’s safety.

“We’re thinking about our options. We know we can’t stay here. What would I do? Where would we stay?” he said. “Maybe we need to try to cross to the United States again.”

In western Guatemala, cultivating coffee was once a way out of poverty. As prices fall, growers are abandoning their farms for the United States.

The Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees is not participating in the program. But officials say they’re aware of problems with its implementation.

“UNHCR has a number of concerns regarding the Asylum Cooperation Agreement and its implementation,” said Sibylla Brodzinsky, UNHCR’s regional spokeswoman for Central America and Mexico. “We have expressed these concerns to the relevant U.S. and Guatemalan authorities.”

Human rights advocates who have interviewed the asylum seekers, known locally as “transferidos,” say many have decided that their best option is to migrate again to the United States. Smugglers often offer their customers three chances to make it across the border.

Migrants at the Casa del Migrante described spending a week in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody in the United States, where they had intended to make their asylum claims. Many carried binders full of evidence they assumed would bolster their cases. On her phone, Marta saved avideo of her son being tortured by MS-13 gang members.

But in their brief conversations with U.S. immigration officials, they were told they would not be given a chance to apply for asylum in the United States.

“We had all this information to show them,” Marta said, leafing through photos of her son’s scars and Honduran court documents. “They said, ‘That’s not going to help you here.’ ”

This school aims to keep young Guatemalans from migrating. They don’t know it’s funded by the U.S. government.

In interviews with The Washington Post, some migrants said they were told vaguely that their cases were being “transferred.” Others were told they were going to be returned to their countries of origin.

“One agent told me, ‘You’re going back to Honduras,’ ” Marta said. But then they arrived in Guatemala City.

“When we looked out the window, we just assumed it was a stop,” her son said.

Marta thought Guatemala might be even more dangerous. They had no connection to the country and nowhere to stay beyond their first few days. When she left the migrant shelter to buy food Friday morning, she said, she stumbled upon a crime scene with a dead body a few blocks away.

During their nine-day detention at an ICE facility in Texas, she said, the family shared a cell with a Guatemalan family that was fleeing violence perpetrated by a different MS-13 group based here.

Agronomy students, some hooded, block a street outside a Guatemala City hotel before lawmakers voted on the deal that made Guatemala a “safe third country” for migrants seeking asylum in the United States. (Oliver De Ros/Associated Press)

“Why would they send us to a country where the same gangs are operating?” she asked.

In the absence of a thorough explanation of their asylum rights in Guatemala, El Refugio de la Niñez is offering a short tutorial to the asylum seekers. So far, 45 have attended.

“The Guatemalan government is completely absent in this whole process,” said Leonel Dubon, the director of the U.N.-funded center. “It sends a clear message. The government isn’t here to offer shelter, it’s here to push people out as quickly as possible.”

The Trump administration negotiated the “safe third country” agreement last year with lame-duck Guatemalan President Jimmy Morales.

As Guatemala pursues war criminals, a dark secret emerges: Some suspects are living quiet lives in the U.S.

Guatemala’s constitutional court initially blocked the deal. Then Trump threatened tariffs on the country and taxes on remittances sent home by Guatemalans living in the United States. It was eventually signed in July.

The new Guatemalan president, Alejandro Giammattei, was sworn in Tuesday. He has raised concerns about the agreement, saying he hadn’t been briefed on its details.

At the signing ceremony, Trump said it would “provide safety for legitimate asylum seekers, and stop asylum fraud and abuses [of the] system.”

U.S. asylum officers do not vet the cases of migrants before they are sent to Guatemala.

In her brief conversations with U.S. immigration agents, Marta tried to get them to look at her binder full of documents and photos.

“They weren’t interested,” she said. “They just kept saying that your case will be transferred to an institution that can handle it.”

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

Kevin writes about a tragically absurd situation that seems to have fallen “below the radar screen” of public outrage or even discourse. This is wrong! Most days I can’t believe that the county that I proudly served for more than 35 years is engaging in this type of abusive behavior that would be below the level of even some Third World dictatorships.

And, it isn’t just “occasional abuse” — it’s systemized, institutionalized abuse and dehumanization on a global and regular basis — all approved or de facto enabled by feckless and spineless Federal Appellate Courts, all the way up to the Supremes! These are folks who should know better and really have no other meaningful function in our “separation of powers” system other than to protect our individual rights. Authoritarian governments and dictators hardly need “courts” to enforce their will, even if some find it useful to “go through the motions” of creating and employing complicit “judges.” As one of my Round Table colleagues succinctly put it “there appears to be no bottom!”

Clearly, the “Safe Third Country” exception was never intended by Congress, nor does the statutory language permit it, to be used to “orbit” asylum applicants to some of the most dangerous refugee sending countries in the world with thoroughly corrupt governments and non-existent asylum systems. So, why does the Trump regime have confidence that it can and will get away with these atrocities? Because they believe, correctly so far, that the Article III Federal Courts, many of them now stacked with Trump’s hand-selected “toady judges,” are afraid to stand up to tyranny and protect the rights of desperate, mostly brown-skinned, asylum seekers.

Obviously, from an institutional standpoint, the Article III Courts are saying:

“Who cares what happens to a bunch of brown-skinned foreigners. Let ‘em die, rot, or be tortured. Human rights, due process, and human dignity simply don’t matter when they don’t affect us personally, financially, or socially. That’s particularly true because the results of our abuses are taking place, thankfully, in foreign nations: out of sight, out of mind. Not our problem.”

Apparently, many Americans agree with this immoral and illegal approach. Otherwise, the “black robed, life tenured ones” would be pariahs in their communities, churches, and social interactions. They wouldn’t be offered those cushy teaching positions at law schools or a chance to expound before public audiences.

But, not speaking out against bad judges and not insisting on integrity and courage in the Article III courts could ultimately prove fatal for all of our individual rights. Judges who use their privileged positions to turn a blind eye to the oppression of others, particularly the most vulnerable humans among us, and the catastrophic failure of the rule of law and Due Process in the U.S. immigration system can hardly be expected to stand up for the individual rights of any of us against Government oppression.

After all, why should an exulted Federal Appellate Judge or a Supreme Court Justice care about what happens to you, unless your blood is about to spatter his or her pristine black robe? Many of those supportive of or complicit in Trump’s tyranny will personally experience the costs of a feckless Federal Judiciary when their “turn in the barrel” comes. And, the Trump regime’s list of those who’s “lives and rights don’t matter” is very, very long and continually expanding.

All I can say now is that some day, the full truth about what happens to those unlawfully and immorally turned away at our borders will “out.” Then, many Articles III judges will try to disingenuously protect their reputations by saying, similar to many judges of the Third Reich, “Gee, who knew,” or “I was powerless,” or “It was a political problem beyond our limited jurisdiction.”

My charge to the New Due Process Army: Don’t let the complicit judges get away with it in the “Court of History.” You see, know, and experience first-hand every day the results of Article III judicial complicity. Don’t ever forget what those judges have done and continue to do to human lives from their protected and “willfully clueless” ivory towers! Ultimately, you aren’t as powerless as the “complicit ones” think you are!

Due Process Forever; Feckless, Complicit, Immoral Federal Judges Never!

PWS

01-14-20

VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN @ LA TIMES: Yes, Trumpism Is a Cult: “To see Trumpism as a cult is not to refuse to engage with its effects, the crimes committed in its name or the way it has awakened and emboldened the cruelest and most destructive beliefs and practices in the American playbook.”

http://enewspaper.latimes.com/infinity/article_share.aspx?guid=c7eff502-0fc6-4c15-a5a9-4fd8adb62bb5

Trumpism deserves to be called a cult

VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN

The comparisons have come hard and fast, at least since 2015. Trump is like Silvio Berlusconi, like Adolf Hitler, like Boris Johnson. A 2018 film called “The Trump Prophecy” took the evangelical route, comparing Trump to Cyrus the Great, the 6th century BC Persian monarch chosen by God to free Jewish captives in Babylon.

But maybe it’s time to stop searching for the exact analogy for Trump, be he Cyrus or Boris, Adolf or a Silvio. What demands analysis is less the arrogant 73-year-old mediocrity in the Oval Office, but the worshipful attitude so many Americans have toward him.

A lot of nut jobs have peddled lies to Americans before, and even styled themselves as messianic. But at no time in history have so many Americans been drawn to what’s looking increasingly like a cult. I don’t use the term recklessly.

When Steven Hassan, an expert in cults and an ex-Moonie (as in the Unification Church, founded by a Korean businessman, the Rev. Sun Myung Moon), published “The Cult of Trump” last spring, some reviewers objected to his use of the cult framework as incendiary and not all that useful.

Indeed, for Trump critics to call his admirers cult members might be just another salvo in our nasty political warfare. It’s similar to the Trump psychologizing over the years that often doubles as name-calling: He’s a baby, a psychopath, a stone-cold narcissist.

The discourse around cults partakes of some woolly theories. “Mind control” and “brainwashing” are shibboleths from the 1950s, when the coinages were used to describe what Chinese Communists did to convert freethinkers to their cause. The implicit suggestion is that unsavory ideas and ideologies can only win adherents using extreme and witchy measures.

All that put me off the notion of Trumpism as a cult. But then in August, Trump looked heavenward and called himself “the chosen one.”

Suddenly, among evangelicals, it wasn’t enough to make comparisons with Cyrus or even King David. He had to be the savior himself. The far-right radio host Wayne Allyn Root called Trump “the second coming of God.” Then former Energy Secretary Rick Perry straight up affirmed Trump’s craziness, telling him, “You are here in this time because God ordained you.”

As 2019 drew to a close, my doubts about Trumpism as a cult dissolved. And I’m not alone.

Republican lawyer George Conway reportedly described his wife, Trump’s presidential counselor Kellyanne Conway, as a member of a cult. Former GOP strategist John Weaver has used the term. Anthony Scaramucci, Trump’s onetime communications director, concurs. Also news vet Dan Rather, conservative political scientist Norman Ornstein, science journalist Steve Silberman, pastor John Pavlovitz and academic and journalist Jared Yates Sexton.

What the cult diagnosis may lack in scholarly rigor, it makes up for in explanatory power. When polled, far too many Republicans come across as having abandoned their commitment to libertarianism, family values or simple logic in favor of Trump worship. They’re lost to paranoia and factually unmoored talking points, just the way Hassan was lost to Sun Myung Moon.

It can be heartbreaking when loved ones succumb to Trumpism. (It’s a double whammy when your grief is dismissed as liberal tears.) A true believer undergoes a “radical personal change,” as Hassan puts it. The person you once knew seems somehow … not there.

Journalists Luke O’Neil and Edwin Lyngar, as well as Jen Senko in “The Brainwashing of My Dad,” have compiled stories of Americans who have gone over. O’Neil summarized the transformation this way: “A loved one … sat down in front of Fox News, found some kind of deep, addictive comfort in the anger and paranoia, and became a different person.”

Sounds about right.

Hassan — who remembers, during his Moonie days, shouting, “I don’t care if Moon is like Hitler. I’ve chosen to follow him, and I’ll follow him to the end” — broke free, and became an expert on cults and how to leave them. He has spent his career proving it’s possible.

To see Trumpism as a cult is not to refuse to engage with its effects, the crimes committed in its name or the way it has awakened and emboldened the cruelest and most destructive beliefs and practices in the American playbook. Instead, the cult framework should relieve the pressure many of us feel to call Trumpites back to themselves, to keep arguing with them. They are stuck in a bad relationship with a controlling figure.

