“SITTING DUCKS” IN “UNSAFE THIRD COUNTRIES” — How The Supremes, The 9th Circuit, The 5th Circuit, & Other Complicit Federal Appellate Courts Aid & Abet The Trump Regime’s Human Rights Violations — Would The “Privileged Robed Ones” Take Due Process & The Rule Of Law More Seriously If It Were THEIR Kids & Grandkids Being Kidnapped & Held for Ransom For The “Crime” Of Seeking Protection Under U.S. Laws?  

“SITTING DUCKS” IN “UNSAFE THIRD COUNTRIES” — How The Supremes, The 9th Circuit, The 5th Circuit, & Other Complicit Federal Appellate Courts Aid & Abet The Trump Regime’s Human Rights Violations — Would The “Privileged Robed Ones” Take Due Process & The Rule Of Law More Seriously If It Were Their Kids & Grandkids Being Kidnapped & Held for Ransom For The “Crime” Of Seeking Protection Under U.S. Laws?  

Robbie Whelan
Robbie Whelan
Mexico City Correspondent
Wall Street Journal

 

\https://apple.news/A7aogQqflTgq9ZgbhJJzr1A

Robbie Whelan reports for the WSJ:

Latin America

Violence Plagues Migrants Under U.S. ‘Remain in Mexico’ Program

Migrants seeking shelter in the U.S. under Trump administration policy report rising numbers of kidnappings by criminal groups

NUEVO LAREDO, Mexico—Every morning, Lorenzo Ortíz, a Baptist pastor who lives in Texas, drives a 12-seat passenger van packed with food and blankets across the border to pick up migrants who have been dropped off in Mexico and ferry them to shelters.

His mission is to keep the migrants safe from organized crime groups that prowl the streets of this violent Mexican border town. Since the Trump administration began implementing its Migrant Protection Protocols program at the start of 2019—widely known as Remain in Mexico—some 54,000 migrants, mostly from Central America, have been sent back to northern Mexico to wait while their asylum claims are processed. Mexico’s government is helping implement it.

But in cities like Nuevo Laredo, migrants are sitting ducks. Over the years, thousands have reported being threatened, extorted or kidnapped by criminal groups, who prey upon asylum seekers at bus stations and other public spaces.

“Over the last year, it’s gotten really bad,” Mr. Ortíz said.

A typical scheme involves kidnapping migrants and holding them until a relative in the U.S. wires money, typically thousands of dollars, in ransom money. Gangs have also attacked shelters and even some Mexican clergy members who help migrants.

There have been 636 reported cases of kidnapping, rape, torture and other violent crimes against migrants returned to Mexico under Remain in Mexico, according to Human Rights First, which interviews victims in border cities and advocates for migrants’ due process rights. At least 138 of these incidents involved kidnappings of children.

Many more cases of extortion and violence go unreported for fear of retribution. As more migrants are returned to dangerous areas such as Nuevo Laredo under Remain in Mexico, the situation is expected to worsen, the nonprofit Human Rights First said in a recent report.

The Mexican government has played down the violence. Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard recently acknowledged kidnapping incidents, but said that “it’s not a massive number.” Only 20 such cases have been investigated by the government, he added.

The Trump administration has credited the program with deterring migrants from attempting to cross into the U.S. Monthly apprehensions of migrants at the U.S. Southern border have plunged from more than 144,000 in May to 33,500 in November. The Remain in Mexico program was expanded in June.

On a recent visit to the border, acting Department of Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf said the program has been a “game-changer” for U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers because it has freed them from having to perform humanitarian duties.

But Mr. Ortíz’s daily commute back and forth over the border highlights what migrants’ advocates say is a key element of the program—it isolates migrants not only from the legal counsel they need to argue their asylum claims, but from resources like food, shelter and medical care that are abundant on the U.S. side, but near-nonexistent in Mexico.

“You have all this infrastructure to help feed and clothe and house people set up on this side, in Laredo and Del Rio and Eagle Pass, and then suddenly the administration changes the policy, and you have to send it all to Mexico, because now everyone is on the other side,” said Denise LaRock, a Catholic Sister who helps distribute donations to asylum seekers through the nonprofit Interfaith Welcome Coalition. Mexico has been unable to provide enough safe shelter and other resources to migrants.

In Matamoros, another large recipient of asylum seekers under the program across the border from Brownsville, Texas, a tent city of more than 3,000 people has sprung up. Migrants there have complained of overcrowding, unsanitary conditions and insufficient medical treatment. In November, a migrant from El Salvador was murdered in Tijuana, opposite San Diego, while waiting with his wife and two children for an asylum hearing under the Remain in Mexico program.

On a recent, briskly-cold Wednesday, Mr. Ortíz, dressed in a ski vest and a baseball cap with the logo of the U.S. Chaplain International Association, picked up six migrants, including two children aged 8 and 14, at the immigration office in Nuevo Laredo. All were from El Salvador, Guatemala or Honduras, and were returning from legal appointments in the U.S. Hearings take place in makeshift courts set up in tents in Laredo, just across the bridge over the Rio Grande that separates the two cities.

At the front door of the office, six young men sat idly around a motorcycle, hats pulled low over their heads, watching the scene unfold, periodically walking up to the church van and peering in. Mr. Ortíz said these men were “hawks” or lookouts for criminal gangs.

“They know who I am, I know who they are,” he said. “You have to know everyone to do this work. The cartels respect the church. I’ve driven all around Nuevo Laredo in this van, full of migrants, and they never mess with me.”

At one point two of the lookouts asked the pastor for some food. He gave them two boxes of sandwich cookies. They clapped him on the shoulder, eating the treats as they walked back to their observation post.

Mr. Ortíz, a native of central Mexico, came to the U.S. at age 15 and eventually built a small contracting business in Texas. He became an ordained Baptist minister about a decade ago and three years ago began ministering to migrants full time. This year, he converted several rooms of his home in Laredo, Texas, into a dormitory for migrants and built men’s and women’s showers in his backyard.

After picking up the migrants, Mr. Ortíz ferried the group to an unmarked safe house with a chain-locked door on a busy street in the center of Nuevo Laredo, Mexico.

Inside, about 90 migrant families crowded into rows of cots set up in a handful of bedrooms and a concrete back patio. Among the Central Americans are also migrants from Peru, Congo, Haiti, Angola and Venezuela.

Reports of migrant kidnappings have increased since the Remain in Mexico program began, Mr. Ortíz said. In September, armed men stormed the safe house—one of two that the pastor brings migrants to—and detained the shelter’s staff for about an hour.

Since then, Mr. Ortíz said, the volunteer staff has stopped allowing migrants to leave the house unaccompanied, even to buy milk for young children at a nearby store.

Rosa Asencio, a schoolteacher fleeing criminal gangs in El Salvador and traveling with her two children ages 4 and 7, was returned to Nuevo Laredo under Remain in Mexico. She says she hasn’t been outside the shelter for nearly three weeks. “They can kidnap you anywhere,” she said.

María Mazariegos, an Honduran housekeeper, said she was kidnapped along with her 12-year-old daughter Alexandra from the bus station in Nuevo Laredo in September.

Gang members held her in a windowless cinder-block room that bore signs of torture for three days with one meal of tortillas and beans. She was released after her family members in the U.S. convinced her captors that they didn’t have the money to pay a ransom.

Then, two weeks later, while she was returning from a court appointment in the U.S., a shelter staff member confirmed, another group tried to kidnap her. An escort from the shelter was able to talk the kidnappers out of it.

She has court hearing under Remain in Mexico rules on Jan. 22, where a judge is expected to decide on her asylum case. If she is rejected, she plans to move to the Mexican city of Saltillo, where she has heard there are more jobs and less violence.

“Just about anywhere is better than here,” Ms. Mazariegos added.

Write to Robbie Whelan at robbie.whelan@wsj.com

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These two quotes really tell you all you need know about this grotesquely immoral and illegal “Let ‘Em Die In Mexico Program” (sometimes totally disingenuously referred to as the “Migrant Protection Protocols”) and the sleazy U.S. Government officials responsible for it:

There have been 636 reported cases of kidnapping, rape, torture and other violent crimes against migrants returned to Mexico under Remain in Mexico, according to Human Rights First, which interviews victims in border cities and advocates for migrants’ due process rights. At least 138 of these incidents involved kidnappings of children.

. . . .

On a recent visit to the border, acting Department of Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf said the program has been a “game-changer” for U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers because it has freed them from having to perform humanitarian duties.

Let’s not forget that the Immigration “Court” system that has life or death power over these asylum claims has been twisted and “gamed” against legitimate asylum seekers, particularly women and children with brown skins, by the White Nationalist politicos who unconstitutionally control it. All this while the Article III appellate courts look the other way and “swallow the whistle” on protecting the legal and constitutional rights of the most vulnerable among us.

Let’s see, essentially: “It’s great program because it allows us to evade our humanitarian duties under humanitarian laws and concentrate on faux law enforcement directed against individuals who are not legitimate targets of law enforcement.” Doesn’t say much for the legal and moral authority of the Article III, life-tenured judges who think this is acceptable for our country.

Obviously, this has less to do with the law, which is clearly against what the “regime” is doing, or legitimate law enforcement, which has little to do with the vast majority of legal asylum seekers, and lots to do with vulnerable, brown-skinned individuals desperately seeking justice being “out of sight, out of mind” to the exalted, tone-deaf Article III Judges who are failing to do their Constitutional duties. “Going along to get along” appears to be the new mantra of far too many of the Article III appellate judges.

Assuming that our republic survives and that “Good Government” eventually returns to both the Executive and the Legislative Branches, an examination of the catastrophic failure of the Article III Judiciary to effectively stand up for the Constitutional, legal, and individual human rights of asylum seekers obviously needs reexamination and attention.

The glaring lack of legal expertise in asylum, immigration, and human rights laws as well as basic Constitutional Due Process, and the total lack of human empathy among far, far too many Article III appellate jurists is as stunning as it is disturbing! The past is the past; but, we can and should learn from it. At some point, if we are to survive as a nation of laws and humane values, we need a radically different and more courageous Article III Judiciary that puts humanity and human rights first, not last!

The “Let ‘Em Die In Mexico Program” will not go down in history as a “law enforcement success” as Wolf-man and the other Trump regime kakistocrats and their enablers and apologists claim; it eventually will take its place as one of the most disgraceful and cowardly abandonments of American values in our history. And, the role of the complicit Supreme Court Justices and Court of Appeals Judges who turned their backs on our asylum laws, our Constitution, and human decency will also be spotlighted!

As I was “indexing” this article, I “scrolled through” the name and thought of my old friend the late Arthur Helton, a courageous humanitarian, lawyer, teacher, role model, and occasional litigation opponent (during my days at the “Legacy INS”). Arthur, who literally gave his life for others and his steadfastly humane view of the law, was a believer in the “fundamental justice” of the American judicial system. I wonder what he would think if he were alive today to see the cowardly and complicit performance of so many Article III appellate judges, all the way up to and including the Supremes, in the face of the unlawful, unconstitutional, institutionalized evil, hate, and tyranny of our current White Nationalist regime.

Due Process Forever!

PWS

12-31-19

“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?”

Dahlia Lithwick
Dahlia Lithwick
Legal Reporter
Slate
Kristin Clarens
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

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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

Popular in News & Politics

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.

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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

A VERY TRUMPY CHRISTMAS:  PERVERTING ASYLUM REGS; USING VULNERABLE KIDS AS BAIT; ORBITING REFUGEES TO DEADLY ASYLUM-FREE ZONES; SCREWING WITH LEGAL IMMIGRANTS; DEATH CAMPS; STAR CHAMBERS; MORE PROSECUTORS AS JUDGES; & OTHER “GIFTS” FROM THE REGIME & ITS ARTICLE III JUDICIAL ENABLERS — Get The “Holiday Horror Update” On All Of America’s Human Rights Abuses & Gratuitous Cruelty From The Gibson Report 12-23-19 

Elizabeth Gibson
Elizabeth Gibson
Attorney, NY Legal Assistance Group
Publisher of “The Gibson Report”

TOP UPDATES

 

Trump Administration Proposes Adding Minor Crimes to List of Offenses that Bar Asylum

NYT: The new rule, issued by the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security, would expand the list of crimes that bar migrants from asylum to include misdemeanor offenses, including driving under the influence, possession of fake identification and drug possession, including having more than 30 grams of of marijuana… The administration would also deny asylum to migrants caught crossing the border after receiving a deportation order and those who illegally received public benefits.