Understanding Trump is a fool’s errand. He’s sui generis, and far too erratic and finally insubstantial to reward close attention. Trump zealots are another matter. They are part of the tradition of radical converts in American history who elected to forfeit their authentic personalities and principles rather than refine or strengthen them. We need to stay focused on how so many Americans came to this pass and took this destructive course. The Trump cult will define American politics for decades to come, even after its dear leader is gone.

Twitter: @page88

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

Heffernan’s analysis leads to the conclusion that it’s naive for Dems to keep wishing, hoping, and thinking that they can just speak truth and advance facts and thereby expect Trump’s followers to wake up, discover decency, and suddenly embrace humanity and rationality again.

No, the way the Democratic majority takes back the White House is by making sure that they get maximum turnout among the majority of Americans not enthralled by Trump and, particularly, that they fight through concerted GOP voter suppression efforts to appeal to, register, and get out the many new and younger voters who don‘t identify with Trump’s dark, White Nationalist view of America and the unfailingly false, cruel, and negative values that he so arrogantly projects to his cult followers.

PWS

01-11-20

HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE: CLYDE W. FORD @ LA TIMES: “Opinion: The immigration crisis and the racism driving it have roots in Hitler’s ‘bible’”

https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-01-07/great-race-passing-trump

Ford writes:

OPINION

Opinion: The immigration crisis and the racism driving it have roots in Hitler’s ‘bible’

By CLYDE W. FORD

JAN. 7, 2020

3:01 AM

The images horrify.

On the banks of the Rio Grande, a child floats lifelessly, her arm around her father, both drowned while trying to cross from Mexico into the United States. Refugees crossing the Mediterranean from Africa into Europe regularly drown. A Honduran mother dragging children flees from tear gas at the U.S. border. Children in cages.

The policies terrify. A border wall. Family separation. The purgatory of waiting for asylum in a third country.

In December, the Washington Post reported that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement wants to use migrant children in detention as bait. Adults who show up to claim them would be targeted for arrest and deportation.

The words incite fear. “Bad hombres.” “Rapists.” “Criminals.” “Shithole countries.” When uttered by a U.S. president, they carry even greater weight.

Britain, Poland, Italy, the United States. Around the world, countries once proud of welcoming immigrants seem determined to find ever more devious ways to keep them out. Are these signs of a newly ascendant nationalism? Or the last gasps of existential fear?

The worldwide immigration crisis — and the racism apparently driving it — can trace its roots in part to a century-old book, Madison Grant’s “The Passing of the Great Race.”

In publishing a centenary edition of the 1916 work, white nationalist Ostara Press praised the book as a “call to American whites to counter the dangers both from non-white and non-north Western European immigration.” Grant proposed a “Nordic race,” loosely centered in Scandinavia, as principally responsible for human social and cultural development. He feared immigration and intermarriage would dilute this race, dooming it to extinction.

Grant’s fears of his “great race” passing are very much alive today.

The Southern Poverty Law Center’s ongoing study of emails sent by Stephen Miller to Breitbart News in the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election document his affinity for white nationalism. Miller, an architect of the Trump administration’s immigration policies, lauds former President Calvin Coolidge for signing the Immigration Act of 1924, which hardened non-white immigration and eased white immigration from Western Europe. It also established the U.S. Border Patrol, the predecessor of Customs and Border Protection and ICE.

Grant’s writing is credited as part of the inspiration for the creation and passage of that 1924 Act. Hitler called Grant’s book, “my bible.” Grant’s ideas defined apartheid. His book fueled the U.S. eugenics movement.

Eugenics is a pseudoscience of race that seeks to breed and maintain a “Nordic stock” of human beings, while culling undesirables — blacks, Jews, Asians, South Americans, homosexuals, the physically and mentally ill, and others — through measures ranging from forced sterilization to death.

In Grant’s day, eugenics attracted the rich and famous — Carnegies, Rockefellers, and the Kelloggs of Corn Flakes fame. Eugenicist Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, saw birth control work as eliminating “human weeds” and Alexander Graham Bell presided over the scientific directors of the Eugenics Records Office, a research institute in Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y.

Eugenics is very much in vogue among white nationalists and far-right groups worldwide, though refashioned now into broader conspiracies like “replacement theory,” which originated in France with the writings of Renaud Camus and proposes that U.S. and European whites are being intentionally “replaced” through low birth rates and liberal immigration policies.

“We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies,” tweeted U.S. Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) in 2017. A gunman in Norway who murdered 80 people in 2011 portrayed the act as a defense of the Nordic race from the scourge of Islamic immigration. Similar “replacement theory” fears influenced mass shooters in Christchurch, Pittsburgh, El Paso and Charleston.

Surprisingly, Grant was as an early conservationist who saw in the fate of endangered species — the moose, the buffalo, the redwood tree — a similar fate awaiting his “Nordics.” He helped establish the U.S. National Park system. Modern-day environmental and climate movements have roots in Grant’s work, leading to a convoluted, bizarre specter:

The U.S. and European countries that Grant lauded manufacture the “greenhouse gases” threatening the environment that Grant sought to protect. Meanwhile, the climate crisis produces refugees from countries that Grant abhorred, seeking shelter in countries with draconian immigration policies that Grant helped to create.

Yet Grant was right. His “great race” is passing. Studies cite 2050 as the tipping point, when U.S. whites will become a statistical minority, and most Americans will be people of color. Whether crafted in overtly racist language or couched in covertly racist immigration policies, fear of the “great race” passing is used to win elections, cling to power, manipulate public opinion and grow organizational membership.

Immigrants built America. This new wave is no different. They are the face of the future, deserving new lives in a country that helps them succeed.

Yes, the “great race” is passing. Good riddance. And we should turn to finding ways to help everyone accept this inevitability — and thrive from it.

Clyde W. Ford is the author of “Think Black,” a memoir about his father, the first black software engineer in America.

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

Like those who were behind or “went along to go along” with horrible parts of our history like Dred Scott, Plessy v. Ferguson, the Chinese Exclusion Laws, or Jim Crow, Trump’s supporters and enablers eventually will have much to answer for in the “court of history.”

“Fake news.” “alternative facts,” false narratives, and internet myths might be gospel to Breitbart, Fox News, GOP sycophants, and Trump voters, but eventually, particularly in an age of information and documentation, “truth will out.” And, it won’t be pretty for the “Modern Day Jim Crows” any more than it was for the segregationists and other racists who preceded them.

PWS

01-10-20

INSIDE THE NUMBERS: My “Quick & Dirty” Takeaways From TRAC’s Latest Immigration Court Asylum Stats

Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse

Record Number of Asylum Cases in FY 2019

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Immigration judges decided a record number of asylum cases in FY 2019. This past year judges decided 67,406 asylum cases, nearly two-and-a-half times the number from five years ago when judges decided 19,779 asylum cases. The number of immigrants who have been granted asylum more than doubled from 9,684 in FY 2014 to 19,831 in FY 2019. However, the number of immigrants who have been denied asylum or other relief grew even faster from 9,716 immigrants to 46,735 over the same time period.

More Chinese nationals were granted asylum than any other nationality. Next came El Salvadorian nationals, followed by asylum seekers from India.

Six-nine percent of asylum seekers were denied asylum or other relief in 2019. Nevertheless, 99 out of 100 attended all their court hearings.

Access to an attorney impacted the asylum outcomes. Only 16 percent of unrepresented asylum applicants received asylum or other forms of deportation relief. In contrast, twice the proportion (33%) of asylum applicants with an attorney received asylum or other relief.

Overall, asylum applicants waited on average 1,030 days – or nearly three years – for their cases to be decided. But many asylum applicants waited even longer: a quarter of applicants waited 1,421 days, or nearly four years, for their asylum decision.

To read the full report go to:

https://trac.syr.edu/immigration/reports/588/

To examine these results in greater detail by nationality and court location, TRAC’s free asylum app is now updated with data through the end of November 2019 at:

https://trac.syr.edu/phptools/immigration/asylum/

Additional free web query tools which track Immigration Court proceedings have also been updated through November 2019. For an index to the full list of TRAC’s immigration tools and their latest update go to:

https://trac.syr.edu/imm/tools/

If you want to be sure to receive notifications whenever updated data become available, sign up at:

https://tracfed.syr.edu/cgi-bin/tracuser.pl?pub=1&list=imm

Follow us on Twitter at

https://twitter.com/tracreports

or like us on Facebook:

https://facebook.com/tracreports

TRAC is self-supporting and depends on foundation grants, individual contributions and subscription fees for the funding needed to obtain, analyze and publish the data we collect on the activities of the US Federal government. To help support TRAC’s ongoing efforts, go to:

https://trac.syr.edu/cgi-bin/sponsor/sponsor.pl

David Burnham and Susan B. Long, co-directors
Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse
Syracuse University
Suite 360, Newhouse II
Syracuse, NY 13244-2100
315-443-3563
trac@syr.edu
http://trac.syr.edu

The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse is a nonpartisan joint research center of the Whitman School of Management (http://whitman.syr.edu) and the Newhouse School of Public Communications (http://newhouse.syr.edu) at Syracuse University. If you know someone who would like to sign up to receive occasional email announcements and press releases, they may go to http://trac.syr.edu and click on the E-mail Alerts link at the bottom of the page. If you do not wish to receive future email announcements and wish to be removed from our list, please send an email to trac@syr.edu with REMOVE as the subject.

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

SOME INTERESTING TAKEAWAYS:

Contrary to regime false narratives, non-detained asylum seekers continued to show up for their hearings approximately 99% of the time.
Contrary to recent EOIR claims, representation of asylum seekers continued to make a huge difference: twice as many represented asylum seekers received relief.
Nearly 20,000 individuals were granted asylum in FY 2019, twice as many as in FY 2014, although the number of cases denied grew even faster by 4.5x, to 46,735.
The three “Northern Triangle” countries, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras ranked among the top five in number of asylum claims granted.
Session’s biased decision in Matter of A-B- appears to have been responsible for artificially depressing asylum grant rates starting in June 2018.
Even with extraordinary efforts by the regime to “game” the asylum system against applicants, 31% of the applicants still were successful in gaining relief in FY 2019.
The New Due Process Army continues to “take the battle” to the regime: despite regime efforts to inhibit and discourage representation, nearly 85% of asylum applicants were represented in FY year 2019, a slight increase over the previous FY.
Unrepresented asylum applicants are “railroaded” though the system at a much higher rate than represented applicants: nearly half of the unrepresented asylum cases that started in 2019 were completed, as opposed to approximately 10% of the represented ones.
Non-detained, represented asylum applicants wait an average of three years for a merits hearing in Immigration Court.
The number of asylum cases decided by Immigration Judges has risen 250% over the past five fiscal years.
Asylum cases were 22.6% of the Immigration Court final decisions in FY 2019, as opposed to 10.7% in FY 2014.
Deciding more asylum cases while intentionally “stacking” the system against asylum seekers has not stopped the mushrooming Immigration Court backlogs.

PWS

01-09-20

“THE GIFTS OF THE MAGA-I:” DESPAIR, DEHUMANIZATION, DEATH — “[W]e keep wondering, how many 7-year-old girls would need to die for this to be something that would get in the headlines and stay in the headlines for a day or two?”

Kristin Clarens, Esquire
Project Adelante

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/12/trump-tent-cities-mpp-killing-immigrant-children.html

JURISPRUDENCE

Trump’s Tent Cities Are on the Verge of Killing Immigrant Children

By DAHLIA LITHWICK

DEC 23, 20191:17 PM

The tent camp set up by asylum-seekers next to the bridge to the U.S. in Matamoros, Mexico, seen on Dec. 9.