 

Under secret Stephen Miller plan, ICE to use data on migrant children to expand deportation efforts

WaPo: The White House sought this month to embed immigration enforcement agents within the U.S. refugee agency that cares for unaccompanied migrant children, part of a long-standing effort to use information from their parents and relatives to target them for deportation, according to six current and former administration officials.

 

Guatemala Is Set to Finalize Deal With U.S. to Accept Mexican Asylum Seekers

WSJ: Guatemala is set to finalize within days a deal to expand its asylum agreement with the U.S. to begin accepting Mexican migrants sent from the southern U.S. border, U.S. and Guatemalan officials familiar with the talks said.

 

The employment green card backlog tops 800,000, most of them Indian. A solution is elusive.

WaPo: An estimated 800,000 immigrants who are working legally in the United States are waiting for a green card, an unprecedented backlog in employment-based immigration that has fueled a bitter policy debate but has been largely overshadowed by President Trump’s border wall fight and the administration’s focus on migrant crossings from Mexico.

 

The radical immigration changes under Trump that went unnoticed

Quartz: Social media tracking, Increased denaturalization efforts, Expansion of “public charge” definition, Domestic violence no longer grounds for asylum, Limits to Temporary Protected Status (TPS), Secret policies.

 

International Students Worry As A Popular Work Program Is Questioned

WGBH: Concerns are growing as the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia considers a legal motion filed by a private group to cancel the federal program.

 

Deaths in custody. Sexual violence. Hunger strikes. What we uncovered inside ICE facilities across the US

USA Today: A USA TODAY Network investigation revealed sex assaults, routine use of physical force, poor medical care and deaths at facilities overseen by ICE.

 

Contrasting Experiences: MPP vs. Non-MPP Immigration Court Cases

TRAC: MPP Results in Slightly Longer Wait Times for First Hearing…Asylum Seekers in the US are 7 Times More Likely to Have an Attorney…Most Asylum Seekers Attend Their Hearings Unless Forced to Remain in Mexico.

 

Former Immigration Judges Send Letter Expressing Concern Over Lack of Public Access to MPP Hearings

On 12/10/19, former immigration judges sent a letter to EOIR requesting that it investigate violations of due process rights during MPP hearings and ensure that the public has appropriate access to all immigration courts. AILA Doc. No. 19121700

 

Executive Office for Immigration Review to Swear in 28 Immigration Judges, Bringing Judge Corps to Highest Level in History

Includes:

Susan F. Aikman, Immigration Judge, Batavia Immigration Court

Jennifer Chung, Immigration Judge, New York, Federal Plaza Immigration Court

Diane L. Dodd, Immigration Judge, New York, Federal Plaza Immigration Court

David A. Norkin, Immigration Judge, New York, Varick Immigration Court (yes, former court administrator)

John J. Siemietkowski, Immigration Judge, New York, Federal Plaza Immigration Court

Rantideva Singh, Immigration Judge, New York, Federal Plaza Immigration Court

 

New Permanent ACIJ at New York – Federal Plaza Immigration Court

EOIR: Effective January 20, ACIJ Carrie Johnson will be the permanent ACIJ for the New York – Federal Plaza Immigration Court. ACIJ Johnson is currently the ACIJ for the Newark and Elizabeth Immigration Courts and will remain in those positions. ACIJ Sheila McNulty will continue to serve as the Acting ACIJ for the New York – Broadway, New York – Varick, Fishkill, and Ulster Immigration Courts.

 

New York sees surge in new driver’s licenses thanks to undocumented immigrants

NY Post: New York State saw a 133 percent surge in new learner permits issued Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday as undocumented immigrants were able to apply for licenses for the first time. See also As Historic ‘Green Light’ Law Goes Into Effect, Immigrants Warned of Driver’s License Scams and New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy signs bill allowing undocumented immigrants to get licenses.

 

How ICE Uses Social Media To Surveil And Arrest Immigrants

Intercept: In this case, ICE used Thomson Reuters’s controversial CLEAR database, part of a growing industry of commercial data brokers that contract with government agencies, essentially circumventing barriers that might prevent the government from collecting certain types of information. See also California DOJ Cuts Off ICE Deportation Officers from State Law Enforcement Database.

 

U.S. citizenship path for thousands of Liberians tucked in spending bill

Reuters: The pathway to citizenship – even for a relatively small cohort of immigrants – is a victory for pro-migrant activists and lawmakers who pushed for citizenship for Liberians covered by temporary deportation relief programs.

 

LITIGATION/CASELAW/RULES/MEMOS

 

Immigrants’ Appeal of Removal Order Subject to Equitable Tolling

Bloomberg: The 30-day limitations period for an immigrant to appeal an order requiring him to be removed from the U.S. isn’t jurisdictional, and thus may be equitably tolled, the Second Circuit said Dec. 19.

 

USCIS Releases Policy Alert on the Effect of Travel Abroad by TPS Beneficiaries with Final Orders of Removal

USCIS updated its policy manual to clarify the effect of travel abroad by TPS beneficiaries with final removal orders. Per USCIS, TPS beneficiaries who depart and return to the U.S. based on authorization to travel remain in the exact same immigration status and circumstances as when they left. AILA Doc. No. 19122036

 

Rakoff Refuses to Dismiss Lawsuit to Halt Immigration Arrests at State Courthouses

NYLJ: U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff of the Southern District of New York said the lawsuit from New York Attorney General Letitia James and Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez raised valid claims that the practice could have deleterious effects on the criminal justice system.

 

Cert granted in Pereida v. Barr

SCOTUSblog: The justices will decide whether a noncitizen who is convicted of a state crime can apply for relief from deportation – such as asylum or cancellation of removal – when the state-court record is ambiguous about whether his conviction corresponds to an offense listed in the Immigration and Nationality Act.

 

Lawsuit says Trump’s green-card rules show preference for ‘the wealthy and the white’

WaPo: Organizations critical of President Trump’s immigration policies filed a broad lawsuit Thursday challenging new restrictions for green-card seekers who may need government help to pay for food and health care…It seeks to block the State Department from moving forward with its public-charge rules, and specifically singles out Trump’s October decree — titled “Presidential Proclamation on the Suspension of Entry of Immigrants Who Will Financially Burden the United States Healthcare System” — requiring green-card applicants to have “approved” medical coverage or sufficient resources to pay for their medical costs out of pocket.

 

Lawsuit Says Immigration Courts Are Now Deportation Machines

AP: The lawsuit filed by the Southern Poverty Law Center in Washington, D.C., and Innovation Law Lab of Portland, Oregon, said that instead of being fair and impartial, judges in immigration courts answer to Attorney General Robert Barr and are pushed to deny applications for asylum.

 

DOJ and DHS Propose Rule to Bar Asylum Eligibility for Individuals Convicted of Certain Criminal Offenses

DOJ and DHS issued a joint notice of proposed rulemaking to provide seven additional mandatory bars to eligibility for asylum for individuals who commit certain criminal offenses in the U.S. The proposed rule would also remove provisions regarding reconsideration of discretionary denials of asylum. AILA Doc. No. 19121835

 

Featured Issue: Denaturalization Efforts by USCIS

The Trump administration announced the opening of an office to focus on identifying immigrants who are suspected of cheating to get their green cards or citizenship and will seek to denaturalize these individuals. Watch this page for updates and resources from AILA. AILA Doc. No. 18072705

 

USCIS Provides Q&As from Special Immigrant Juvenile Policy Clarifications Engagement

USCIS provided Q&As from its December 10, 2019, engagement on the recent Special Immigrant Juvenile (SIJ) adopted AAO decisions and the corresponding policy manual update. AILA Doc. No. 19122002

 

The U.S. Resumes Returning Mexican Nationals to the Interior of Mexico

ICE and the Mexican Ministry of the Interior announced the continuation of the Interior Repatriation Initiative. The first 2019 repatriation flight of approximately 150 Mexican nationals departed Tucson International Airport on December 19, 2019. AILA Doc. No. 19122000

 

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Monday, December 16, 2019

 

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Note that DOJ/EOIR rally outdid themselves on Immigration Judge appointments with 27 “Government insiders,” most from DHS or other enforcement backgrounds, and only one “outside” appointment from private practice. As one of my Round Table colleagues quipped: “I guess they must have run out of ICE Assistant Chief Counsel.”

Time to be happy and thankful if you’re not a migrant seeking justice and mercy in Trump’s America.  

Behind every tyrannical regime are complicit judges who fail to stand up for justice for the most vulnerable and deserving of protection!

Thanks again, Elizabeth for all you do for the New Due Process Army and  the cause of American justice!

 

PWS

12-24-19

REGIME’S NEWEST SCHEME TO SCREW ASYLUM SEEKERS: BOGUS REGS THAT WOULD ILLEGALLY & UNNECESSARILY EXTEND THE GROUNDS OF “MANDATORY DENIAL,” DECREASE ADJUDICATOR DISCRETION, & SHAFT REFUGEE FAMILIES — Regime’s Outlandish “Efficiency Rationale” Fails to Mask Their Cruelty, Racism, Fraud, Waste, & Abuse – Julia Edwards Ainsley (NBC News) & Dean Kevin R. Johnson (ImmigrationProf Blog) Report

Julia Edwards Ainsley
Julia Edwards Ainsley
NBC News Correspondent

https://apple.news/AXSXjJIOxRUSM4ZOgQm9plQ

 

Trump admin announces rule further limiting immigrants’ eligibility for asylum

DUIs, drug paraphernalia possession and unlawful receipt of public benefits would be among seven triggers barring migrants from even applying for asylum.

 

by Julia Ainsley | NBC NEWS

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration announced a new rule Wednesday that would further limit immigrants’ eligibility for asylum if they have been convicted of certain crimes, including driving under the influence and possession of drug paraphernalia.

The rule, if finalized, would give asylum officers seven requirements with which to deem an immigrant ineligible to apply for asylum.

Other acts that would make an immigrant ineligible for asylum under the new rule include the unlawful receipt of public benefits, illegal re-entry after being issued a deportation order and being found “by an adjudicator” to have engaged in domestic violence, even if there was no conviction for such violence.

The rules could eliminate large numbers of asylum-seekers from ever having their cases heard in court. Currently, immigration courts have a backlog of over 1 million cases, according to data kept by Syracuse University.

In a statement, the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security said the new rule would “increase immigration court efficiencies.”

Andrew Free, an immigration attorney based in Nashville, said the new regulation is “calculated to enable the denial of as many claims as possible.”

Free said the most common charges he sees for his immigrant clients are driving under the influence, domestic violence and driving without a license. Driving without a license is particularly common for immigrants who have had to use fake travel documents to enter the U.S. and live in states that do not give licenses to undocumented migrants.

“People who are fleeing persecutions and violence are not going to be able to get travel documents from the governments inflicting violence upon them. If you have to resort to other means of proving your identity, you won’t be eligible [for asylum,]” Free said.

The Trump administration has unveiled a number of new requirements meant to curb asylum applications this year. The most successful of those policies has been “Remain in Mexico” or MPP, that requires lawful asylum-seekers from Central America to wait in Mexico, often in dangerous conditions, until their court date in the United States. Over 60,000 asylum-seekers are currently waiting in Mexico for a decision to be made in their case, a process that can take over a year.

 

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Kevin R. Johnson
Kevin R. Johnson
Dean
U.C. Davis Law


The Beat Goes On! Joint Notice of Proposed Rulemaking to Restrict Certain “Criminal Aliens'” Eligibility for Asylum

By Immigration Prof

 Share

 

Consistent with the efforts to facilitate removal of “criminal aliens,” the Department of Justice and Department of Homeland Security released the announcement below today:

“The Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security (collectively, “the Departments”) today issued a notice of proposed rulemaking (NPRM) that would amend their respective regulations in order to prevent certain categories of criminal aliens from obtaining asylum in the United States. Upon finalization of the rulemaking process, the Departments will be able to devote more resources to the adjudication of asylum cases filed by non-criminal aliens.

Asylum is a discretionary immigration benefit that generally can be sought by eligible aliens who are physically present or arriving in the United States, irrespective of their status, as provided in section 208 of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), 8 U.S.C. § 1158. However, in the INA, Congress barred certain categories of aliens from receiving asylum. In addition to the statutory bars, Congress delegated to the Attorney General and the Secretary of Homeland Security the authority to establish by regulation additional bars on asylum eligibility to the extent they are consistent with the asylum statute, as well as to establish “any other conditions or limitations on the consideration of an application for asylum” that are consistent with the INA. Today, the Attorney General and Secretary of Homeland Security are proposing to exercise their regulatory authority to limit eligibility for asylum for aliens who have engaged in specified categories of criminal behavior. The proposed rule will also eliminate a regulation concerning the automatic reconsideration of discretionary denials of asylum applications in limited cases.

The proposed regulation would provide seven additional mandatory bars to eligibility for asylum. The proposed rule would add bars to eligibility for aliens who commit certain offenses in the United States.Those bars would apply to aliens who are convicted of:

(1) A felony under federal or state law;

(2) An offense under 8 U.S.C. § 1324(a)(1)(A) or § 1324(a)(1)(2) (Alien Smuggling or Harboring);

(3) An offense under 8 U.S.C. § 1326 (Illegal Reentry);

(4) A federal, state, tribal, or local crime involving criminal street gang activity;

(5) Certain federal, state, tribal, or local offenses concerning the operation of a motor vehicle while under the influence of an intoxicant;

(6) A federal, state, tribal, or local domestic violence offense, or who are found by an adjudicator to have engaged in acts of battery or extreme cruelty in a domestic context, even if no conviction resulted; and

(7) Certain misdemeanors under federal or state law for offenses related to false identification; the unlawful receipt of public benefits from a federal, state, tribal, or local entity; or the possession or trafficking of a controlled substance or controlled-substance paraphernalia.

The seven proposed bars would be in addition to the existing mandatory bars in the INA and its implementing regulations, such as those relating to the persecution of others, convictions for particularly serious crimes, commission of serious nonpolitical crimes, security threats, terrorist activity, and firm resettlement in another country.

Under the current statutory and regulatory framework, asylum officers and immigration judges consider the applicability of mandatory bars to asylum in every proceeding involving an alien who has submitted an application for asylum. Although the proposed regulation would expand the mandatory bars to asylum, the proposed regulation does not change the nature or scope of the role of an immigration judge or an asylum officer during proceedings for consideration of asylum applications.

The proposed rule would also remove the provisions at 8 C.F.R. § 208.16(e) and §1208.16(e) regarding reconsideration of discretionary denials of asylum. The removal of the requirement to reconsider a discretionary denial would increase immigration court efficiencies and reduce any cost from the increased adjudication time by no longer requiring a second review of the same application by the same immigration judge.” (bold added).

KJ

December 18, 2019 in Current Affairs | Permalink | Comments (0)

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What total, unadulterated BS and gratuitous cruelty!

For example, 8 C.F.R. § 208.16(e) and §1208.16(e) are humanitarian provisions that seldom come up except in highly unusual and sympathetic cases. The idea that they represent a “drain” on IJ time is preposterous! And, if they did, it would be well worth it to help to keep deserving and vulnerable refugee families together!

I had about three such cases involving those regulations in 13 years on the bench, although I cited the existing regulation for the proposition that discretionary denials are disfavored, as they should be under international humanitarian laws. Federal Courts and the BIA have held that asylum should not be denied for “discretionary reasons” except in the case of “egregious adverse factors.” Therefore, an Immigration Judge properly doing his or her job would very seldom have occasion to enter a “discretionary denial” to someone eligible for asylum. Obviously, the regime intends to ignore these legal rulings.

One of my colleagues wrote “they are going to capture a lot of people and force IJs to hear separate asylum applications for each family member. So counterproductive.”

Cruelty, and more “aimless docket reshuffling” is what these “maliciously incompetent gimmicks” are all about.

I note that this is a “joint proposal” from EOIR and DHS Enforcement, the latter supposedly a “party” to every Immigration Court proceeding, but actually de facto in charge of the EOIR “judges.” That alone makes it unethical, a sign of bias, and a clear denial of Due Process for the so-called “court” and the “Government party” to collude against the “private party.”

When will the Article IIIs do their job and put an end to this nonsense? It’s not “rocket science.” Most first year law students could tell you that this absurd charade of a “court” is a clear violation of Due Process! So, what’s the problem with the Article IIIs? Have they forgotten both their humanity and what they learned in Con Law as well as their oaths of office they took upon investiture?

Right now, as intended by the regime with the connivance and complicity of the Article IIIs, those advocating for the legal, constitutional, and human rights of asylum seekers are being forced to divert scarce resources to respond to the “regime shenanigan of the day.” It’s also abusing and disrespecting the Article III Courts. Why are they so blind to what’s REALLY going on when the rest of us see it so clearly? These aren’t “legal disputes” or “legitimate policy initiatives.” No, they are lawless outright attacks on our Constitution, our nation, our human values, and our system of justice which Article III Judges are sworn to uphold!

Join the New Due Process Army and fight to protect our democracy from the White Nationalist Regime and the complicit life-tenured judges who enable and encourage it!

Due Process Forever; “Malicious Incompetence” & Complicit Courts Never!

PWS

12-21-19

CONFRONTING THE “AMERICAN STAR CHAMBER” — Innovation Law Lab, SPLC, CLINIC, & Others Force Article III Courts To Face Their Judicial Complicity In Allowing EOIR’s “Asylum Free Zones” & Other Human Rights Atrocities To Operate Under Their Noses

Tess Hellgren
Tress Hellgren
Staff Attorney/Fellow
Innovation Law Lab

My friend Tess Hellgren, Staff Attorney/Justice Catalyst Legal Fellow @ Innovation Law Lab reports:

 

Hi all,

 

As some of you are already aware, I am very pleased to share that Innovation Law Lab and the Southern Poverty Law Center filed a lawsuit this morning challenging the weaponization of the nation’s immigration court system to serve the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant agenda.  More information is available below and at http://innovationlawlab.org/faircourts/.

 

I would like to thank all of you again for participating in our IJ roundtable and sharing your experiences for our report on the immigration court system (you will see a reference to it in our press release below). The insights we gained over the course of that report were vital in helping us identify and understand the problems in the immigration courts under the current administration.

 

Sincerely,

 

Tess

 

 

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

December 18, 2019

 

Contact:
Marion Steinfels, marionsteinfels@gmail.com / 202-557-0430

Ramon Valdez, ramon@innovationlawlab.org / 971-238-1804
Immigration Advocates File Major Lawsuit Challenging

Weaponization of the Nation’s Immigration Court System

Advocates Launch Immigration Court Watch App to Ensure

Greater Accountability, Transparency in Courts

 

WASHINGTON, DC – The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), Innovation Law Lab (Law Lab),  Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center, Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project (ASAP), Catholic Legal Immigration Network, Inc. (CLINIC) and Santa Fe Dreamers Project (SFDP) have filed a federal lawsuit challenging the weaponization of the nation’s immigration court system to serve the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant agenda.

 

“Under the leadership of President Trump and the attorney general, the immigration court system has become fixated on the goal of producing deportations, not adjudications,” said Stephen Manning, executive director of Innovation Law Lab. “The system is riddled with policies that undermine the work of legal service providers and set asylum seekers up to lose without a fair hearing of their case.”

 

The complaint outlines pervasive dysfunction and bias within the immigration court system, including:

 

  • Areas that have become known as “asylum-free zones,” where virtually no asylum claims have been granted for the past several years.
  • The nationwide backlog of pending immigration cases, which has now surpassed 1 million — meaning that thousands of asylum seekers must wait three or four years for a court date.
  • The Enforcement Metrics Policy, implemented last year, which gives judges a personal financial stake in every case they decide and pushes them to deny more cases more quickly.
  • The “family unit” court docket, which stigmatizes the cases of recently arrived families and rushes their court dates, often giving families inadequate time to find an attorney and prepare for their hearings.

 

“The immigration courts make life-and-death decisions every day for vulnerable people seeking asylum – people who depend on a functioning court system to protect them from persecution, torture, and death,” said Melissa Crow, senior supervising attorney with the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Immigrant Justice Project. “While prior administrations have turned a blind eye to the dysfunction, the Trump administration has actively weaponized the courts, with devastating results for asylum seekers and the organizations that represent them.”

 

The lawsuit was filed on behalf of six legal service providers whose work for asylum seekers has been badly impaired as a result of the unjust immigration court system.

 

“As the political rhetoric surrounding immigrants has become sharper, we’ve noticed a decline in the treatment our clients receive in immigration court,” said Linda Corchado, Director of Legal Services, Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center. “While asylum seekers are entitled to a full and fair hearing, their proceedings are too often rushed, and judges deny our requests for time to properly prepare their cases and collect and translate crucial evidence from across the world.”

 

In addition to filing on behalf of their own organizations, plaintiffs include Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center, Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project (ASAP), Catholic Legal Immigration Network, Inc. (CLINIC) and Santa Fe Dreamers Project (SFDP).

 

The complaint can be viewed here and here: http://innovationlawlab.org/faircourts.

 

In an effort to ensure greater transparency and accountability in the nation’s immigration courts, Innovation Law Lab also announced the full launch of an Immigration CourtWatch app, which enables court observers to record and upload information on the conduct of immigration judges.

 

The new tool allows data on immigration judge conduct to be gathered and stored in both individual and aggregate forms. This will provide advocates with valuable information to fight systemic bias and other unlawful court practices. This data can be used to bolster policy recommendations, along with advocacy and legal strategies.

 

Advocates, attorneys and other court watchers are encouraged to download and access the app available here: http://innovationlawlab.org/courtwatch.

In June, Law Lab and SPLC released a report, based on over two years of research and focus group interviews with attorneys and former immigration judges from around the country, on the failure of the immigration court system to fulfill the constitutional and statutory promise of fair and impartial case-by-case review. The report can be accessed here: The Attorney General’s Judges:  How the U.S. Immigration Courts Became a Deportation Tool.

###

 

The Southern Poverty Law Center, based in Alabama with offices in Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi and Washington, D.C., is a nonprofit civil rights organization dedicated to fighting hate and bigotry, and to seeking justice for the most vulnerable members of society. For more information, see www.splcenter.org and follow us on social media: Southern Poverty Law Center on Facebook and @splcenter on Twitter.  

 

Innovation Law Lab, based in Portland, Oregon with projects around the country and in Mexico, is a nonprofit organization that harnesses technology, lawyers, and activists to advance immigrant justice. For more information, visit www.innovationlawlab.org.

 

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Hon. Ilyce Shugall
Hon. Ilyce Shugall
U.S. Immigraton Judge (Retired)
Director, Immigrant Legal Defense Program, Justice & Diversity Center of the Bar Assn. of San Francisco.

 

And, here’s a statement in support of this much-needed litigation action from my distinguished Round Table colleague Judge (Ret.) Ilyce Shugall:

 

These were my remarks during the press conference:

 

I am Ilyce Shugall, a former immigration judge.  I became an IJ in 9/2017 and resigned in 3/2019.  I was sworn in by then-Chief IJ Mary Beth Keller.  She has also resigned.  I swore to uphold the constitution at my investiture.  When the administration made it impossible to continue to do so, I resigned.

 

I defended immigrants in immigration court for 18 years before I became an immigration judge, so I understood the inherent problems and limitations on judicial independence in a court system housed inside the Department of Justice, a prosecuting arm of the executive branch.  However, as Melissa said, this administration’s policies have entirely eroded what independence and legitimacy remained in the immigration court system.

 

As an immigration judge, I watched independence being stripped from the judge corps on a regular basis.  The attorney general ended administrative closure, taking away a vital docketing tool from the judges, while simultaneously contributing to the court’s ever-growing backlog.  The attorney general also significantly limited the judges’ ability to grant continuances.  Then, the attorney general and EOIR director implemented performance metrics which required judges complete 700 cases per year and created time limits on the adjudication of cases.  And this was only the beginning.  These policies have had a drastic impact on those appearing in immigration court, particularly those fleeing horrific violence who have been preventing from effectively presenting their cases.