John Moore/Getty Images

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On this week’s episode of Amicus, Slate’s podcast about the Supreme Court, Dahlia Lithwick was joined by Kristin Clarens, an attorney with Project Adelante, a group of multidisciplinary professionals, including lawyers, doctors, ministers, and psychologists, working across the country to help mobilize and concentrate support for asylum-seekers at the border. A transcript of the interview, which has been edited and condensed for clarity, follows.

Dahlia Lithwick: Can you just start by explaining what it is that you do and how as a lawyer you were able to kind of amble in and out of border facilities, detention facilities?

Kristin Clarens: People who previously would have been detained [in the U.S.] are now living in sort of makeshift refugee camps on the Mexico side of the border because of the “Remain in Mexico” policy. So now it’s incredibly easy to amble in and out, as easy as it is for the cartel members and other organized criminals who are circulating in these camps.

The Remain in Mexico policy, the Migrant Protection Protocols, is just about a year old. Can you describe what the world was like before it, what the world has been like since?

The estimates are that there are around 3,000 people [in the tent camp in Matamoros] living just in squalor and in tents, and that 80 percent of them are families with young children. A year ago, in the Rio Grande Valley, most of those people would come to the United States either after asking for permission at a port of entry or after crossing without permission and they would be apprehended, put into one of the temporary facilities that so many of us have seen on the news with the kids in cages and the very overcrowded conditions, lack of sanitation and medical care. After that, the families and young kids were sent to longer-term detention centers where many of us, many lawyers who speak Spanish, have worked across the country.

As of June or July of this year, the United States government started implementing something that they call, I think very ironically, the Migrant Protection Protocols, which is a policy guideline that says that border patrol agents are able to return asylum-seekers to Mexico for the duration of their immigration hearings. So now an asylum-seeker who comes up from Central America arrives in these incredibly sketchy and stressful border towns, asks for asylum at the port of entry, and after a quick trip to one of the cage facilities, they are sent back into the streets of Mexico.

That moment where they’re shoved back into Mexican territory from the U.S. officials is an incredibly vulnerable one. It’s kind of like bad guys lurking on the sides.

Now that you’re looking at the tent cities in Mexico, what kinds of things are you seeing, what kinds of legal aid are you able to provide if you are in Matamoros trying to help?

The legal aid that we’re able to provide at this point is becoming so much more limited because the statistics out now are that 0.1 percent of asylum-seekers who have their cases heard in the MPP courts—many of whom have valid claims, who would have succeeded with time and due process and legal support—0.1 percent are succeeding. Nothing has changed with respect to the nature of the cases—single women who have been persecuted specifically because they’re vulnerable in their home countries by gangs and by other types of organized crime. They’re incredibly vulnerable living in these—it’s just like a tent, the kind of tent that you would take to go camping in the woods in the summer. Except for single women—sometimes pregnant with young children with no other form of support, no network whatsoever—living for months at a time in freezing cold conditions in rain and in superhot conditions the next day, just incredibly exposed on every single level.

The circumstances change almost weekly with respect to the parameters and expectations, the due process provided in the MPP camp, and also, with respect to just the feasibility of [the legal support] we can offer as the numbers of people on the ground grow and the backlog increases in the MPP courts.

The camp facility where people are sort of constrained physically has somewhere between 2,600 and 3,000 people in it at any given day, and it’s growing. But the total number of people who’ve been returned to Mexico under MPP is closer to 68,000. So only a small fraction of the people who need legal services are even visible at this point.

On the ground and at least at Matamoros, people don’t have enough showers, they don’t have enough food. There’s rampant illness. I mean, you are seeing kids with tremendous medical and nutritional and other needs that are not getting that.

There’s sort of a group that’s come onto the scene over the past month that’s providing mobile health care via a clinic and also a humanitarian support to try and improve the shelters. They’re all volunteer based. It’s kind of all of us rolling up our sleeves and trying to figure out the best way to get support in there. But it’s subject essentially to the whims of the Mexican government. At any point, this could be shut down, or relocated, or people could just be forced to scatter. You just don’t know how things are going to unfold when the United States government’s policies might be enjoined, or when the Mexican government may decide that it can no longer tolerate these large refugee camps.

“How many 7-year-old girls would need to die for this to be something that would get in the headlines and stay in the headlines for a day or two?”

— Kristin Clarens

The Mexican government initially restricted humanitarian groups’ access to sort of building things like toilets and showers and did so themselves in Matamoros. But the facilities that they built were really not adequate. They have showers that are not linked to any sort of drainage systems so there’s just big puddles of disgusting water that smelled bad and it’s just really kind of dehumanizing. Prior to the existence of the showers though, people were bathing in the river, which is contaminated with human waste, and people were getting sick and these awful skin infections all over. Little kids were swimming in the same place where little kids were also vomiting and having diarrhea. It’s just kind of a recipe for humanitarian crisis, within 100 feet of an American city.

You’ve been dealing this week with a critically ill child.

It’s really difficult for people who could die at any minute of their illnesses to get medical care in Matamoros for a variety of reasons. It’s hard for them to get around. It’s a scary city and it’s not safe. And so, this past week, we heard about several more critically ill migrants waiting at the tent city, including a 7-year-old who had, I think it can best be described as, sort of a breach in her abdominal wall.

So her fecal matter was leaking out and kind of reinfecting her, kind of getting reabsorbed by parts of her body as she wasn’t able to access clean water or water at all, to drink or to bathe herself to prevent just massive infection that could really quickly turn to a life-and-death situation. So, we did the best we could. I’ve been on the bridge trying to cross with people and been kind of mistreated and treated aggressively by the Border Patrol agents, and I know how scary and hard that is. I can’t imagine having gotten that experience as a 7-year-old girl who has to wear a diaper because her stomach is no longer able to contain her intestines. Fortunately, she was able to cross after, I think, a collective eight or nine hours waiting on the bridge and advocating and negotiating with Border Patrol. She was able to get across and get to the hospital on Tuesday night.

I had to try to twist your arm to get you to come talk about her story, because nobody died so it feels like nobody is going to care?

That’s the sense that I get in trying to focus attention on this in such a stressful time in America. It seems scary. Our government is unstable and stressful right now, and at the same time, these incredible egregious human rights violations are happening at our Southern border. And it’s like, how do we cut through this noise and really stand up for the weakest people that our country is negatively impacting right now? And I don’t have those answers, but we keep wondering, how many 7-year-old girls would need to die for this to be something that would get in the headlines and stay in the headlines for a day or two?

You can listen to Amicus in the player below or via Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Stitcher, Google Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Amicus With Dahlia Lithwick | Law, Justice, and the Courts

Divided Realities

Lawyers on the crisis at the border, and a cacophony of bad faith in the Capitol.

01:10:57

SHARESUBSCRIBECOOKIE POLICY

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Donald Trump Immigration Mexico

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As the article points out, vulnerable refugees with valid asylum claims that might well have been granted prior to the Trump White Nationalist kakistocracy are now being railroaded without legal representation or any semblance of fairness, impartiality, or due process.

Another way of putting Kristin Clarens’s very valid concerns: “How many seven-year old girls would have to die before complicit, tone-deaf, life-tenured Supreme Court Justices and Article III Appellate Judges take off their blinders, get out of their ivory towers, stop kowtowing to Trump and the forces of White Nationalist darkness and evil, and start seeing Trump’s victims as human beings, or even as their own children or grandchildren?”

Thank goodness for courageous, talented, dedicated folks like Kristin who represent the “True Spirit of Christmas” in an age where kindness, compassion, mercy, and justice have been forgotten and are daily being trampled by the regime, its supporters, and enablers.

Merry Christmas,

PWS

12-25-19

EUGENE ROBINSON @ WASHPOST: KID KILLERS ON THE LOOSE: “Sixteen-year-old Carlos Gregorio Hernandez Vasquez died horribly and needlessly. The Trump administration’s policy of deliberate, punishing cruelty toward Latin American migrants killed him.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-trump-administration-is-to-blame-for-a-teen-migrants-death/2019/12/09/569ae0e8-1ac6-11ea-8d58-5ac3600967a1_story.html

Sixteen-year-old Carlos Gregorio Hernandez Vasquez died horribly and needlessly. The Trump administration’s policy of deliberate, punishing cruelty toward Latin American migrants killed him.

That is the only conclusion to be drawn from a shocking report by the nonprofit newsroom ProPublica about Hernandez’s death in May at a U.S. Border Patrol station in Texas. I assume the agents and health-care workers who should have given Hernandez lifesaving attention are decent human beings, not monsters. But they work within an intentionally monstrous system that assigned no value to a young Guatemalan boy’s life.

President Trump’s racist and xenophobic immigration policies are not grounds for impeachment; rather, they are an urgent reason to defeat him in the coming election. But at least six migrant children, including Hernandez, have died in federal custody on Trump’s watch. Somebody should be held accountable. Somebody should go to jail.

Hernandez died of influenza and neglect.

He had crossed the Rio Grande without documents with a group of migrants who were almost immediately apprehended by the Border Patrol. In keeping with administration policy, he was separated from his adult sister and processed at a notoriously overcrowded holding facility in McAllen, Tex., where a nurse practitioner found he had a temperature of 103. She diagnosed him with the flu and said he should be taken to a hospital if his condition worsened.

Instead, worried he might infect others at the McAllen center, officials moved him to a Border Patrol station in nearby Weslaco and locked him in a cell. That was on the afternoon of May 19. By the following morning, Hernandez was dead.

Border Patrol logs show that agents checked on Hernandez several times that night. But ProPublica obtained cellblock video showing that “the only way . . . officials could have missed Carlos’ crisis is that they weren’t looking.”

The video “shows Carlos writhing for at least 25 minutes on the floor and a concrete bench,” ProPublica reported. “It shows him staggering to the toilet and collapsing on the floor, where he remained in the same position for the next four and a half hours.”

Customs and Border Protection, the parent agency of the Border Patrol, claimed that Hernandez’s lifeless body was discovered by agents doing a morning check. But the video shows, according to ProPublica, that it was Hernandez’s cellmate who sent up the alarm.

“On the video, the cellmate can be seen waking up and groggily walking to the toilet, where Carlos was lying in a pool of blood on the floor. He [the roommate] gestures for help at the cell door. Only then do agents enter the cell and discover that Carlos had died during the night.”

Let that sink in for a moment. A 16-year-old boy has obviously fallen ill and has a soaring fever. Instead of seeking medical care for him, agents of the United States government — acting in your name and mine — leave him to die on the cold concrete floor of a detention cell.

Hernandez’s death implies more than the apparent negligence of a few overworked Border Patrol agents. It indicts a whole system designed by the Trump administration to deter would-be migrants and asylum seekers by punishing those who do make the journey.

In Hernandez’s case, the fatal punishment was meted out illegally. He had been in custody for six days when he died, but the Border Patrol is only supposed to hold children for 72 hours, at most, before transferring them to the Department of Health and Human Services.

The Trump administration instituted a shockingly inhumane policy of separating migrant parents from their children, who in many cases were sent hundreds of miles away. Thousands of children were warehoused in cages, like animals. Toddlers and infants were absurdly expected to represent themselves at immigration hearings whose nature they could not begin to understand.

It is true that officials have had to deal with a flood of migrants who overwhelmed border facilities and personnel. But the Trump administration responded to the surge not with compassion but with purposeful callousness. It is horrific that six migrant children are known to have died in Customs and Border Protection custody since September 2018. It is even worse when you realize there were no such deaths, not a single one, during the eight years of the Obama administration.