 

New policies, memoranda, and regulations are being published regularly by this administration. Each one, an attack on the system, and each one with the goal to eliminate due process and expedite deportations.  I hope this lawsuit will eventually lead to a truly independent immigration court system, where judges can uphold their oaths and therefore immigrants receive the due process they are entitled and deserve.

 

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

 

Every one of us in America is entitled to Due Process; every day, vulnerable asylum applicants and other migrants are being dehumanized and denied their Due Process rights by an ridiculously unconstitutional Immigration “Court” system operating with the complicity of life tenured Federal Judges, all the way up to the Supremes, who are failing to live up to their oaths of office.

 

The grotesque, constant, open abuse of the legal and constitutional rights of the most vulnerable among us threatens the rights of each of us, including those individuals responsible for putting the Trump regime in power, maintaining it, and the Article III judges who are failing to stand up to the regime’s unconstitutional cruelty and mocking of our the rule of law. Enough! It’s long past time for the Article IIIs to live up to their responsibilities and stand up for the victims of tyranny!

The case is

LAS AMERICAS IMMIGRANT ADVOCACY CENTER, et. al v. TRUMP  (D OR)

Due Process Forever; Complicit Courts Never!

 

PWS

 

12-18-19

 

THIRD CIRCUIT FINALLY EXPOSES THE BIA AS A BIASED, UNPROFESSIONAL, UNETHICAL MESS, THREATENING INDIVIDUALS WITH TORTURE &/OR DEATH IN VIOLATION OF DUE PROCESS AND HUMAN RIGHTS:  In Sharp Contrast To Recent “Go Along To Get Along” Actions By The Supremes, 9th, 5th, 11th, and 4th Circuits, Circuit Judges McKee, Ambro and Roth Stand Up & Speak Out On BIA’s Unbelievably Horrible Performance: “I think it is as necessary as it is important to emphasize the manner in which the BIA dismissed Quinteros’ claim that he would be tortured (and perhaps killed) if sent back to El Salvador. For reasons I will explain below, it is difficult for me to read this record and conclude that the Board was acting as anything other than an agency focused on ensuring Quinteros’ removal rather than as the neutral and fair tribunal it is expected to be. That criticism is harsh and I do not make it lightly.”

NELSON QUINTEROS, Petitioner v. ATTORNEY GENERAL OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, 3rdCir., 12-17-19, published

PANEL:  Circuit Judges McKee, Ambro and Roth

OPINION BY: Judge Roth

CONCURRING OPINION: Judge McKee, Joined By Judges Ambro & Roth

LINK TO FULL OPINION:  https://www2.ca3.uscourts.gov/opinarch/183750p.pdf

READ THE FULL CONCURRING OPINION RIPPING THE BIA HERE:

McKEE, Circuit Judge, with whom Judges Ambro and Roth join, concurring.

I join my colleagues’ thoughtful opinion in its entirety. I write separately because I think it is as necessary as it is important to emphasize the manner in which the BIA dismissed Quinteros’ claim that he would be tortured (and perhaps killed) if sent back to El Salvador. For reasons I will explain below, it is difficult for me to read this record and conclude that the Board was acting as anything other than an agency focused on ensuring Quinteros’ removal rather than as the neutral and fair tribunal it is expected to be. That criticism is harsh and I do not make it lightly.

The BIA’s puzzling conclusions concerning Quinteros’ New York Yankees tattoo, although not the sole cause of my concern, illustrate the reasons I feel compelled to write separately. I will therefore begin by discussing the BIA’s decision-making process concerning this tattoo.

As Judge Roth notes, Quinteros testified that his New York Yankees tattoo would identify him as a former gang member.1 He also produced corroborating testimony to that effect from an expert witness and a study from the Harvard Law School International Rights Clinic. The first Immigration Judge to consider this evidence—which was apparently undisputed by the government—did so carefully and ultimately concluded that Quinteros “[h]as shown a clear likelihood that he would be killed or tortured by members of MS-13 and 18th Street gangs.”2 This finding was affirmed by the BIA upon its first review of Quinteros’ case,3 and affirmed again by the second IJ after we remanded for consideration in light of

1 Maj. Op. at 4-5.
2 JA125. The IJ also found the expert testimony convincing: “Dr. Boerman’s testimony persuasively illustrates how the Respondent could be mistaken for a gang member, since most gang members have tattoos, and there is a large number of MS-13 members in El Salvador . . .” Id.
3 JA130 (“We adopt and affirm the Immigration Judge’s decision.”).

1

Myrie.4 Thus, two IJs and a Board member had previously examined and accepted this finding. Yet, for reasons that are not at all apparent, the BIA suddenly reversed that conclusion upon this fourth review.

In an explanation that is both baffling and dismaying, the BIA now claims: “Apart from his own testimony and the testimony of his expert witness, the record is devoid of any objective evidence establishing that a person with a New York Yankees tattoo without any other gang identifying marks will be identified as a . . . gang member and subjected to torture.”5 I am at a loss to understand what the BIA is referring to by requiring “objective” evidence. The IJ whose order was being reviewed had held that Quinteros was credible, stating: “Based on a review of the totality of evidence, the Court finds that Respondent’s testimony was consistent with the record and he was forthright with the Court regarding his past membership in MS-13 gang. Thus, the Court finds Respondent credible.”6 Moreover, there was nothing to suggest that Quinteros’ testimony lacked credibility regarding any aspect of his fear of MS-13 or how gang members would interpret his tattoo, and neither IJ suggested anything to the contrary.7

The BIA properly states the applicable standard of review of an IJ’s credibility finding is “clear error,”8 but nowhere does it suggest any basis for finding such error in either IJs’ determination. I am therefore unable to ascertain any justification for the BIA’s sudden reversal after the three previous cycles of review all arrived at the opposite conclusion. I also remain baffled by the BIA’s usage of “objective evidence.” The firsthand testimony of the victim of any crime is probative evidence if it is credible9—the issue is

4 JA14.
5 JA5 (emphasis added).
6 JA12.
7 See JA 14 (second IJ’s conclusion that Quinteros was credible); JA118 (first IJ’s conclusion that Quinteros was credible); see also Pet. Br. 41-42.
8 See BIA Opinion at JA2 (citing C.F.R. § 1003.1(d)(3)(i)).
9 For example, in statutory rape cases, fully half of the states (including Pennsylvania, where Quinteros is being held) have abolished their rules requiring corroboration. The victim’s

2

the credibility of the witness. Once a witness’s testimony is found to be credible, it cannot arbitrarily be rejected merely to achieve a particular result. Even more salient, the BIA’s rejection of Quinteros’ credible testimony is inconsistent with controlling precedent and the regulations governing CAT relief.10 Those regulations state: “[t]he testimony of the applicant, if credible, may be sufficient to sustain the burden of proof without corroboration.”11 Thus, it is clear that corroborative evidence may not be necessary. In this case, where the testimony of the applicant is credible and is not questioned in any way, there is no reason to need corroboration.

Accordingly, Quinteros’ testimony should have been sufficient proof of any dispute about his tattoo even if he could be described as lacking objectivity. Moreover, there was nothing offered to suggest that the expert witness or the report of the Harvard Clinic was anything less than objective. It is impossible to discern from the record why the BIA refused to accept that external evidence. Moreover, given its apparent disregard for these three distinct, previously accepted pieces of evidence, I seriously doubt whether any evidence would have been capable of changing the agency’s analysis. Thus, it is the BIA’s own objectivity that concerns me here.

The agency’s discussion of the location of Quinteros’ tattoo heightens these concerns. First, the BIA expressed

account, if credible, is sufficient. See 18 PA. CONS. STAT. § 3106 (2018) (“The testimony of a complainant need not be corroborated in prosecutions under [Pennsylvania criminal law]. No instructions shall be given cautioning the jury to view the complainant’s testimony in any other way than that in which all complainants’ testimony is viewed.”); Vitauts M. Gulbis, Annotation, Modern Status of Rule Regarding Necessity for Corroboration of Victim’s Testimony in Prosecution for Sexual Offense, 31 A.L.R. 4th 120 § 4[a] (1984).

10 See, e.g., Valdiviezo-Galdamez v. Att’y Gen., 663 F.3d 582, 591 (3d Cir. 2011) (accepting as objective evidence the testimony of the petitioner alone); Auguste v. Ridge, 395 F.3d 123, 134 (3d Cir. 2005) (accepting as “objective” the “[e]vidence of past torture inflicted upon the applicant . . .”). 11 8 C.F.R. § 208.16.

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skepticism because the record does not contain a photograph of the tattoo, “or a description of its size and design.”12 It faulted Quinteros for not establishing that the tattoo is “publicly visible,” and stated, “[t]he record simply indicates that he has a tattoo on his right arm.”13 Yet, the Government never contested the existence of the tattoo and, as I have explained, Quinteros’ testimony about it was accepted as credible by the IJ.

Then the BIA objected that Quinteros never “clearly specified the location of his New York Yankees tattoo and his expert witness did not know its location.”14 However, two sentences later, the BIA states that “[t]he Record . . . simply indicates that he [Quinteros] has a tattoo on his right arm.”15 Therefore, not only was there never a dispute about the existence of the tattoo, there was also no dispute as to its location, and the BIA’s abortive suggestions to the contrary are simply inconsistent with a fair and neutral analysis of Quinteros’ claim. Finally, even if one sets that all aside, I can find no reasonable basis for the BIA to suppose that the specific design of the tattoo or testimony about its size was even necessary. Whatever its exact appearance, it was uncontested that it was a New York Yankees tattoo. And as noted by Judge Roth, the record had established that awareness of gang use of tattoos is so prevalent in El Salvador that individuals are routinely forced by police and rival gangs to remove their clothing for inspection of any tattoos that may be present.16 It therefore pains me to conclude that the BIA simply ignored evidence in an effort to find that Quinteros’ tattoo would not place him in peril as it was underneath his clothing.17

12 JA5.
13 JA5.
14 Id.
15 Id.
16 Maj. Op. at 22; see also JA61, 90-91, 162. Overlooking so obvious an inference of danger—arising from the undisputed existence of Quinteros’ tattoo—contradicts our directive that “the BIA must provide an indication that it considered such evidence, and if the evidence is rejected, an explanation as to why . . .” Zhu v. Att’y Gen., 744 F.3d 268, 272 (3d Cir. 2014). 17 JA5.

4

As troubling as the mishandling of Quinteros’ evidence might be standing alone, the BIA’s errors here are not an isolated occurrence. There are numerous examples of its failure to apply the binding precedent of this Circuit delineating the proper procedure for evaluating CAT appeals.18 Indeed, that framework has been mishandled, or simply absent, from several BIA opinions in the two years since we explicitly emphasized its importance in Myrie.19

As Judge Roth explains, Myrie instituted a two-part inquiry for evaluating whether a claim qualifies for relief under CAT. She describes the steps required and the points which must be addressed;20 we normally accept the BIA’s well- reasoned conclusions on each of these points, however,

“[t]he BIA must substantiate its decisions. We will not accord the BIA deference where its findings and conclusions are based on inferences

18 For our particular decisions on this topic, see Myrie v. Att’y Gen., 855 F.3d 509 (3d Cir. 2017); Pieschacon-Villegas v. Att’y Gen., 671 F.3d 303 (3d Cir. 2011).
19 Myrie, 855 F.3d at 516 (requiring the BIA to follow the process we have delineated, as, “[i]n order for us to be able to give meaningful review to the BIA’s decision, we must have some insight into its reasoning.”) (quoting Awolesi v. Ashcroft, 341 F.3d 227, 232 (3d Cir. 2003)). Among the examples of BIA error, see Serrano Vargas v. Att’y Gen., No. 17-2424, 2019 WL 5691807, at *2 (3d Cir. Nov. 4, 2019) (finding it “unclear” whether the BIA followed our precedent); Guzman v. Att’y Gen., 765 F. App’x. 721 (3d Cir. 2019) (finding ultimately non-determinative an incorrect application of the Myrie and Pieschacon-Villegas standards which had been summarily affirmed by the BIA); Zheng v. Att’y Gen., 759 F. App’x. 127, 130 (3d Cir. 2019) (requiring the appeals court to read between the lines of the BIA opinion to understand whether the conclusion satisfied the Myrie test); Antunez v. Att’y Gen., 729 F. App’x. 216, 223 (3d Cir. 2018) (concluding the BIA applied the wrong standard of review under Myrie).