According to ProPublica’s report, Carlos Gregorio Hernandez Vasquez was a bright and engaging boy who captained his school’s soccer team in the village of San Jose del Rodeo. The Border Patrol assigned him the alien identification number A203665141. His body was shipped home for burial.

Read more from Eugene Robinson’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.

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So why are racist White Nationalist policies that kill kids and then cover up “OK?” Why are Kelly, Nielsen, “Big Mac With Lies,” “Gonzo Apocalypto,” and others responsible for human rights violations running around making big bucks off their misconduct, giving speeches as if they were “normal” former senior executives, and even running for public office rather than facing charges for their misconduct? Others like Chief Toady Billy Barr and “Cooch Cooch” remain in office while spreading their authoritarian lies and attacking our democratic institutions.

And what about complicit Federal Appellate Judges and Supreme Court Justices who have let Due Process, fundamental fairness, and human decency die while looking the other way?

Human rights criminals like Trump & Miller need plenty of “go along to get along” accomplices to carry out their abuse.

Thanks, Eugene, for speaking out when so many others in privileged positions of supposed responsibility have been so cowardly and complicit in the face of tyranny that intends to destroy our democracy and that has already undermined our humanity.

Where’s the outrage!

Due Process Forever!

PWS

12-11-19

WHERE’S THE OUTRAGE? — 9th CIRCUIT JUDGES ASSIST REGIME’S AGENTS IN COMMITTING “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” MERE YARDS FROM THE BORDER! — NDPA Leader Jodi Goodwin, Esquire, Speaks Out: “I’ve been practicing law for 25 years and the last four to five months of practicing law has broken me. I don’t want to fucking do this anymore. [Her voice breaks again] It sucks. How do you explain to people that you know they thought they were coming to a place where there’s freedom and safety and where the laws are just, but that’s not the situation? I’m very mad.”

Jodi Goodwin, Esquire
Immigration Attorney
Harlingen, TX

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/remain-in-mexico-policy-immigrant-kids_n_5deeb143e4b00563b8560c69

Angelina Chapin reports for HuffPost:

A few times a week, attorney Jodi Goodwin walks across the bridge from Brownsville, Texas, to a refugee camp in Matamoros, Mexico, to meet with asylum-seekers. Her clients are among the more than 2,500 immigrants crammed into tents while they wait for U.S. immigration hearings ― often stuck for months in dirty and dangerous conditions.

The forced return to Mexico of migrants seeking refuge in the U.S. is one of President Donald Trump’s most inhumane immigration policies, yet it hasn’t received nearly the attention that his family separation and prolonged detention practices have.

Since January, under Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” initiative ― also known as the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP) ― the U.S. government has sent at least 54,000 immigrants to wait for their court dates in Mexican border towns. Instead of staying with relatives in the U.S., families are sleeping in tents for up to eight months, in unprotected areas where infections spread within crowded quarters and cartel kidnappings are commonplace. Family separation ended a year ago. But Trump’s mistreatment of asylum-seekers continues in a different form.

Some parents are so desperate that they’ve resorted to sending their children across the bridge alone, since unaccompanied kids who arrive at the border cannot be turned away under MPP. Since October, at least 135 children have crossed back into the U.S. by themselves after being sent to wait in Mexico with their parents, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

In Mexico, many of these migrants don’t have access to lawyers and are forced to plead their cases in makeshift tent courts set up along the U.S. border where overwhelmed judges conduct hearings via video teleconference. The courts have limited public access ― lawyers and translators say that they have been barred from attending hearings. Migrants’ advocates argue that the tent courts violate due process, and immigrant rights organizations have filed a federal lawsuit against Immigration and Customs Enforcement over the use of videoconferencing.

Goodwin, who has 42 clients, said there is a serious shortage of lawyers willing to represent immigrants staying in another country where crime is rife. She spoke with HuffPost about why the Remain in Mexico policy is even more traumatic than separating thousands of families and why it hasn’t sparked public outrage.

AMERICAN IMMIGRATION LAWYERS ASSOCIATION

Jodi Goodwin (center) at the refugee camp in Matamoros, Mexico.

HuffPost: Immigrant parents forced to wait in Mexico are making the heart-wrenching choice to send their kids to the U.S. alone. What are the conditions like at the camp in Matamoros?

Jodi Goodwin: It smells like urine and feces. There’s not enough sanitation. There’s 10 port-a-potties for thousands of people. Up until recently, there was no potable water available at all. People were bathing in the Rio Grande river, getting sick and, in some cases, drowning. People were seriously dehydrated.

The camp sounds completely unfitting for any human being, let alone children.

It’s a horrific situation to put families in. It’s great to live in a tent for the weekend when you’re going to the lake. It’s not great to live in a tent for months at a time where you don’t have basic necessities.

Are kids getting sick?

The kids are sick every day. I’ve seen all kinds of respiratory illnesses and digestive illnesses. I’ve seen chronic illnesses like epilepsy. I saw a baby that appeared to have sepsis who was forced to wait on the bridge for more than three hours before being taken to a hospital.

And what about the kidnappings? Have you heard of families being taken by cartel members who then try and extort an immigrant’s U.S. relatives for money?

About half of the people I’ve spoken to in Mexico have been kidnapped. The cartel knows if they can grab an immigrant, they’re likely to be able to work out a ransom. If they don’t, then they just kill them.

Any specific examples?

I dealt with one case where a mom from El Salvador and her 4-year-old son were kidnapped within an hour of being sent back to Mexico under MPP. They were taken for eight days before her brother in the U.S. paid the kidnappers $7,000.

The lady was terrified. She was sleep-deprived, food-deprived and water-deprived. She said that the people who had kidnapped her were extremely violent and hit her kid. They were drinking alcohol and raping people at a stash house where several other people were being held.

LOREN ELLIOTT / REUTERS

Migrants, most of them asylum-seekers sent back to Mexico from the U.S. under the “Remain in Mexico” program, occupy a makeshift encampment in Matamoros, Mexico, on Oc. 28, 2019.

The last time we spoke, you were on the frontlines of family separation, visiting detention centers where mothers were hysterically crying after being ripped apart from their children. How does the trauma of MPP compare, particularly for parents who are sending their kids across the border alone?

It’s way worse. I can’t with any confidence say that they will ever see their children again.

Why not?

I knew there were legal ways to get out of family separation. We were able to talk with our clients and didn’t have to go off to another country. And for those parents who got through their interviews or their court hearings, we were able to get them back with their kids.

With MPP, the assault is not only on human rights but also on due process within the court systems, which has completely hijacked the ability to be able to fix things. The parents can’t even get into the country to try to reunify with their kids.

Nearly 3,000 children were separated from their parents under Trump’s zero-tolerance policy. Do you think a similar number of families will be ripped apart because of Remain in Mexico?

It could be more. Over 55,000 people have been sent back to Mexico. I’ve talked to so many parents who have sent their kids across. It’s a heart-wrenching decision process that they go through. How do you give up your baby?

It reminds me of Jewish parents who were captives in Nazi Germany and had to convince their kids to get on a different train or go in a different line to save their own lives.

Have you witnessed these separations firsthand?

In November I saw a little boy and his 4-year-old sister sent across the bridge with an older child, who was about 14 years old. The teenager carried the baby boy, who still had a pacifier in his mouth, and the girl was holding onto the older kid’s belt loop.

I was standing on the bridge between Matamoros and the U.S. and I turned around to look down at the bank of the Rio Grande river. Every single parent who has sent their kid to cross tells me the same thing: As soon as they say goodbye and hug their kids, they run to the bank to watch them. [Her voice breaks] I knew there was somebody probably standing on that bank hoping those kids made it across.

Do you still think about those kids?

Oh yeah. The green binky that the little baby was sucking on is knitted in my mind.

VERONICA CARDENAS / REUTERS

The Mexican National Guard patrols an encampment where asylum-seekers live as their tents are relocated from the plaza to near the banks of the Rio Grande in Matamoros on Dec. 7, 2019.

You’ve been working hundreds of hours a month to try and help people stranded in Matamoros. This work must take a toll on you personally.

I’ve been practicing law for 25 years and the last four to five months of practicing law has broken me.

I don’t want to fucking do this anymore. [Her voice breaks again] It sucks. How do you explain to people that you know they thought they were coming to a place where there’s freedom and safety and where the laws are just, but that’s not the situation? I’m very mad.

Family separation resulted in massive outcry from the public, which eventually pressured the government to end the zero-tolerance policy. Why is MPP not getting the same attention?

There is no public outrage because it’s not happening on our soil. It’s happening literally 10 feet from the turnstile to come to the U.S. But because it’s out of sight and out of mind, there is no outrage. What ended family separation was public outrage. It had nothing to do with lawsuits. It had everything to do with shame, shame, shame.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

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

I’m with you, Jodi! Thanks for your dedication to justice for the most vulnerable!

What’s wrong with this scenario: life-tenured Federal Judges who won’t stand up for the rule of law, Due Process, and Equal Protection in the face of an arrogantly and overtly lawless White Nationalist Regime; DOJ and other U.S. Government lawyers who defend immoral and disingenuous positions in Federal Court, often, as in the Census Case and the DACA Case using pretextual rationales and knowingly false information; dehumanization, with overwhelming racial and religious overtones, of those who deserve our protection and rely on our sense of fairness; undercutting, mistreating and humiliating the brave lawyers like Jodi who are standing up for justice in the face of tyranny; GOP legislators who are lawyers defending Trump’s mockery of the Constitution, human decency, and the rule of law and knowingly and defiantly spreading Putin’s false narratives.

Obviously, there has been a severe failure in our legal and ethical education programs and our criteria for Federal Judicial selections, particularly at the higher levels, and particularly with respect to the critical characteristic of courage. Too many “go alongs to get alongs!” I can only hope that our republic survives long enough to reform and correct these existential defects that now threaten to bring us all down.

Where’s the accountability? Where’s the outrage? Where’s our humanity?

We should also remember that many asylum seekers from Africa, who face extreme danger in Mexico, are also being targeted (“shithole countries?”) and abused as part of the Regime’s judicially-enabled, racially driven, anti-asylum, anti-rule-of-law antics at the Southern Border. https://apple.news/AyYSWSXNfSdOm63skxWaUTQ

Also, morally corrupt Trump Regime officials continued to tout “Crimes Against Humanity” as an acceptable approach to border enforcement and “reducing apprehensions!” Will machine gun turrets be next on their list? Will Article III Judges give that their “A-OK?”

We’re actually paying Article III Federal Judges who are knowingly and intentionally furthering “Crimes Against Humanity.” Totally outrageous!

Constantly Confront Complicit Courts 4 Change!

Due Process Forever; Complicit Courts Never!

PWS

12-10-19

TIME FOR SOME GOOD NEWS: Waterwell’s Immigration Court Drama “The Courtroom,” Featuring Roles By Some “Judges Of The Roundtable,” Makes NY Times “Best Theater of 2019” List! — “[W]e citizens are on trial, too. What kind of a nation are we? How cruel have we permitted ourselves to be?”

Retired Judge Jeffrey S. Chase, leader of our “Roundtable of Former Immigration Judges” reports:

Waterwell’s wonderful play The Courtroom, in which the script is an actual transcript of an immigration court hearing, and in which three of us (Betty Lamb, Terry Bain, and myself) so far have acted along with stars of Broadway, TV, and film, was named today by the New York Times to its “Best Theater of 2019” list!

Waterwell plans to hold a performance a month through next September or so, so if you are coming to NYC, you can still see it (or maybe act in it!)