20 Maj. Op, at 21.

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or presumptions that 21 are not reasonably grounded in the record.”

In other words, the BIA cannot act arbitrarily. We expect that it will “examine the relevant data and articulate a satisfactory explanation for its actions, including a ‘rational connection between the facts found and the choice made.’”22 Here, as already seen, the BIA’s conclusions fell far short of that low bar. According deference would therefore be to compound a mistaken application of law.

The BIA’s misapplication of Myrie here is consistent with other examples. Beginning with the first prong of Myrie’s first question (what will happen if a petitioner is removed to his or her country of origin), the BIA ignored evidence in the record. I have already discussed much of its tattoo analysis.23 Similarly, the BIA simplistically concluded that because Quinteros left El Salvador when he was a boy, he would not be recognized by El Salvadorian gangs upon his return.24 That conclusion was clearly contradicted in the record by credible and undisputed evidence that Quinteros knows “at least 70” current or former gang members in the United States who were deported to El Salvador and would recognize him there.25 The BIA was required to at least review the evidence Quinteros offered and provide a non-arbitrary reason for rejecting it.26

21 Kang v. Att’y Gen., 611 F.3d 157, 167 (3d Cir. 2010) (quoting Sheriff v. Att’y Gen., 587 F.3d 584, 589 (3d Cir. 2009)).
22 Motor Vehicle Mfrs. Ass’n of U.S., Inc. v. State Farm Mut. Auto. Ins. Co., 463 U.S. 29, 43 (1983) (quoting Burlington Truck Lines v. United States, 371 U.S. 156, 168 (1962)).

23 JA5.
24 JA4. The BIA strangely maintains in the face of the evidence presented that “[Quinteros] has not clearly articulated exactly how anyone in El Salvador will remember or recognize him . . .” id.
25 JA63-64.
26 Huang, 620 F.3d at 388 (“The BIA simply failed to address any evidence that, if credited, would lend support to [Petitioner’s case], and thus the decision does not reflect a consideration of the record as a whole.”).

6

And the errors do not stop there. Because it had not substantively addressed the testimony offered above, the BIA was left without substantive findings on which to determine Question II of the Myrie framework: does what will likely happen to a petitioner amount to torture? As Judge Roth makes clear, the BIA is required to conduct both steps of the Myrie analysis.27 By declining to reach clear findings of what would happen upon removal, the BIA prevented itself from then being able to determine whether those results met the legal standard for torture. The Myrie framework cannot be so easily evaded.

Lastly, to briefly reiterate Judge Roth’s important observations regarding Myrie’s second prong,28 a proper inquiry must “take[] into account our precedent that an applicant can establish governmental acquiescence even if the government opposes the [group] engaged in torturous acts.”29 This is only logical, as few countries admit to torturing and killing their citizens, even when privately condoning such conduct. Thus, if we simply took countries at their word, there would barely be anywhere on the globe where CAT could apply. We have previously made clear that this is the proper inquiry to determine acquiescence and have remanded based on the BIA’s failure to look past the stated policies of a given government.30 Other Circuit Courts of Appeals have done the same.31 The BIA is thus on notice that results, not press

27 Maj. Op, at 23 (citing Myrie, 855 F.3d at 516).
28 Maj. Op, at 24-25.
29 Pieschacon-Villegas v. Att’y Gen., 671 F.3d 303, 312 (2011).
30 See, e.g., Guerrero v. Att’y Gen., 672 F. App’x 188, 191 (3d Cir. 2016) (per curiam); Torres-Escalantes v. Att’y Gen., 632 F. App’x 66, 69 (3d Cir. 2015) (per curiam).
31 Barajas-Romero v. Lynch, 846 F.3d 351, 363 (9th Cir. 2017); Rodriguez-Molinero v. Lynch, 808 F.3d 1134, 1140 (7th Cir. 2015) (“[I]t is success rather than effort that bears on the likelihood of the petitioner’s being killed or tortured if removed”); Madrigal v. Holder, 716 F.3d 499, 510 (9th Cir. 2013) (“If public officials at the state and local level in Mexico would acquiesce in any torture [petitioner] is likely to suffer, this satisfies CAT’s requirement that a public official acquiesce in the torture, even if the federal government . . . would not similarly acquiescence.”); De La Rosa v. Holder,

7

releases or public statements, are what drive the test for

acquiescence under Myrie.
III.

In Quinteros’ case, as has happened before, “[t]he BIA’s opinion frustrates our ability to reach any conclusion . . .”32 In Cruz, we stated that “the BIA’s cursory analysis ignored the central argument in [Petitioner’s] motion to reopen that he was no longer removable for committing a crime of moral turpitude.”33 In Kang, we disapproved when “[t]he BIA ignored overwhelming probative evidence . . . its findings were not reasonably grounded in the record and thus . . . . [t]he BIA’s determination was not based on substantial evidence.”34 In Huang, we complained when “[t]he BIA’s analysis [did] little more than cherry-pick a few pieces of evidence, state why that evidence does not support a well-founded fear of persecution and conclude that [petitioner’s] asylum petition therefore lacks merit. That is selective rather than plenary review.”35 There are simply too many additional examples of such errors to feel confident in an administrative system established for the fair and just resolution of immigration disputes.36 Most disturbing,

598 F.3d 103, 110 (2d Cir. 2010) (“[I]t is not clear . . . why the preventative efforts of some government actors should foreclose the possibility of government acquiescence, as a matter of law, under the CAT.”).

32 Cruz v. Att’y Gen., 452 F.3d 240, 248 (3d Cir. 2006).
33 Id.
34 Kang, 611 F.3d at 167.
35 Huang v. Att’y Gen., 620 F.3d 372, 388 (3d Cir. 2010).
36 See, e.g., Huang Bastardo-Vale v. Att’y Gen., 934 F.3d 255, 259 n.1 (3d Cir. 2019) (en banc) (castigating the BIA for its “blatant disregard of the binding regional precedent . . .”); Mayorga v. Att’y Gen., 757 F.3d 126, 134-35 (3d Cir. 2014) (reversing a BIA decision without remand and observing that “[i]deally the BIA would have provided more analysis, explaining why it accepted the IJ’s (erroneous) reasoning . . .”) (alteration in original); Quao Lin Dong v. Att’y Gen., 638 F.3d 223, 229 (3d Cir. 2011) (finding the BIA “erred by misapplying the law regarding when corroboration is necessary . . .”); Gallimore v. Att’y Gen., 619 F.3d 216, 221 (3d Cir. 2010) (holding that “[t]he BIA’s analysis in all likelihood rests on an historically inaccurate premise . . . . the

8

these failures gravely affect the rights of petitioners, such as Quinteros, who allege that they will face torture or death if removed to their country of origin.

Although the BIA is “[n]ot a statutory body . . .”37 it has been described as “[t]he single most important decision-maker in the immigration system.”38 I doubt that any court or any other administrative tribunal so regularly addresses claims of life-changing significance, often involving consequences of life and death. It is therefore particularly important that the opinions of the BIA fairly and adequately resolve the legal arguments raised by the parties and render decisions based only upon the record and the law.

I understand and appreciate that the BIA’s task is made more difficult by the incredible caseload foisted upon it, and the fact that BIA members (and IJs for that matter) are horrendously overworked.39 But administrative shortcomings

BIA’s opinion fails adequately to explain its reasoning and, in any event, appears incorrect as a matter of law.”). Nor is this a concern of recent vintage, the BIA has been on notice for well over a decade. See, e.g., Kayembe v. Ashcroft, 334 F.3d 231, 238 (3d Cir. 2003) (“[T]he BIA in this case has failed even to provide us with clues that would indicate why or how [petitioner] failed to meet his burden of proof. As a result, ‘the BIA’s decision provides us with no way to conduct our . . . review.’”) (quoting Abdulai v. Ashcroft, 239 F.3d 542, 555 (3d Cir. 2001)); Abdulai, 239 F.3d at 555 (“[T]he availability of judicial review (which is specifically provided in the INA) necessarily contemplates something for us to review . . . . the BIA’s failure of explanation makes [this] impossible . . .”) (emphasis in original).

37 Anna O. Law, THE IMMIGRATION BATTLE IN AMERICAN COURTS 23 (2010) (citing unpublished internal history of the BIA).
38 Andrew I. Schoenholtz, Refugee Protection in the United States Post September 11, 36 COLUM. HUM. RTS. L. REV. 323, 353 (2005).

39 See Am. Bar Ass’n, Comm’n on Immigration, 2019 Update Report: Reforming the Immigration System: Proposals to Promote Independence, Fairness, Efficiency, and

9

can never justify denying the parties a fair and impartial hearing, or excuse allowing adjudications to devolve into a mere formality before removal.

I would like to be able to feel comfortable that the lopsided outcomes in immigration proceedings40 reflect the merits of the claims for relief raised there rather than the proverbial “rush to judgment.” Thus, on remand, I can only hope that Quinteros’ claims are heard by more careful and judicious ears than he was afforded in this appearance.

Professionalism in the Adjudication of Removal Cases, Vol. 1, 20-21 (2019), available at https://www.naij- usa.org/images/uploads/newsroom/ABA_2019_reforming_th e_immigration_system_volume_1.pdf (noting the continued heavy caseload of the BIA, with an increasing number of appeals likely in the near future, and a resulting tendency to dispose of cases with single-member opinions that address only a single issue in the case).

40 Jaya Ramji-Nogales, et al., Refugee Roulette: Disparities in Asylum Adjudication, 60 STAN. L. REV. 295, 359-61 (2007) (reporting that between 2001 and 2005, the BIA’s rate of granting asylum fell by up to 84%, with some categories of applicants receiving asylum only 5% of the time).

10

 

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

 

It’s about time! But, this is long, long, long, long overdue! Way overdue! It’s long past time for “harsh criticism” of the BIA’s unconstitutional and inexcusable behavior. Forget about treading on the feelings of the BIA judges. Start thinking about the lives of the individuals they are harming and potentially torturing and killing! It’s time for the “Article IIIs” to “can the legal niceties” and take some action to halt the abuses before more innocent lives are lost!

 

Refreshing as it is in some respects, this concurring opinion vastly understates the overwhelming case against the BIA being allowed to continue to operate in this unprofessional, unethical, and unconstitutional manner. In the end, the panel also makes itself complicit by sending the case back for yet another unwarranted remand for the BIA to abuse this individual once again. For God’s sake, grant the protection, which is the only possible legally correct result on this record. CAT is mandatory, not discretionary!

 

Interestingly, while the panel was hatching this remand, the BIA in Matter of O-F-A-S-, 27 I&N Dec. 709 (BIA 2019) was essentially “repealing CAT by intentional misconstruction” and running roughshod over almost every CAT precedent and principle described by the panel. How many times can the regime “poke the Article IIIs in the eyes with two sharp sticks” before the latter take some notice? You’re being treated like fools, cowards, and weaklings, and the rest of us are daily losing whatever respect we once had for the role of life-tenured Federal Judges in protecting our republic and our individual rights!

 

Clearly, the intentionally skewed outcomes in asylum and other protection cases are a result of the regime’s illegal and unconstitutional White Nationalist “war on asylum,” particularly directed against vulnerable women, children, and individuals of color.  Many of these individuals are improperly and unconstitutionally forced to “represent” themselves, if they are even fortunate enough to get into the hearing system. It’s modern day racist Jim Crow with lots of gratuitous dehumanization to boot. And, it’s being enabled by feckless Article III appellate courts.

 

Judge McKee and his colleagues need not “wonder” if the skewed results of this system are fixed. The public pronouncements by overt White Nationalists like Session, Barr, Miller, “Cooch Cooch,” and Trump himself make their disdain for the law, the Constitution, individuals of color, and the Federal Courts crystal clear. There is no “mystery” here! Just look at “Let ‘Em Die In Mexico” or the preposterously fraudulent “Safe Third Country Agreements” that have effectively eliminated Due Process and U.S. protection laws without legislation.

 

Read the truth from the National Association of Immigration Judges or one of the many other experts in the field who have exposed the unconstitutional operations of the Immigration Courts and the need for immediate action to end the abuse and restore at least a semblance of Due Process! Of course, these aren’t fair and impartial adjudications as required by the Constitution. They haven’t been for some time now. No reasonable person or jurist could think that “kangaroo courts” operating under the thumb of enforcement zealots like Sessions and Barr could be fair and impartial as required by the Constitution!

 

And the “backlogs” adding to the pressure on the BIA and Immigration Judges are overwhelmingly the result of “Aimless Docket Reshuffling” by the DOJ, which went into “overdrive” during this regime. The regime then “pulls the wool” over the eyes of the Article IIIs and the public by deflecting attention from their own “malicious incompetence” while shifting the blame to the victims – the respondents and their attorneys. How cowardly and dishonest can one get? Yet, the Article IIIs fail time after time to look at the actual evidence of “malicious incompetence” by the Trump regime that has been compiled by TRAC and others!

 

Sessions and Barr have made it clear that the only purpose of their weaponized and “dumbed down” Immigration “Courts” is to churn out removal orders on the “Deportation Express.” “Reflect on the merits?” Come on, man! You have got to be kidding! There is nothing in this perverted process that encourages such care or reflection or even informed decision making. That’s why judges are on “production quotas!” It’s about volume, not quality. Sessions actually said it out loud at an Immigration Judges’ so-called “training session!” In the unlikely event that the respondent actually “wins” one, even against these odds, Sessions, Whitaker, and Barr have all shown how they can unconstitutionally and unethically simply reach down and change results to favor the DHS.

 

As the bogus denials pile up, even though country conditions are not materially improving in most “sending” countries, the Trump Regime, EOIR, DOJ, and DHS use these unfair results to build their false narrative that the artificially inflated denial rates reflect the lack of merits of the claims.

 

Would Court of Appeals Judges or Justices of the Supremes subject themselves or their families to “Immigration Court Justice” in any type of meaningful dispute? Of course not! So, why is it “Constitutionally OK” for often unrepresented individuals on trial for their lives to be subjected to this system? It clearly isn’t! So, why is it being done every day?

 

End the dangerous, unethical, and immoral “Judicial Task Avoidance.” Time for the Article IIIs to step up to the plate, stop enabling, stop remanding, stop looking the other way, and rule this entire system unconstitutional, as it most certainly is. Stop all deportations until Congress creates an independent Immigration Court system that complies with Due Process! Assign a “Special Master” to run EOIR without DOJ interference. Those few cases where the public health or safety is actually at risk should be tried before U.S. Magistrate Judges or retired U.S. District Judges until at least temporary Due Process fixes can be made to the Immigration Courts.

 

Sound radical? Not as radical as sentencing vulnerable individuals to death, torture, or other unspeakable harm without any semblance of Due Process — subjecting individuals to a “crapshoot for their lives.” And, that’s what we’re doing now because Article III Courts don’t have the guts to do their job and “just say no” – once and for all — to EOIR’s daily charade that mocks our Constitution and our humanity!

 

Due Process Forever!

A maliciously incompetent regime and complicit courts, never!

PWS

12-17-19

FARCE UNDER THE “BIG TOP” – “Clown Courts” Deliver Potential Death Sentences With Nary A Trace Of Due Process As Article III Judges Beclown Themselves By Looking The Other Way!

Michelle Hackman
Michelle Hackman
Immigration Reporter
Wall Street Journal
Alicia A. Caldwell
Alicia A. Caldwell
Immigration Reporter
Wall Street Journal

Michelle Hackman and Alicia A. Caldwell report for the Wall Street Journal:

 

https://www.wsj.com/articles/immigration-tent-courts-at-border-raise-due-process-concerns-11576332002

Immigration Tent Courts at Border Raise Due-Process Concerns

By

Michelle Hackman and

Alicia A. Caldwell | Photographs by Verónica G. Cárdenas for The Wall Street Journal

Dec. 14, 2019 9:00 am ET

BROWNSVILLE, Texas—Each morning well before sunrise, dozens of immigrants line up on the international bridge here to enter a recently erected tent facility at the U.S. border.

Inside a large wedding-style tent, the government has converted shipping containers into temporary courtrooms, where flat screens show the judge and a translator, who are in front of a camera in chambers miles away.

The tents, which appeared at ports of entry here and up the Rio Grande in Laredo in late summer, are the latest manifestation of the Trump administration’s evolving response to a surge of migrants seeking asylum at the southern border.

SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS

Do you think the differences between the tent courts and other immigration courts deny some applicants due process? Join the conversation below.

Migrants are ushered to these courts dozens at a time, allowing them access to the U.S. legal system without admitting them onto U.S. soil. They are already part of yet another Trump administration experiment, the Migrant Protection Protocols, which requires migrants to live in Mexico for the duration of their court cases.

The administration says the tent courts are designed to help the immigration system move more quickly through cases, providing asylum faster for qualified applicants and turning away the rest—many of whom, the administration says, have submitted fraudulent claims.

In the past, nearly all families and children arriving at the border were allowed into the U.S. to await hearings. But now, tens of thousands of asylum seekers must wait months in Mexican border cities that have some of the highest crime rates in the Western Hemisphere.

Asylum seekers waited in line to attend their immigration hearings on the Gateway International Bridge in Matamoros.

On a recent Friday, Judge Eric Dillow connected with the Brownsville tent via videoconference from his courtroom in Harlingen, Texas, about 30 miles away. The migrants, seated at a folding table, were shown on a large screen.

Judge Dillow planned to hold hearings for 28 migrants that morning, but only 17 appeared at the bridge the requisite four hours before their 8:30 a.m. hearing. Only two brought a lawyer. The rest were read their rights as a group, and when asked if they had questions, none raised their hands.

James McHenry, head of the Executive Office for Immigration Review, the Justice Department agency that oversees immigration courts, said temporary courts adhere to the same procedures and offer the same rights to people as other immigration courts. “In all cases, a well-trained and professional immigration judge considers the facts and evidence, applies the relevant law, and makes an appropriate decision consistent with due process,” he said.

But immigrant-rights advocates and the union representing immigration judges—who are Justice Department employees—say the unique conditions of the tent courts deny migrants due process by depriving them of meaningful access to lawyers or interaction with judges, making the setup essentially a rubber stamp for deportation.

“It’s a system that’s designed in its entire structure to turn people away,” said Laura Lynch, senior policy counsel with the American Immigration Lawyers Association.

The judges union has expressed concern over numerous issues: Judges can’t interact with applicants face-to-face, which the union says is important to assess credibility. Immigration court officials aren’t in the tents, which are operated by U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Judges can’t hand migrants documents directly to ensure they contain no errors. Unlike most U.S. courts, the tents are closed to the public and press.

A Cuban asylum seeker waited in Matamoros to present his documents to the agent who will be escorting him to his immigration hearing.

“The space of the court is supposed to be controlled by the court,” said Judge Ashley Tabaddor, president of the National Association of Immigration Judges. “But the tents, we don’t have any control over.”

Most migrants who cross the border near Brownsville are sent to Matamoros, Mexico, just across the Rio Grande, where they live in shelters or tents near the bridge.

They are returned with little more than a sheet of paper stating their first court date and a list of lawyers to contact. But those contacts aren’t very useful because they have either U.S.-based or toll-free phone numbers that don’t function in Mexico.

Of the 47,313 people whose cases were filed between January and September, only 2.3% have legal representation and only 11 have been granted asylum or other legal status, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University, which tracks immigration court data.

Pro-bono lawyers who work with these migrants are fearful to travel far beyond the U.S. border into Mexico. Inside the tents, lawyers are typically permitted 15 minutes to meet clients before hearings. In most other U.S. courts, lawyers are free to visit clients, and detention facilities provide more opportunities for meetings.

On two recent days in the tents, migrants appearing alone spent about five minutes each before a judge, while migrants with lawyers took between 20 and 30 minutes each.

“The system is dependent on individuals not finding representation because they can be deported much easier and faster,” said Jeff O’Brien, a California-based immigration lawyer representing several Brownsville clients pro bono. “If everyone had a lawyer, it would essentially come to a halt.”

A U.S. Customs and Border Protection agent checked documents presented by asylum seekers.

Documentation errors are a common hurdle. Applicants’ addresses are often listed on forms as simply “domicilio conocido,” which roughly translates as general delivery, or sometimes a Matamoros shelter that many migrants avoid because they are scared to travel farther into the city.

Tent camp residents also had notices for hearings when courts aren’t open: one at 1 a.m. and another on a Saturday.

It isn’t known how the government notifies these migrants about changes in their cases without valid addresses. Migrants who aren’t at the bridge for hearings are assumed to have abandoned their cases. Government lawyers ask judges to deport absentees—ending asylum requests and barring them from the U.S. for a decade.

Asked about how address discrepancies are handled, a Justice Department spokesman said judges follow the Immigration Court Practice Manual. The manual requires migrants in the U.S. to notify the court of address changes, and in cases where they are detained, it requires the government to notify the court where. Neither scenario applies to migrants in Mexico.

Without lawyers, applicants routinely make paperwork errors—such as submitting documents in Spanish, or documents translated into English without a form certifying the translator is English-proficient—that advocates say they have seen judges use to order them deported.

At a recent hearing in Brownsville, a Honduran woman and her baby daughter appeared before Judge Sean D. Clancy in Harlingen. A CBP officer in Brownsville had faxed the woman’s asylum application to Harlingen, where a clerk handed it to the judge.

A Central American asylum-seeking mother hugged her child on a November morning in Matamoros.

“Are you afraid of returning to Honduras?” Judge Clancy asked the woman. A translator beside him repeated the question in Spanish. “Very much,” came the translated reply.

Judge Clancy looked at her application and noted a different response. “One question here says, ‘Do you fear harm if you return to your home country?’ And you checked ‘no.’”

The woman appeared confused. Judge Clancy told her to return to court with a properly completed application on April 15, when a date for her full asylum hearing would be set.

Write to Michelle Hackman at Michelle.Hackman@wsj.com and Alicia A. Caldwell at Alicia.Caldwell@wsj.com

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

What a total disgrace and mockery of justice! What do Circuit Court of Appeals judges do for a living if they don’t have the legal skills and courage to stand up for our Constitution and our asylum laws against US Government fraud and abuses like this?

Nobody without a lawyer has any chance in this system! With a representation rate of an astoundingly low 2.3% due to the Trump regime’s intentional obstacles, roadblocks, and refusal to promote and facilitate pro bono representation, this system is nothing less than an unconstitutional and illegal “killing floor” (a reasonable chance to be represented by pro bono counsel is actually a statutory requirement). You don’t have to be much of an Article III Judge to recognize the the systemic fraud and abuse going on here. But, a judge would have to have the courage to stand up to the Trump regime and put a stop to this disgraceful nonsense! Sadly, courage seems to be something in very short supply at the appellate levels of the Federal Judiciary these days.

Thanks Michelle and Alicia for exposing this ongoing parody of justice!

 

PWS

12-17-19

 

 

 

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.”

Paul Moses
Paul Moses
Reporter
The Daily Beast
Tim Healy
Tim Healy
Reporter
The Daily Beast

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

 

 

ABIGAIL HAUSLOHNER @ WASHPOST: UNDER TRUMP, MORE JUDGES, MORE DETENTION, MORE RANDOM CRUELTY, FEWER ACTUAL REMOVALS!

 

Abigail Hauslohner
Abigail Hauslohner
National Immigration Reporter, Washington Post

https://apple.news/AJdVpL896RYGLiF1yFiyFFA

 

It has been nearly 700 days since Bakhodir Madjitov was taken to prison in the United States. He has never been charged with a crime.

Madjitov, a 38-year-old Uzbek national and father of three U.S. citizens, received a final deportation order after his applications to legally immigrate failed. He is one of the approximately 50,000 people jailed on any given day in the past year under the authority of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the most foreigners held in immigration detention in U.S. history.

The majority of those detainees, like Madjitov, are people with no prior criminal records.

According to the latest snapshot of ICE’s prisoner population, from early November, nearly 70 percent of the inmates had no prior criminal conviction. More than 14,000 are people the U.S. government has determined have a reasonable fear of persecution or torture if deported.