BTW, the role played by some of us was the judge performing the naturalization ceremony at the end of the play, in which the entire audience stands and takes the oath. The best anecdote I have heard so far was after a performance at the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, where a non-citizen audience member asked a member of the Waterwell staff if that was a real judge performing the scene. When told yes, it was, the audience member replied “Well, then I guess I’m a U.S. citizen now!”

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

Here’s the link to the NY Times and the summary of “The Courtroom” by Laura Collins-Hughes:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/03/arts/best-broadway-theater-show.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

LAURA COLLINS-HUGHES

Political Punches

One of the most heart-gripping shows of the year could hardly be simpler: It’s not even a full production, just a staged reading of trial transcripts.

Michael Braun and Kristin Villanueva in “The Courtroom.”Credit…Maria Baranova

In W aterwell’s “The Courtroom,” the accused is an immigrant in danger of deportation, her unassuming American life at risk of being torn apart over a mistake she insists was innocent. The sneaky thing about this riveting re-enactment, though, is that in watching it, we citizens are on trial, too. What kind of a nation are we? How cruel have we permitted ourselves to be?

That work, recently returned for monthly site-specific performances around New York, is part of 2019’s thrillingly vital bumper crop of political theater — shows that implicate the audience with bracing artistry.

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

Some of you have probably heard me say that being an Immigration Judge was “half scholar, half performing artist.”

Congrats to Waterwell and to “Roundtable Drama Stars” Retired Judges Jeffrey S. Chase, Betty Lamb, and Terry Bain, all formerly of the NY Immigration Court. Proud of you guys! There are so many ways in which our Roundtable contributes to the New Due Process Army’s daily battle to restore Due Process and save our democracy, beyond filing amicus briefs throughout the country (which we do almost every week, with lots of pro bono help from our talented friends at many law firms)!

Many of those contributions are through the arts. See Judge Polly Webber and her triptych “Refugee Dilemma” fiber artwork, which has received national acclaim and recognition. https://wp.me/p8eeJm-48d As I said just today in an earlier blog about the disturbingly poor and tone deaf performance by three life-tenured judges of the 11th Circuit, this really is not about different legal views any more. https://wp.me/p8eeJm-4RO

It’s a moral and ethical battle to preserve our democracy and its commitment to humanity from the forces of evil, racism, xenophobia, misogyny, authoritarianism, corruption, and White Nationalism that threaten to destroy it. It so happens that courtrooms are among the most visible battlegrounds. But, it goes far beyond that – to the very fabric of our society and our values — to our very humanity and how we view our fellow human beings.

That’s why complicit judges are so dangerous to the system. As with “Jim Crow,” there is only one “right side of history” here! We deserve better performance from America’s judges, particularly those with Article III protections!

As Laura so cogently said in her review:

[W]e citizens are on trial, too. What kind of a nation are we? How cruel have we permitted ourselves to be?

“The Courtroom” should be required viewing for every judge, law professor, judicial law clerk, law student, legislator, congressional staff member, and immigration bureaucrat in America!

Due Process Forever!

PWS

12-04-19

11TH CIRCUIT TANKS, DEFERS TO MATTER OF A-B- — Refugee Women Of Color Sentenced To Potential Death Without Due Process By Judges Elizabeth L. Branch, Peter T. Fay, & Frank M. Hull!

http://media.ca11.uscourts.gov/opinions/pub/files/201814788.pdf

AMEZCUA-PRECIADO v. U.S. ATTORNEY GENERAL, 11th Cir., 12-03-19, published (per curium)

PANEL: BRANCH, FAY and HULL, Circuit Judges.

Maria Amezcua-Preciado, a native and citizen of Mexico, along with her two minor children, petitions for review of the Board of Immigration Appeals’ (“BIA”) final order reversing the Immigration Judge’s (“IJ”) grant of her application for asylum and denying her withholding of removal. The BIA concluded, based on recent precedent from the Attorney General, Matter of A-B-, 27 I. & N. Dec. 316 (A.G. 2018), that Amezcua-Preciado’s proposed social group of “women in Mexico who are unable to leave their domestic relationships” was not a cognizable particular social group under the Immigration and Nationality Act (“INA”). After review, we agree with the BIA that Amezcua-Preciado failed to establish membership in a particular social group. We thus deny Amezcua- Preciado’s petition for review.

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

Wow, what an amazingly gutless and disingenuous performance! Complicit Article III courts have become one of the Trump Regime’s key White Nationalist tools for “deconstructing” U.S. immigration, refugee, and asylum laws.

These aren’t legal disagreements; they are a derelictions of ethical and moral responsibilities. Matter of A-B- was a biased, legally incorrect, factually distorted, unethical attack on asylum law by a Sessions, who was not a “fair and impartial adjudicator.” It ignored a generation of well-developed jurisprudence, legal analysis, and overwhelming factual support for recognizing gender-based domestic violence as a basis for asylum.

Matter of A-R-C-G-, overruled by A-B-, represented a broad consensus within the legal community. Indeed, much of the impetus for that decision came from DHS itself, who had been successfully and efficiently applying its principles in Asylum Offices and in Immigration Courts long before A-R-C-G- actually became a precedent. Remarkably, no actual party requested Sessions’s intervention in A-B-; he rejected ICE’s request to vacate his interference and return the case to the BIA for adjudication under A-R-C-G- criteria. Obviously, the fix was on. But, that made no difference to Branch, Fay, and Hull in their disingenuous haste to “roll over” for the White Nationalist agenda.

I hope that when future historians eventually dissect the rancid racism, misogynism, and White Nationalism of the current regime they will fully expose jurists like Branch, Fay, & Hull who used their privileged positions to “go along to get along,” enabling and furthering the regime’s illegal and unethical “war on asylum seekers, migrants of color, and women.”

DUE PROCESS FOREVER; COMPLICIT COURTS NEVER!

PWS

12-03-18

KILLER “COURTS:” DUE PROCESS TAKES A DIVE, AS TRUMP REGIME’S WHITE NATIONALIST POLICIES SUPPRESS ASYLUM GRANT RATES IN NEW YORK AND OTHER IMMIGRATION “COURTS” — “Oh, Jesus Christ!” Menkin shouted at the lawyers when he learned a reporter had been present for the hearing. “Don’t you people look around the room? What’s the matter with you?” After the judge expressed his alarm, the reporter was ejected with Gloria’s tearful assent, and so the basis for Judge Menkin’s ruling on Gloria’s asylum petition is not known. The outcome is, though: denied, 30 days to appeal.”

https://apple.news/AYWheKLcqSvWk_toIFrDVLg

Paul Moses, Tim Healy in The Daily Beast:

‘ALL RIGHT, STOP’

Here’s Why the Rejection Rate for Asylum Seekers Has Exploded in America’s Largest Immigration Court in NYC

“It’s basically like the same problem with putting quotas on police officers for tickets.”

The rate of asylum petitions denied in New York City’s busy immigration court has shot up about 17 times times faster than in the rest of the country during the Trump administration’s crackdown—and still Ana was there, a round-faced Honduran woman with a black scarf wrapped turban-like over her hair, a look of fright crossing her dark eyes as the judge asked if she faced danger in her home country.

Her eyes darted over to her helper, a Manhattan lighting designer with New Sanctuary Coalition volunteers to offer moral support—she couldn’t find a lawyer to take her case for free. Then Ana turned back to the judge, or rather, to the video screen that beamed him in from Virginia, and whispered to the court interpreter in Spanish: “My spouse and my son were killed.” Tears welled in her eyes as she said a notorious transnational gang had carried out the slaying.

“Yes we were receiving threats from them,” she added. And that was why, months before her husband and son were slain, she and her 5-year-old daughter had come “through the river,” entering the United States near Piedras Negras, Mexico.

After ruling that she was deportable, the judge gave Ana—The Daily Beast is withholding her real name because of the danger she faces in Honduras—three months to submit a claim for asylum, a possible defense against her removal. “You should start working on that,” the judge told her. As she left the courtroom, Ana hugged the volunteer who’d accompanied her, Joan Racho-Jansen.

New York’s immigration court has long been the asylum capital; it has made two out of every five of the nation’s grants since 2001, while handling a quarter of the caseload. With approval of 55 percent of the petitions in the fiscal year ended Sept. 30, it still grants a greater percentage of asylum requests than any other courts except San Francisco and Guam.

But New York’s golden door is slamming shut for far more asylum seekers than in the past, especially for women like Ana.

The asylum denial rate in the New York City immigration court rose from 15 percent in fiscal year 2016, the last full year of the Obama administration, to 44 percent in fiscal year 2019, which ended Sept. 30. The rest of the country, excluding New York, has been relatively stable, with denials going from 69 percent to 74 percent. That is, the rate of denials in the rest of the country increased by one-ninth, but in New York they almost trebled.

There are other courts where the rate of denials has shot up sharply over the same period: Newark, New Jersey (168 percent); Boston (147 percent); Philadelphia (118 percent). But because of the volume of its caseload, what’s happening in New York is driving the national trend against asylum. For now, in sheer numbers, New York judges still granted more asylum requests over the last year than those in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Arlington, Virginia, the next three largest courts, combined.

An analysis of federal data compiled by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University and interviews with former immigration judges, lawyers, immigrant advocates and experts finds multiple reasons for the sharp shift in the nation’s largest immigration court as compared to the rest of the country:

—Many more migrants are coming to the New York court from Mexico and the “Northern Triangle” of El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala, and the judges have been far more likely to deny them asylum than in the past: from two out of five cases in the 2016 fiscal year to four out of five cases in the 2019 fiscal year.

—Many veteran New York judges retired, and most of the replacements have a prosecutorial, military, or immigration enforcement background. In the past, appointments were more mixed between former prosecutors and immigrant defenders. Immigration judges are appointed by the U.S. attorney general and work for the Justice Department, not the federal court system.

—All the judges are under heavier pressure from their Justice Department superiors to process cases more quickly, which gives asylum applicants little time to gather witnesses and supporting documents such as police reports. New judges, who are on two years of probation, are under particular pressure because numerical “benchmarks” for completing cases are a critical factor in employee evaluations.

“You have a huge number of new hires in New York,” said Jeffrey Chase, a former New York immigration judge. “The new hires are mostly being chosen because they were former prosecutors. They’re normally of the background that this administration thinks will be statistically more likely to deny cases.”

Judge Jeffrey L. Menkin, who presided in Ana’s case via video hookup, began hearing cases in March. He is based in Falls Church, Virginia, the home of the Executive Office of Immigration Review, the Justice Department agency that runs the immigration courts. He’d been a Justice Department lawyer since 1991, including the previous 12 years as senior counsel for national security for the Office of Immigration Litigation.

Menkin can see only a portion of his New York courtroom on his video feed and as a result, he didn’t realize a Daily Beast reporter was present to watch him conduct an asylum hearing for a Guatemalan woman—we’ll call her Gloria—and her three young children, who were not present.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement took Gloria into custody at the Mexican border in March. Released on bond, she made her way to New York and had an initial immigration court hearing on June 26, one of many cases on a crowded master calendar. She was scheduled for an individual hearing four months later.

At the hearing scheduled three months later on the merits of her case, she decided to present an asylum defense to deportation. Her lawyer asked for a continuance—that is, a new hearing date—while his client waited to receive documentation she’d already requested from Guatemala. The papers were on the way, Gloria said.

Judges in such cases—those that the Department of Homeland Security designates as “family unit”—have been directed to complete them within a year, which is about 15 months faster than the average case resolved for the year ending Sept. 30. Down the hall, other types of cases were being scheduled for 2023. Menkin called the lawyer’s unexpected request for a continuance “nonsense” and “malarkey” and asked: “Are you and your client taking this case seriously?”