Though President Trump has made cracking down on immigration a centerpiece of his first term, his administration lags far behind President Barack Obama’s pace of deportations. Obama — who immigrant advocates at one point called the “deporter in chief” — removed 409,849 people in 2012 alone. Trump, who has vowed to deport “millions” of immigrants, has yet to surpass 260,000 deportations in a single year.

And while Obama deported 1.18million people during his first three years in office, Trump has deported fewer than 800,000.

It is unclear why deportations have been happening relatively slowly.

Eager to portray Trump as successful in his first year in office, ICE’s 2017 operational report compared “interior removals” — those arrested by ICE away from the border zones — during the first eight months of Trump’s term with the same eight-month period from the previous year, reporting a 37percent increase from 44,512 to 61,094 people.

But the agency also acknowledged that overall deportation numbers had slipped, attributing the decline to fewer border apprehensions and suggesting that an “increased deterrent effect from ICE’s stronger interior enforcement efforts” had caused the change.

Administration officials this year have noted privately that Mexican nationals — who are easier to deport than Central Americans because of U.S. immigration laws — also made up a far greater proportion of the migrants apprehended along the U.S.-Mexico border during Obama’s presidency.

ICE officials say that the detainee population has swelled — often cresting at 5,000 people more than ICE is budgeted to hold — as a direct result of the influxes of migrants along the southern border, and that when ICE is compelled to release people into the United States, it creates “an additional pull factor to draw more aliens to the U.S. and risk public safety,” said ICE spokesman Bryan Cox.

“The increase in ICE’s detained population this year was directly tied to the border crisis,” Cox said. “About 75 percent of ICE’s detention book-ins in fiscal year 2019 came directly from the border.”

Judge bars Trump fast-track deportation policy, saying threat to legal migrants was not assessed

Immigrant advocates say the packed jail cells result from an administration obsessed with employing harsh immigration tactics as a means of deterrence. They say the Trump administration is keeping people like Madjitov locked up when they previously would have been released pending the outcomes of their cases.

ICE also is holding people longer: Non-criminals are currently spending an average of 60 days in immigrant jails, nearly twice the length of the average stay 10 years ago, and 11 days longer than convicted criminals, according to government statistics.

“ICE has sort of declared open season on immigrants,” said Michael Tan, a senior staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union’s Immigrants’ Rights Project. “So you’re seeing people who under the previous administration would have been eligible for bond and release being kept in custody.”

ICE officials say that they are enforcing a set of laws created by Congress and that the agency is working to take dangerous criminals off the streets. At a fiery White House briefing in October, acting ICE director Matthew Albence spoke of agents “unnecessarily putting themselves in harm’s way” on a daily basis to remove foreign nationals who might cause harm to U.S. citizens. ICE Assistant Director Barbara Gonzalez spoke of having to “hold the hand of too many mothers who have lost a child to a DUI, or somebody else who’s been raped by an illegal alien or someone with a nexus to immigration.”

Most of those in immigration detention are neither hardened criminals nor saints. They are people who overstayed their visas, or whose asylum claims failed. They are people who struggled to navigate a complex immigration system, or who never tried at all, or who made critical mistakes along the way. They tend to be poor, luckless and lawyerless, advocates and researchers say.

A November snapshot of ICE’s prisoner population showed that approximately 68percent had no prior criminal conviction. According to the agency’s deportation data, one of the most common criminal convictions is illegal reentry.

Cox said that all ICE detainees are “evaluated on a case-by-case basis based upon the totality of their circumstances” and that those kept in detention are “generally those with criminality or other public safety or flight-risk factors.”

With ICE’s release of 250,000 “family units” apprehended along the border, the agency released 50percent more people in fiscal 2019 than in the previous year, Cox said.

Low priority for deportation

Madjitov was born in 1981 into a family of musicians in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, which was then part of the Soviet Union. His father taught him to play the karnay, a long, hornlike instrument, and he joined an ensemble of traditional musicians.

The family was religious, and as a young man in 2005, Madjitovjoined thousands of others in a mass protest of the brutal regime of Uzbek President Islam Karimov, who was infamous for his persecution of political dissidents and the devout. Government forces opened fire on the crowds, killing hundreds, and they arrested scores of others, including Madjitov. After being released from prison weeks later, Madjitov resolved to leave Uzbekistan.

A music festival in Austin several months later provided the ticket out. Madjitov and a dozen other folk musicians landed there in 2006, on P-3 temporary visas for entertainers.

He traveled from the festival to live with friends — other Uzbek immigrants — in Kissimmee, Fla. He found a job working at a Disney hotel and applied for asylum.

His application was rejected, so he appealed it. And when the appeal was rejected, he appealed that, his case bumping along through the dense bureaucracy with hundreds of thousands of others.

ICE takes to White House bully pulpit to again blast ‘sanctuary cities’

Madjitov received a final order of removal in 2011. But with no criminal conduct on his record, he was deemed a low priority for deportation by the Obama administration.

Ten years after Madjitov’s arrival, President Trump came to office on a vow to deport “criminal illegal aliens,” the murderers, rapists and gang members who Trump claimed were gaming the immigration system, preying on U.S. citizens and their tax dollars.

Madjitov was taken into custody in 2017.

“My family, myself, we never did anything wrong,” Madjitov said in a phone interview from the Etowah County Detention Center in Alabama, where he is being held, a thousand miles from his family in Connecticut. “That’s why we chose to stay in this country, because of the freedom.”

After nearly three years in office, Trump has made good on part of his promise. Between Oct.1, 2018, and the end of September, the administration initiated more than 419,000 deportation proceedings, more than at any point in at least 25 years, according to government statistics compiled by Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.

Unlike under Obama, deporting the migrants has proved more difficult. Many of those crossing the southern border have requested asylum, which entitles them to a certain amount of due process in the immigration court system — protections that the administration also is working to dismantle.

Immigrant advocates believe the system has become overwhelmed because of the administration’s zeal to deport, even though in many cases it lacks the resources or legal standing to do so.

“The Obama administration, because they had enforcement priorities, were able to streamline deportations,” said Sophia Genovese, an attorney with the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Southeast Immigrant Freedom Initiative. “The Trump administration is making it harder for people to obtain visas or legal status, and at the same time their deportation priority is everyone. So because of that, they clog the system.”

Most of the serious criminals slated for deportation come to ICE by way of the criminal justice system, according to ICE and defense lawyers. Convicted murderers or drug offenders finish their sentences in state or federal prisons and then are transferred into ICE’s custody.

In Georgia, lawyers say they have noticed a ballooning number of immigrants who have no criminal records but have been pulled into ICE detention because of violations such as driving without a license or without insurance. They include victims of domestic violence and speakers of Central American indigenous languages, Genovese said.

“It’s been really difficult to provide them with representation,” she said. “In court, their cases aren’t being translated. And a lot of them are just giving up.”

In 2018, a federal judge granted a preliminary injunction in a class-action lawsuit filed on behalf of Ansly Damus, a Haitian ethics professor who claimed asylum but was kept in ICE detention for two years afterward despite not having a criminal record or posing a flight risk. U.S. District Judge James E. Boasburg recognized that such people normally would have been “overwhelmingly released,” and prohibited five ICE field offices from denying parole without individual determinations that a person poses a flight risk or danger to the public. Tan said the ACLU is now monitoring ICE’s compliance with the injunction and is seeing mixed results.

‘All of them are fighting their cases’

The U.S. government might have valid reasons to be suspicious of Madjitov, but officials declined to say what they are.

According to federal court filings that do not name Madjitov, his wife’s brother, also an Uzbek immigrant, traveled to Syria in 2013 to join the al-Nusra Front, an extremist group with ties to al-Qaeda. Saidjon Mamadjonov was killed shortly thereafter. And the FBI later accused Madjitov’s other brother-in-law, SidikjonMamadjonov, of hiding what he knew about Saidjon’s death during interviews with federal investigators.

But no one ever accused Madjitov or his wife, MadinaMamadjonova, of wrongdoing.

The couple settled in Windsor, Conn., where Madjitov worked as a home health aide and Mamadjonova gave birth to two boys.

Madjitov planted a garden of tomatoes, cucumbers, eggplant and apple trees in the family’s yard. On Fridays, they would go to the mosque together, and on weekends they would go to the park and out for pizza or Chinese food.

ICE Air: Shackled deportees, air freshener and cheers. America’s one-way trip out.

“I always worked with my lawyer wherever I lived — I always notified DHS where I lived, and they always gave me a work permit,” Madjitov said.

“We were a very happy couple,” said Mamadjonova, who said she has struggled to support the family since his arrest and has been battling depression. “He was very affectionate, a very kind and caring father.”

On Oct. 31, 2017, another Uzbek immigrant who claimed to have been inspired by the Islamic State terrorist group drove a rented truck onto a crowded bike path in Manhattan, killing eight people.

A few weeks later, law enforcement officials came to Madjitov’shouse searching for information about the brother-in-law who had died in Syria three years earlier. The couple said they told investigators they didn’t have anything. A month after that, on a cold December morning, ICE showed up and arrested Madjitovbecause hehad a final order of removal.

Mamadjonova said her husband was still in his pajamas when ICE asked her to go retrieve his identification documents from the bedroom. “When I came back, he was handcuffed,” said Mamadjonova, who was 39 weeks pregnant with the couple’s third child at the time. “He was crying.”

The Trump administration, which increased its removals of Uzbek nationals by 46percent in 2017, never again asked Madjitov about Saidjon or terrorism. ICE said Madjitov’s file contained no criminal record, nor was he marked as a “known or suspected terrorist.”

He is still in captivity.

ICE says that Madjitov’s crime is his failure to leave the United States after receiving a final order of removal, and that the agency is authorized to continue holding him because he refused to board a deportation flight in June 2019, when ICE tried to remove him.

The Etowah County Detention Center, where Madjitov is being held, is known among immigration attorneys as a facility that holds people ICE wants to put away for a long time. There, Madjitov is one of about 120 people in a unit, surrounded by immigrants with a shared sense of desperation.

“All of them are from different countries, from Africa, from Asia, from different religions. Most of them — like 90 percent — have families in this country. So all of them are fighting for their cases,” he said. “Every day I pray to God. Every day I’m scared they’re going to try to remove me. Every day, I have nightmares.”

Abigail Hauslohner covers immigrant communities and immigration policy on The Washington Post’s National desk. She covered the Middle East as a foreign correspondent from 2007 to 2014, and served as the Post’s Cairo bureau chief. She has also covered Muslim communities in the United States and D.C. politics and government.

Democracy Dies in Darkness

© 1996-2019 The Washington Post

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

As Abigail notes, the causes for the phenomenon of fewer removals under Trump are complex. But certainly, “malicious incompetence” and the screwed up “when everyone’s a priority nobody is a priority” policy of the Trump Administration, particularly the DHS, are key contributing factors.

The system is sick and dying. But,”Aimless Docket Reshuffling” is alive and well in our dysfunctional Immigration Courts.

We also should never underestimate the continuing pernicious effects of “Gonzo” Sessions’s unlawful and downright stupid decision in Matter of Castro-Tum to force more than 300,000 properly closed “low priority” cases back onto already overwhelmed dockets, thus disabling one of the few methods of rational docket control at the Immigraton Judges’ disposal.

And, last, but not least, are the feckless Federal Courts of Appeals who allow this clearly unconstitutional mess — bogus “courts” grossly mismanaged by biased, non-judicial prosecutors and politicos — to continue to violate the Fifth Amendment every day. They long ago should have put a stop to this unconstitutional travesty and forced the appointment of an independent “Special Master” to oversee the Immigration Courts and restore Due Process until Congress does its job and legislates to create an independent Immigration Court System that actually complies with the Fifth Amendment of our Constitution.

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.”

Molly O’Toole
Molly O’Toole
Immigration Reporter
LA Times

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

BIA NEWS: Judge Garry D. Malphrus Leapfrogs Into Acting Chair Job, As Two Of The Remaining “Voices Of Reason” Bite The Dust At Barr’s “Newly Packed” Falls Church Station Stop On The “Trump Deportation Express!”

BIA NEWS: Judge Garry D. Malphrus Leapfrogs Into Acting Chair Job, As Two Of The Remaining “Voices Of Reason” Bite The Dust At Barr’s “Newly Packed” Falls Church Station Stop On The “Trump Deportation Express!”