The judge then asked if Gloria was requesting a case-closing “voluntary departure,” a return to her homeland that would leave open the option she could apply again to enter the United States.

But Gloria had no intention of going back to Guatemala voluntarily. So Menkin looked to the government’s lawyer: “DHS, do you want to jump into this cesspool?” The government lawyer objected to granting what would have been the first continuance in Gloria’s case.

And so Menkin refused to re-schedule, telling Gloria and her lawyer that they had to go ahead right then if they wanted to present an asylum defense. Gloria began testifying about threats and beatings that stretched back a decade, beginning after a failed romance with a man who was influential in local politics. Details are being withheld to protect her identity.

She finally fled, she said, when extortionists threatened to hurt her children if she didn’t make monthly payoffs that were beyond her means. When she observed that she and her children were being followed, she decided to leave. After she said she had gone to police three times, Menkin took over the questioning.

“Are you familiar with the contents of your own asylum application?” he asked, pointedly.

“No,” Gloria responded.

Menkin said her asylum application stated she had gone to police once, rather than three times, as she’d just testified. Gloria explained that she had called in the information for the application to an assistant in her lawyer’s office, and didn’t know why it was taken down wrong.

When her lawyer tried to explain, Menkin stopped him, raising his voice: “I did not ask you anything.”

Later, Menkin came back to the discrepancy he’d picked up on. “I don’t know why,” Gloria responded.

“All right, STOP,” Menkin told the woman, who cried through much of the two-hour hearing. Again, he sought to terminate the case, asking the DHS lawyer, “Do I have grounds to dismiss this now?”

“I’m trying to be fair,” she replied.

“We’re all trying to be fair,” Menkin said.

And to be fair, it should be noted that since October 2018, the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) has been evaluating judges’ performance based on the numbers for case completions, timeliness of decisions and the percent of rulings upheld on appeal. “In essence, immigration judges are in the untenable position of being both sworn to uphold judicial standards of impartiality and fairness while being subject to what appears to be politically-motivated performance standards,” according to an American Bar Association report that assailed what it said were unprecedented “production quotas” for judges.

The pressure is especially strong on judges who, like Menkin, are new hires. They are probationary employees for two years.

Denise Slavin, a former president of the National Association of Immigration Judges who retired from the bench in April after 24 years of service, said the judges’ union had tried to talk EOIR Director James McHenry out of his quotas. “It’s basically like the same problem with putting quotas on police officers for tickets,” she said. “It suggests bias and skews the system to a certain extent.” Told of the details of Gloria’s hearing, she added, “That’s a prime example of the pressure these quotas have on cases… the pressure to get it done right away.”

Kathryn Mattingly, spokeswoman for the Executive Office of Immigration Review, said by email that she couldn’t comment on individual cases, but that all cases are handled on their individual merits. “Each asylum case is unique, with its own set of facts, evidentiary factors, and circumstances,” she wrote. “Asylum cases typically include complex legal and factual issues.” She also said that Menkin could not comment: “Immigration judges do not give interviews.”

It’s true that each asylum case has its own complex factors. But a 2016 study by the U.S. Government Accountability Office took many of them into account—the asylum seeker’s nationality, language, legal representation, detention status, number of dependents—and determined that there are big differences in how the same “representative applicant” will be treated from one court and one judge to another.

“We saw that grant rates varies very significantly across courts and also across judges,” said Rebecca Gambler, director of the GAO’s Homeland Security and Justice team.

Some experts say that changes in the way the Justice Department has told immigration judges to interpret the law may be having an outsize effect in New York.

Starting with Jeff Sessions, the Trump administration’s attorneys general have used their authority over immigration courts to narrow the judges’ discretion to grant asylum or, in their view, to clarify existing law.

Asylum can be granted to those facing persecution because of “race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.” In June 2018, Sessions overturned a precedent that many judges in New York had been using to find that victims of domestic assaults or gang violence could be members of a “particular social group,” especially when police were complicit or helpless. Justice’s ruling in the Matter of A-B-, a Salvadoran woman, seems to have had a particular impact in New York.

“Where there’s a question about a ‘particular social group,’ judges in other parts of the country may have taken a narrower view” already, said Lindsay Nash, a professor at Cardozo Law School in New York and co-director of the Kathryn O. Greenberg Immigration Justice Clinic.

Mauricio Noroña, a clinical teaching fellow at the same clinic, said new judges would be especially careful to follow the lead in the attorney general’s ruling.

Andrew Arthur, a fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington and a former immigration judge in York, Pennsylvania, said Sessions’ decision in the Matter of A-B- would particularly affect Central American applicants, whose numbers have increased sharply in New York’s court. Data show that just 8.5 percent of the New York asylum cases were from Central America or Mexico in 2016; in the past year, 32.6 percent were.

Arthur said a larger portion of the New York court’s asylum rulings in the past were for Chinese immigrants, whose arguments for refuge—persecution because of political dissent, religious belief, or the one-child policy—are fairly straightforward under U.S. asylum law. Although the number of Chinese applicants is still increasing, they have fallen as a portion of the New York caseload from 60 percent in 2016 to 28 percent in the past year.

Sessions’ determination against A-B- is being challenged, and lawyers have been exploring other paths to asylum in the meantime. “It’s extremely complicated to prepare cases in this climate of changing law,” said Swapna Reddy, co-executive director of the Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project. But, she said, “That’s not to say advocates and judges can’t get back to that [higher] grant rate.”

Gloria continued to cry; the DHS lawyer asked that she be given a tissue. The government lawyer’s cross-examination was comparatively gentle, but she questioned why Gloria didn’t move elsewhere within Guatemala and seek police protection.

“He would find out before I even arrived at the police station,” she said of the man she feared. And, she added, “They’re always going to investigate and as for always being on the run, that’s no life for my kids.”

In closing arguments, Gloria’s lawyer said his client had testified credibly and that she legitimately feared her tormentor’s influence. The DHS lawyer did not question Gloria’s credibility, but she said Gloria’s problem was personal, not political—that she could have moved to parts of Guatemala that were beyond the reach of the man’s political influence.

Judge Menkin then declared a 20-minute recess so that he could compose his decision. In the interim, the lawyers discovered that a man sitting in one corner of the small courtroom was a reporter and, when the judge returned to the bench to rule, so informed him.

Immigration court hearings are generally open to the public. There are special rules for asylum cases, however. The court’s practice manual says they “are open to the public unless the respondent expressly requests that they be closed.”

“Oh, Jesus Christ!” Menkin shouted at the lawyers when he learned a reporter had been present for the hearing. “Don’t you people look around the room? What’s the matter with you?”

After the judge expressed his alarm, the reporter was ejected with Gloria’s tearful assent, and so the basis for Judge Menkin’s ruling on Gloria’s asylum petition is not known. The outcome is, though: denied, 30 days to appeal.

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

Sound like Due Process to you? Only if it’s not your life at stake! Wonder how Judge Menkin and others like him would feel if they and their families were subjected to the same type of “judicial” procedure.

In viewing Judge Menkin’s ridiculous denial of a routine continuance, it’s important to understand that the precedent decisions binding Immigration Judges have intentionally over-emphasized the importance of documenting claims – even though documentation is often unavailable or time-consuming to obtain, have properly translated, and serve on the Immigration Judge and ICE in advance of the hearing. Therefore, denying a first continuance for needed preparation is tantamount to “giving the finger” to Due Process!

“Women in Honduras” has been found to be a valid “particular social group” by a number of Immigration Judgers elsewhere. Given the corruption of the Government of Honduras, the political influence of Ana’s tormentor, and the high rate of femicide, it’s highly unlikely that Ana would receive government protection.

The ICE attorney made an absurdist argument that Ana could “safely resettle” elsewhere in Honduras. Honduras is a small country, about the size of Virginia. It has an astronomical murder rate, highly corrupt police, snd almost no viable infrastructure, all important considerations in a legitimate inquiry into relocation. Under these conditions, there is no way that Ana had a “reasonably available internal relocation alternative” in Honduras as described in Federal Regulations. A “real” judge might have grilled ICE counsel about her legally and factually untenable position. But, not Menkin. He apparently had already made up his mind to deny regardless of the law or facts.

In short, before a “fair and impartial” judge with expertise in asylum law this could and should have been an “easy grant” of asylum, even without the additional documentation that could have been presented if the judge had granted a continuance. Instead, it was “orbited” off into a dysfunctional administrative appellate system where results are akin to “Refugee Roulette” highly dependent on the “panel” or individual “Appellate Immigration Judge” to which the case is assigned at the BIA. In this respect, it’s also noteworthy that Barr recently appointed six Immigration Judges with some of the highest asylum denial rates in the country to the BIA. Some “fair and impartial” judiciary!

It also appears that Menkin belatedly and improperly “duressed” Ana into agreeing to a “closed” hearing. Most of the time, once asylum applicants’ attorneys carefully explain to them that public observation and exposure of this “rigged” process might be the only way of getting pressure to change it, they readily agree to have the press present. Also, generally everybody tends to perform better and more professionally when the press or other observers are present (obviously, however, in this particular case, not so much).

First the Trump Regime artificially suppresses asylum grant rates with skewed hiring, improper interpretations of the law, unethical quotas, and pressure on the “judges” to crank out more removal orders. Then, they use the bogus statistics generated by the intentionally flawed and biased process to make a case that most of the asylum claims are non-meritorious.

Notably, even under this clearly biased, overtly anti-asylum procedure, the majority of asylum claims that get decided “on the merits” in New York are still granted. Imagine what the grant rate would be in a truly fair judicial system that properly applied asylum law and the Constitution: 70%, 80%, 90%? We’ll never know, because the regime fears the results of a fair asylum process that fully complies with Due Process: The “dirty little secret” the regime doesn’t want you to know! Talk about “fraud, waste, and abuse!” Something to remember the next time you hear “Cooch Cooch,” “Markie,” Albence, and other Trump sycophants at DHS and DOJ falsely claim that the overwhelming number of asylum applications are without merit.

Judges likes Menkin might want to remember that the truth will eventually “out’ even if too late to save the life of Ana and others like her. When that happens, those judges who put expediency, their jobs, and homage to the Trump Regime’s White Nationalist agenda before the law, Due Process, and human lives will find their “legacies” tarnished forever.

Many thanks to Judge Jeffrey S. Chase and Judge Denise Slavin of our Roundtable of Former Immigration Judges for their usual incisive comments. And a shout out to journalists like Moses and Healy who continue to shed light on the outrageous abuses taking place every day in our Immigration “Courts!”

Ultimately, legal and moral responsibility is on Congress, the Article III Courts, and the voters for allowing this clearly unconstitutional, deadly mess to continue to unfold in the Immigration “Courts” every day. That’s why it’s critical that the New Due Process Army “Constantly Confront Complicit Courts 4 Change.”

Due Process Forever; Complicit (& Corrupt) Courts Never!

PWS

12-03-19

CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY: TRUMP REGIME OFFICIALS SCHEMED TO UNCONSTITUTIONALLY SEPARATE FAMILIES WITHOUT SYSTEM TO REUNITE THEM — “I really think a part of this administration’s approach is that we don’t view this population as having human rights.”

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/how-many-immigrant-families-separated_n_5ddebbbbe4b0913e6f782022

Angelina Chapin reports in HuffPost:

Last year, the Trump administration ripped apart thousands of immigrant families despite knowing it did not have a tracking system in place that would ensure they could be reunited, according to a new report from the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services.

As a result, the public will likely never know how many immigrant children have been separated from their parents.

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The Trump administration was prepared to separate more than 26,000 children from their families between May and September 2018 under a zero tolerance policy for unauthorized border crossing, according to the inspector general report released on Wednesday. But in spite of the plan for mass separations ― ultimately blocked in court in June 2018 ― the government didn’t have the technology to track family separations.

The estimate that roughly 3,000 children were taken from their parents between May and June 2018 is undoubtedly lower than the true number.

The Department of Homeland Security failed to accurately record the family relationships of roughly 1,400 children over a year and a half, from October 2017 to February 2019, according to the report.

Immigration officials knew about these technical issues long before the zero tolerance policy was implemented. But they failed to fix them before taking children from their families en masse, making an already traumatic situation for parents and kids all the more chaotic.

“It just confirms that the real policy and attitude of dehumanization of this population,” said Michelle Brané, the director of the Migrant Rights and Justice Program at the Women’s Refugee Commission. “I really think a part of this administration’s approach is that we don’t view this population as having human rights.”

DHS and HHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

I really think a part of this administration’s approach is that we don’t view this population as having human rights.

Michelle Brané, director, Migrant Rights and Justice Program at the Women’s Refugee Commission

The Trump administration has admitted that it didn’t have a proper system to track separated families across both DHS and HHS. HHS is responsible for unaccompanied immigrant children, including those taken from their families at the border.

In April, after an internal watchdog report revealed the Trump administration had likely separated thousands more children from their parents than previously known, HHS officials said it could take up to two years to identify them because of the disorganized data. In a court filing, a deputy director at HHS called the process of tracking down these children a “burden” and said the department didn’t have enough staff to take on the project.

During family separation, DHS’s IT system did not have the ability to properly label separated family members or track them after they were split up, according to the inspector general report. As a result, employees came up with various ad hoc methods of tracking families. But they were not standardized across the department and caused widespread confusion once the data reached ICE officers.

Agents were also not properly trained on how to use the existing technology, and mistakes were rampant. Shortly after the zero tolerance policy was implemented, eight children were separately entered into the system despite being from the same family, according to the report. There was also no plan to reunify families post-separation, despite the fact that parents were being deported without their children.

While the stated goal of the zero tolerance policy was to prevent immigrants from being apprehended and released into the U.S. while they awaited legal proceedings ― a process derisively known as “catch-and-release” ― the result was that children were traumatized and detained for record amounts of time.

Brané said the government has still failed to take accountability for its faulty tracking system and the lifelong trauma it has caused these families.

“There was an affirmative decision not to record,” she said. “They continue to drag their feet and act defensive as though this was some sort of natural disaster that happened to them that they didn’t respond to in the best way.”

Do you have information you want to share with HuffPost? Here’s how.

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

So, the victims of these human rights violations continue to suffer while the regime’s “perps” go free and even brag about their White Nationalist racist dehumanization actions. Some are still in Government positions, others are giving speeches, and the evil mastermind of “zero tolerance” Jeff Sessions is running for office. Incredibly, Sessions was actually in charge of insuring that our Government complied with the law and respected individual rights. Instead, he carried out a Jim Crow racist program of human rights abuses, demeaning the Department of Justice and the rule of law in the process. How does this make sense?

This happens when regime flunkies believe that they will never be held accountable for their actions and abuses. Obviously, that’s a view that starts with their Supreme Leader and his party of enabling sycophants.

PWS

11-30-19

THREE THANKSGIVING CHEERS FOR IMMIGRATION JUDGE JULIE NELSON (SF) & APPELLATE IMMIGRATION JUDGE ELLEN LIEBOWITZ (BIA) — Doing Justice, Granting Asylum, Saving Lives In The Age Of Trump!

My colleague Judge Jeffrey Chase of our Roundtable of Former Immigration Judges reports some good news:

Also, for those of you who subscribe to Ben Winograd’s index of unpublished BIA Decisions, today’s update includes an unpublished decision dated Nov. 6, 2019, Matter of A-C-A-A- (single BM Ellen Liebowitz), affirming the IJ’s grant of asylum in a domestic violence case based on her cognizable PSG of “Salvadoran females.” The written decision of the IJ, Julie L. Nelson in SF, is also included.

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

Thanks to those judges like Judge Nelson and Judge Liebowitz who are continuing to stand up for the rights of asylum seekers “post-A-B-.”

And, many thanks to Jeffrey & Ben for passing this good news along and for all they do for Due Process every day!

What if rather than the “A-B- atrocity” made precedent by unethical White Nationalist Jeff Sessions, we had an honest, independent Immigration Court system that encouraged fair and impartial adjudications and implemented asylum laws generously, as intended (see, e.g., INS v. Cardoza-Fonseca) by publishing precedent decisions like this recognizing the right to protection?

BIA precedents on asylum have intentionally been constructed in a negative manner, showing judges how to deny, rather than grant, protection and encouraging them to take a skewed anti-asylum view of the law. Even worse, bogus, unethical, legally incorrect “Attorney General precedents” are uniformly anti-asylum; the applicant never wins.

Some judges, like Judge Nelson and Judge Leibovitz, take their oaths of office seriously. But, too many others “go along to get along” with the unlawful and unethical “anti-asylum program” pushed by the White Nationalist Trump Regime.

Indeed, even during my tenure as an Immigration Judge, I remember being required to attend asylum “training” sessions (in years when we even had training) where litigating attorneys from the Office of Immigration Litigation basically made a presentation that should have been entitled “How to Deny Potentially Valid Asylum Claims And Have Them Stand Up On Judicial Review.”

It’s also past time for the Supremes and the Circuit Courts of Appeals to get their collective heads out of the clouds, start paying attention, begin doing their jobs and strongly rejecting “disingenuous deference” to bogus, illegal, unethical “precedents” rendered by politically biased enforcement hacks like Sessions and Barr who have unethically usurped the role of quasi-judicial adjudicator for which they are so clearly and spectacularly unqualified under the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment. It’s nothing short of “judicial fraud” by the Article IIIs! Constantly Confront Complicit Courts 4 Change!

With a more honest and legally correct favorable precedents on asylum, many more cases could be documented and granted at the Asylum Office and Immigration Court levels. The DHS would be discouraged from wasting court time by opposing meritorious applications. The backlog would start going down. There would be fewer appeals. Justice would be served. Worthy lives would be saved. DHS could stop harassing asylum seekers and start enforcing the laws in a fair and reasonable manner. America would lead the way in implementing humanitarian laws, and we would become a better country for it.

Help the New Due Process Army fight for a better, more just, future for America and the world.

Due Process Forever!

Happy Thanksgiving.

PWS

11-28-19

PROFESSOR KAREN MUSALO @ LA TIMES: We Can Restore Legality & Humanity To U.S. Asylum Law — That’s Why The Refugee Protection Act Deserves Everyone’s Support — “The bill lays out a plan to allow women and girls fleeing gender-based violence the opportunity to obtain asylum, and bring our country back in line with its humanitarian commitments. It’s a vision that all members of Congress should be able to get behind, even at a time of bitter partisanship.”

https://edition.pagesuite.com/popovers/dynamic_article_popover.aspx?guid=55eeae6e-b617-4ffd-b041-a54c15a3ada7&v=sdk

Professor Musalo writes in the LA Times:

Every day, courageous women and girls arrive at our southern border seeking refuge from unimaginable violence. Under our laws, they have the right to apply for asylum and have their cases heard. But rather than offering protection, the Trump administration is determined to send them back to the countries they have fought so hard to escape.

On Thursday, Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) and Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) introduced the Refugee Protection Act. The bill lays out a plan to allow women and girls fleeing gender-based violence the opportunity to obtain asylum, and bring our country back in line with its humanitarian commitments. It’s a vision that all members of Congress should be able to get behind, even at a time of bitter partisanship.

It’s no secret that this administration is systematically dismantling our asylum law. Women and children have borne the brunt of the suffering — from the egregious policies of family separation and “Remain in Mexico,” to the quiet publication of decisions by the attorney general that have closed door after door to those seeking safety.

The Refugee Protection Act would rectify many of these inhumane actions, and includes language to reverse recent decisions that have made it nearly impossible for women fleeing domestic violence or gang brutality to qualify as refugees.

One of those decisions — known as Matter of A-B- — was handed down by then-Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions in 2018. That decision has been used to limit the legal definition of “refugee” in an attempt to eliminate the possibility of asylum in the U.S. for victims of domestic violence, sex trafficking and other gender-based human rights violations. Since then, we have seen asylum approval rates plummet for women, children and families arriving at our southern border.

The Matter of A-B- case involves a domestic violence survivor from El Salvador who fears she will be killed if she is sent back to her country. My organization, the Center for Gender & Refugee Studies, has represented A.B. in her asylum case for nearly two years.

In El Salvador, A.B., a courageous and resilient woman, endured over 15 years of beatings, rapes, death threats and psychological abuse at the hands of her husband. She secured a divorce and even moved to another part of El Salvador, desperate to escape her abuser. But no matter where she went, he tracked her down. When she requested a restraining order, the police provided her one — and told her to hand-deliver it to him. Fearing that he would make good on his threat to kill her, she fled to the United States.

In 2016, A.B. was granted asylum by the highest administrative tribunal in the immigration system, the Justice Department’s Board of Immigration Appeals. But in a highly unusual procedural move, Sessions seized upon A.B.’s case, overturned the grant of asylum, and used it to declare that the United States should no longer extend protection to domestic violence survivors.

A.B. has appealed Sessions’ action, but until a final decision is reached, she remains terrified that she will be deported. Countless other women who have made the arduous journey to the United States also face a hostile immigration system and, post-Matter of A-B-, an even harder legal battle.

Congress has an opportunity to correct this. The new bill would clarify legal requirements for asylum and provide clear guidance for cases involving gender-based violence. It would ensure that asylum seekers like A.B. get a fair opportunity to argue her claim before a judge.

The United States has a long history of giving refuge to people who’ve come to our shores. This measure would be a step toward restoring that tradition.

Karen Musalo is a law professor and the founding director of the Center for Gender & Refugee Studies at UC Hastings College of the Law. She is also lead coauthor of “Refugee Law and Policy: An International and Comparative Approach (5th edition).”

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

Here’s a link to an ImmigrationProf Blog summary and the text of the Refugee Protection Act, a recently introduced bill:

https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/immigration/2019/11/karen-musalo-restore-asylum-for-women-fleeing-abuse-and-death-.html

PWS

11-24-19

WHILE LIFE-TENURED FEDERAL JUDGES CHICKEN OUT, FORMER ASYLUM OFFICER DOUG STEPHENS SPEAKS OUT IN NYT VIDEO EDITORIAL AGAINST JUDICIALLY-ENABLED NATIONAL DISGRACE OF “LET ‘EM DIE IN MEXICO” — “A former asylum officer says ‘remain in Mexico’ and other policies undermining asylum aren’t just racist, they’re illegal.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/20/opinion/trump-asylum-remain-mexico-policy.html

By Doug Stephens

Mr. Stephens is a lawyer.

Video by Leah Varjacques and Taige Jensen

In the Video Op-Ed above, a former asylum officer reveals why he resigned: to protest President Trump’s policy requiring migrants to remain in Mexico while awaiting hearings.

Doug Stephens had been an asylum officer for two years. But two days and five interviews that resulted in sending asylum seekers back to danger shook him. He drafted a memo detailing his legal objections to the policy, and circulated it to 80 of his colleagues, his supervisors and a member of Congress. And then he quit.

Mr. Stephens is not the only asylum officer who has grappled with following orders. In interviews with a half-dozen current and former asylum officers across the country, The Times learned of individuals leaving their posts, requesting job transfers and falling into deep depression.

The right to asylum has been a cornerstone of international immigration law since the 1951 United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. The United States, along with 144 other nations, made a commitment to protect those who arrive at our borders with “a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion.”

To date, Mr. Trump’s remain in Mexico policy, officially known as one of the “Migrant Protection Protocols,” has left nearly 58,000 asylum seekers stranded in Mexico.

Doug Stephens, a lawyer, resigned his post as a Citizenship and Immigrations Services asylum officer in San Francisco in August.

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See the video at the above link.

Doug “gets it,” and it didn’t take him long. My Georgetown Law students “got it.” They kept asking me how this could be happening when it seemed to be clearly illegal and a violation of the Fifth Amendment as well as international treaties.

But, Chief Justice John Roberts and the majority of the Supremes don’t get it? A three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit didn’t get it? The Ninth Circuit ruminates for months on a question that a District Judge already answered in short order and that most first year law students could figure out in a few minutes. Circuit Courts keep signing off on removal orders produced by a clearly unconstitutional “kangaroo court” system where applicants are denied a fair and impartial decision-maker and the Chief Prosecutor can and does reach in and change results favorable to the applicant that he doesn’t like?

Something is wrong with this picture. And, it starts with intellectual corruption and cowardice at the highest levels of our Federal Judiciary.

Trump has never made any secret that he hates refugees and migrants for unconstitutional racial, ethnic, and political reasons, that he intends to keep them out, and that he really doesn’t care about the Constitution, due process (except for himself), the Refugee Act, or international norms. He has utter contempt for Federal Judges and for Congress.

He tried, with spectacular lack of success, to get Congress to change the immigration and refugee laws by holding “Dreamers” hostage. Failing, he just went ahead and plowed through the Refugee Act, the Fifth Amendment, and the UN Convention, harming and killing folks in his wake. Just like he illegally reprogrammed money to build an unneeded, yet politically significant, “wall” that Congress had pointedly refused to fund. Never let the law, the national interest, or democratic institutions get in the way of the Trump White Nationalist political agenda.

The Court’s response: Let’s look the other way, like we did in the “Travel Ban Case.” We’re sort of offended by your unpresidential conduct, but, hey, as long as it doesn’t affect us and our families we’ll just hope you’ll tone it down because we really don’t want to confront you. But, if you “double down” instead, we’ll pretend like it’s never happened. Oh, and by the way, perhaps we can help you heap further abuse on your “Dreamer hostages.” What’s a little more pain and suffering on kids that we can cover up with legal gobbledygook.

One of Trump’s biggest “dissings” of the Supremes: His Administration’s total disregard and effective overruling of the Supreme’s landmark INS v. Cardoza -Fonseca case requiring the Government to implement a generous interpretation of the “refugee” definition for asylum to conform to the plain language of the statute as well as the Congressional intent behind the Refugee Act. Donald Trump and his immigraton thugs don’t even recognize what “generosity” is, and he has basically wiped out the Refugee Act and its asylum provisions without any changes in the law. How’s that for contempt of Court!

Roberts can blabber his head off about whether there are “Obama Judges” or “Trump Judges.” But, actions speak louder than words; until he and his fellow GOP appointees on the Court actually stand up to Trump’s abuses of the law, his babbling will be drowned out by Trump’s tweets.

Trump’s not right about much. But, maybe he has a point in his contemptuously arrogant attitude that the Supremes and most Circuits won’t dare require him to follow the laws or operate within the Constitution, particularly as his continues to “pack” the Federal Courts with his guaranteed judicial toadies.

That’s going to be the legacy of the “Roberts Court” if our Chiefie doesn’t wake up some morning with a new backbone and start joining his liberal colleagues in putting some breaks on Trump’s outrageous scofflaw conduct in the immigration and asylum area and saving some innocent lives in the process.

And the process should start with emphatically rejecting the Solicitor General’s unethical and often factually inaccurate and legally defective attempts to invoke the Supremes’ aid in short-circuiting the system any time the Big Baby Boss is upset with lower courts properly reigning in his illegal actions and making him follow the rules like everyone else.

Trump’s “malicious incompetence” often doesn’t accomplish much. He’s a divider, not a uniter. He’s only President of his base. The majority of the Americans can just “go pound sand” as far as he’s concerned.

But one thing he might eventually unite Americans on, for differing reasons, is contempt for spineless Federal Courts who won’t stand up to tyranny. And, that won’t be good for the future of our Constituitional Republic.

Due Process Forever! Complicit Courts Never!

That’s why the “New Due Process Army” could be the last, best hope for American’s survival. Constantly Confront Complicit Courts 4 Change! The “blood of the innocents” will be upon their spiffy robes if the “privileged life-tenured ones” don’t get out of their “ivory tower hazes” and have the guts to do their jobs!

PWS

11-20-19

“LET ‘EM DIE IN MEXICO WATCH” — CRISIS OF CONSCIENCE: U.S. ASYLUM OFFICERS REFUSE TO CARRY OUT ILLEGAL & IMMORAL ANTI-ASYLUM PROGRAM! — “You’re literally sending people back to be raped and killed,” he said. “That’s what this is.”

https://apple.news/ABLpJrjGFTROOJbP0K3fAGg

Molly O’Toole reports in the LA Times:

Asylum officers rebel against Trump policies they say are immoral and illegal

In collaboration with the radio program “This American Life,” the Los Angeles Times takes an exclusive, front-line look at a much-criticized Trump administration policy to restrict asylum — the Migrant Protection Protocols — from the perspective of the asylum officers implementing it.

It only took Doug Stephens two days to decide: He wasn’t going to implement President Trump’s latest policy to restrict immigration, known as Remain in Mexico. The asylum officer wouldn’t interview any more asylum seekers only to send them back to danger in Mexico.

As a federal employee, refusing to implement the government policy probably meant that he’d be fired, and an end to his career as a public servant. He’d only been assigned five of the interviews so far. But it was five too many — to the trained attorney, the policy officially termed “Migrant Protection Protocols” was not only unethical, it was against the law.

When Stephens told his supervisor in San Francisco his decision, he said he was stunned.

“I told him, ‘You don’t understand. I’m not doing these interviews,’” Stephens said, speaking publicly for the first time in an exclusive interview. “I think they’re illegal. They’re definitely immoral. And I’m not doing them.’”

Stephens is believed to be the first asylum officer to formally refuse to conduct interviews under the program, according to Michael Knowles, a spokesman for the National CIS Council, the union that represents some 13,000 asylum officers and other employees of Citizenship and Immigration Services worldwide.

But he isn’t alone. Across the country, asylum officers are calling in sick, requesting transfers, retiring earlier than planned and quitting, all to resist this and other Trump administration immigration policies that they view as illegal, according to Stephens, as well as other asylum officers and officials.

In a collaboration with the radio program “This American Life,” the Los Angeles Times takes an exclusive, front-line look at one of the Trump administration’s most successful policies to restrict asylum — the Migrant Protection Protocols — from the perspective of the asylum officers forced to implement it.

The asylum officers’ primary job is to make sure that the U.S. government is not returning people to harm in their home countries, a foundational principle in both U.S. and international law. But under MPP, instead of allowing asylum seekers who come to the southern border to wait in the U.S. for their immigration hearings, U.S. officials are forcing them to wait in Mexico.

Since the Trump administration announced the policy in December, U.S. officials have pushed roughly 60,000 asylum seekers back to Mexico, to wait in areas that the U.S. State Department considers some of the most dangerous in the world.

While U.S. officials downplay the danger in Mexico, kidnappings, rape and other violence against asylum seekers under the program are widespread and well documented, according to other officials, advocates, lawyers and academic researchers.

Homeland Security officials concede that the program is designed to discourage asylum claims. The president is running for reelection on renewed promises to limit immigration. Under the policy, only 11 asylum seekers have been granted some kind of relief, according to Syracuse University’s TRAC database.

The half-dozen asylum officers interviewed by The Times say that in almost every interview they’ve conducted under the policy, the asylum seeker expressed a fear of returning to Mexico — many said they’d been harmed there already. But under the new standards, the officers say they had to return them anyway.

“What’s my moral culpability in that?” said an asylum officer who’s conducted nearly 100 interviews. She requested anonymity because she feared retaliation. “My signature’s on that paperwork. And that’s something now that I live with.”

The asylum officers rebelling against Trump’s immigration policies say they run counter to the laws passed by Congress, as well as their oath to the Constitution and extensive training, which includes how to detect fraud or any potential national security concerns.

Under U.S. law, migrants have the right to request asylum. Some 80% of asylum seekers pass the first step in the lengthy process, an interview with an asylum officer that’s known as a credible-fear screening. Congress set a low standard for the officers to use at this initial stage, to minimize the risk of sending someone back to harm, or even death. But ultimately, only about 15% of applicants win asylum before an immigration judge.

Trump and his top officials use this difference between the percentage of asylum seekers who pass the first step versus the percentage who ultimately win asylum to claim that asylum itself is a “hoax” or “big fat con job.”

Ken Cuccinelli, the acting head of Citizenship and Immigration Services, has publicly criticized the officers, saying they approve too many requests and oppose Trump’s initiatives for partisan reasons. On Wednesday, Cuccinelli was named acting deputy Homeland Security secretary.

Cuccinelli’s spokesperson stopped responding to requests for an interview. But The Times asked Cuccinelli during an October media breakfast about concerns from officers.

“So long as we’re in the position of putting in place what we believe to be legal policies that haven’t been found to be otherwise,” Cuccinelli said, “we fully expect them to implement those faithfully and sincerely and vigorously.”

Citizenship and Immigration Services also declined requests for data on staffing for the Homeland Security agency, and the asylum section specifically, to try to quantify what officers and officials called an “exodus” primarily because of the policy.

In another sign of widespread discomfort among the asylum officers, the union representing them has filed “friend of the court” briefs in lawsuits against the administration, arguing that its immigration policies — including MPP — are illegal.

Last month, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals heard arguments in the ongoing litigation against the policy. The panel’s ruling on whether the policy is legal is pending.

When Stephens refused to do the interviews, his supervisors started disciplinary proceedings, issuing him formal warnings, he described at the time. He decided to quit, but not before he sent out a legal memo he’d drafted arguing why the policy violates the law, which he sent to his entire San Francisco office, supervisors, the union and a U.S. senator. He later got his own legal representation, at Government Accountability Project, a nonpartisan nonprofit.

He says he’s still trying to draw attention to the program, encouraging others to speak out against it.

“You’re literally sending people back to be raped and killed,” he said. “That’s what this is.”

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

So, what happened to the integrity of 9th Circuit Appellate Judges and Congress? Why are they OK with blatant violations of our laws, our Constitution, and human rights that actually kill people? You could call it “accessory to murder.”

Folks like Doug Stephens, Molly O’Toole, and many other courageous, dedicated members of the “New Due Process Army” are making a public record. While the cowardly abusers might be “getting away with murder” in “real time,” they will eventually be held accountable by history for their illegal, immoral, and unconscionable actions. And, that includes not only the “perpetrators” in the Trump Administration, but also their many disgraceful enablers in the judiciary and Congress.

Many innocent people might die or be sent to oblivion. But, their bloodstains won’t be washed away, even by time.

PWS

11-16-19

Due Process Forever; Feckless, Complicit, Immoral Federal Judges Never!

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