 

By Paul Wickham Schmidt

Exclusive for immigrationcourtside.com

 

Nov . 7, 2019. In a little noticed move, “Trump Chump” Attorney General Billy Barr in October advanced conservative GOP appointed Appellate Immigration Judge Garry D. Malphrus to the position of Acting Chair of the Board of Immigration Appeals in Falls Church Virginia. The move followed the sudden reputedly essentially forced “retirement” of former Chair David Neal in September.

 

Notably, Barr bypassed long-time BIA Vice Chair and three-decade veteran of the Executive Office for Immigration Review (“EOIR”) (which “houses” the BIA) Judge Charles “Chuck” Adkins-Blanch to elevate Judge Malphrus. Increasingly, particularly in the immigration area, the Trump Administration has circumvented bureaucratic chains of command and normal succession protocols for “acting” positions in favor of installing those committed to their restrictionist political program.

 

Like former Chair Neal, Vice Chair Adkins-Blanch has long been rumored not to be on the “Restrictionist A Team” at EOIR. Apparently, that’s because he occasionally votes in favor of recognizing migrants’ due process rights and for their fair and impartial treatment under the immigration laws.

 

For example, although generally known as a low-key “middle of the road jurist,” Vice Chair Adkins-Blanch authored the key BIA precedent Matter of A-R-C-G-, 26 I&N Dec. 388 (BIA 2014). There, the BIA recognized the right of abused women, particularly from the Northern Triangle area of Central America, to receive protection under our asylum, and immigration laws. That decision was widely hailed as both appropriate and long overdue by immigration scholars and advocates and saved numerous lives and futures during the period it was in effect.  It also promoted judicial efficiency by encouraging ICE to not oppose well-documented domestic violence cases.

 

Nevertheless, in a highly controversial 2018 decision, White Nationalist restrictionist Attorney General Jeff Sessions dismantled A-R-C-G-. This was an an overt attempt to keep brown-skinned refugees, particularly women, from qualifying for asylum. Matter of A-B –, 27 I&N Dec. 316 (A.G. 2018). Session’s decision was widely panned by immigration scholars and ripped apart by U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan, the only Article III Judge to address it in detail to date, in Grace v. Whitaker, 344 F. Supp. 3d 96 (D.D.C. 2018). Nevertheless, Matter of A-B- remains a precedent in Immigration Court.

 

In addition to the Malphrus announcement, sources have told “Courtside” that veteran BIA Appellate Immigration Judges John Guendelsberger and Molly Kendall Clark will be retiring at the end of December. While the current BIA intentionally has been configured over the past three Administrations to have nothing approaching a true “liberal wing,” Judges Guendelsberger and Kendall Clark were generally perceived as fair, scholarly, and willing to support and respect individual respondents’ rights, at least in unpublished, non-precedential decisions.

 

This was during an era when the BIA as a whole was moving in an ever more restrictive direction, seldom publishing precedent decisions favoring or vindicating the rights of individuals over DHS enforcement. Additionally, under Sessions and now Barr, the BIA has increasingly been pushed aside and given the role of “restrictionist enforcer” rather than “expert tribunal.” The most significant policies are rewritten in favor of hard-line enforcement and issued as “precedents” by the Attorney General, sometimes without any input or consultation from the BIA at all.

 

The BIA’s new role evidently is to insure that Immigration Judges aggressively use these restrictionist precedents to quickly remove individuals without regard to due process. Apparently, this new role also includes promptly reversing any grants of relief to individuals, thus insuring that ICE Enforcement wins no matter what, and actively discouraging individuals from daring to use our justice system to assert their rights. To this end, Barr’s six most recent judicial appointments to the BIA, part of an obvious “court-packing scheme,” are all Immigration Judges with asylum denial rates far in excess of the national average and reputations for being unsympathetic, sometimes also rude and demeaning, to respondents and their attorneys.

 

Indeed, adding insult to injury, Barr’s latest regulatory proposal would give a non-judicial official, the EOIR Director, decisional and precedent setting authority over the BIA in certain cases. This directly undoes some of the intentional separation of administrative and judicial functions that had been one of the objectives of EOIR.

 

Judge Guendelsberger was originally appointed to the BIA by the late Attorney General Janet Reno in 1995. However, as a member (along with me) of the notorious due process oriented “Gang of Five,” he often wrote or joined dissents from some of the BIA majority’s unduly restrictive asylum jurisprudence. Consequently, Judge Guendelsberger and the rest of the “Gang” were “purged” from the BIA by Attorney General John Ashcroft in 2003.

Reassigned to “re-education camp” in the bowels of the BIA, Judge Guendelsberger worked his way back and was “rehabilitated” and reappointed to the BIA by Attorney General Eric Holder in August 2009. This followed several years as a “Temporary Board Member,” (“TBM”). The TBM is a clever device used to conceal the dysfunction caused by the Ashcroft purge by quietly designating senior BIA staff as judges to overcome the shortage caused by the purge and irrational BIA “downsizing” used to cover up the political motive for the purge. TBMs are also disenfranchised from voting at en banc, thus insuring a more compliant and less influential temporary judicial workforce.

Judge Guendelsberger was the only member of the “Gang of Five” to achieve rehabilitation. However, his former “due process fire” was gone. In his “judicial reincarnation” he seldom dissented from BIA precedents. He even joined and authored decisions restricting the ability of refugees to qualify for asylum based on persecution from gangs that the governments of the Northern Triangle were unwilling or unable to control or were actually using to achieve political ends.

Indeed, his later public judicial pronouncements bore little resemblance to the courageous and often forward-looking jurisprudence with which he was associated during his “prior judicial life” with the “Gang of Five.” Nevertheless, he continued to save lives whenever possible “under the radar screen” in his unpublished decisions, which actually constitute the vast bulk of a BIA judge’s work.

Judge Kendall Clark was finally appointed to a permanent BIA Appellate Judgeship by Attorney General Loretta Lynch in February 2016, following a lengthy series of appointments as a TBM. Perhaps because of her disposition to recognize respondents’ rights in an era of sharp rightward movement at the BIA, she authored few published precedents.

However, she did write or participate in a number of notable unpublished cases that saved lives at the time and advanced the overall cause of due process. She also had the distinction of serving as a Senior Legal Advisor to four different BIA Chairs (including me) from 1995 to 2016.

Thus, the BIA continues its downward spiral from a tribunal devoted to excellence, best practices, due process, and fundamental fairness to one whose primary function is to serve as a “rubber stamp” for White Nationalist restrictionist enforcement initiatives by DHS. The voices of reasonable, thoughtful, scholarly jurists like Judges Guendelsberger and Kendall Clark will be missed.

They are some of the last disappearing remnants of what EOIR could have been under different circumstances.  Their departure also shows why an independent Article I Judiciary, with unbiased judges appointed because of their reputations for fairness, scholarship, timeliness, teamwork, and demonstrated respect for the statutory and constitutional rights of individuals, is the only solution for the current dysfunctional mess at EOIR.

PWS

11-07-19

 

 

 

HALLOWEEN HORROR STORY: Opaque & Biased Politicized Judicial Hiring Denies Migrants The Fair & Impartial Adjudication To Which They Are Constitutionally Entitled – Given The Generous Legal Standards, A Worldwide Refugee Crisis, & Asylum Officers’ Positive Findings In Most Cases, Asylum Seekers Should Be Winning The Vast Majority Of Immigration Court Cases — Instead, They Are Being “Railroaded” By A Biased System & Complicit Article III Courts!

Tanvi Misra
Tanvi Misra
Immigration Reporter
Roll Call

 

https://www.rollcall.com/news/congress/doj-changed-hiring-promote-restrictive-immigration-judges?fbclid=IwAR2VfI3AKcttNoXlc_MX0sa-6X94bsOWF4btxb7tWDBz7Es4bvqB63oZA-0

 

Tanvi Misra reports for Roll Call:

 

DOJ changed hiring to promote restrictive immigration judges

New practice permanently placed judges on powerful appellate board, documents show

Posted Oct 29, 2019 2:51 PM

Tanvi Misra

@Tanvim

More non-Spanish speaking migrants are crossing the borderDHS advances plan to get DNA samples from immigrant detaineesWhite House plans to cut refugee admittance to all-time low

 

Error! Filename not specified.

James McHenry, director of the Justice Department’s Executive Office for Immigration Review, testifies before a Senate panel in 2018. Memos from McHenry detail changes in hiring practices for six restrictive judges placed permanently on the Board of Immigration Appeals. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

The Department of Justice has quietly changed hiring procedures to permanently place immigration judges repeatedly accused of bias to a powerful appellate board, adding to growing worries about the politicization of the immigration court system.

Documents obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests describe how an already opaque hiring procedure was tweaked for the six newest hires to the 21-member Board of Immigration Appeals. All six board members, added in August, were immigration judges with some of the highest asylum denial rates. Some also had the highest number of decisions in 2017 that the same appellate body sent back to them for reconsideration. All six members were immediately appointed to the board without a yearslong probationary period.

[More non-Spanish speaking migrants are crossing the border]

“They’re high-level deniers who’ve done some pretty outrageous things [in the courtroom] that would make you believe they’re anti-immigrant,” said Jeffrey Chase, a former immigration judge and past senior legal adviser at the board. “It’s a terrifying prospect … They have power over thousands of lives.”

Among the hiring documents are four recommendation memos to the Attorney General’s office from James McHenry, director of the Executive Office for Immigration Review, which oversees the nation’s immigration court system.

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The memos, dated July 18, recommend immigration judges William A. Cassidy, V. Stuart Couch, Earle B. Wilson, and Keith E. Hunsucker to positions on the appellate board. McHenry’s memos note new hiring procedures had been established on March 8, to vet “multiple candidates” expressing interest in the open board positions.

A footnote in the memos states that applicants who are immigration judges would be hired through a special procedure: Instead of going through the typical two-year probationary period, they would be appointed to the board on a permanent basis, immediately. This was because a position on the appellate board “requires the same or similar skills” as that of an immigration judge, according to the memo.

Appellate board members, traditionally hired from a variety of professional backgrounds, are tasked with reviewing judicial decisions appealed by the government or plaintiff. Their decisions, made as part of a three-member panel, can set binding precedents that adjudicators and immigration judges rely on for future cases related to asylum, stays of deportation, protections for unaccompanied minors and other areas.

McHenry, appointed in 2018 by then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions, concludes his recommendation memos by noting that the judge’s “current federal service was vetted and no negative information that would preclude his appointment” was reported. He does not mention any past or pending grievances, although public complaints have been filed against at least three of the judges.

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These documents, obtained through FOIA via Muckrock, a nonprofit, collaborative that pushes for government transparency, and shared with CQ Roll Call, reflect “the secrecy with which these rules are changing,” said Matthew Hoppock, a Kansas City-based immigration attorney. “It’s very hard to remove or discipline a judge that’s permanent than when it’s probationary, so this has long term implications.”

‘If I had known, I wouldn’t have left’: Migrant laments ‘Remain in Mexico’ policy

Volume 90%

 

The Department of Justice declined to answer a series of questions asked by CQ Roll Call regarding the new hiring practices, why exemptions were made in the case of these immigration judges and whether complaints against any of the judges were considered.

“Board members, like immigration judges, are selected through an open, competitive, and merit-based process involving an initial review by the Office of Personnel Management and subsequent, multiple levels of review by the Department of Justice,” a DOJ official wrote via email. “This process includes review by several career officials. The elevation of trial judges to appellate bodies is common in almost every judicial system, and EOIR is no different.”

Homestead: On the front lines of the migrant children debate

Volume 90%

 

Opaque hiring process

When the department posted the six board vacancies in March, the openings reflected the first time that board members would be allowed to serve from immigration courts throughout the country. Previously, the entire appellate board worked out of its suburban Virginia headquarters.

In addition, the job posts suggested that new hires would be acting in a dual capacity: They may be asked to adjudicate cases at the trial court level and then also review the court decisions appealed to the board. Previously, board members stuck to reviewing appeals cases, a process that could take more than a year.

Ultimately, all six hires were immigration judges, although past board candidates have come from government service, private sector, academia and nonprofits.

“This was stunning,” MaryBeth Keller, chief immigration judge until she stepped down this summer, said in a recent interview with The Asylumist, a blog about asylum issues. “I can’t imagine that the pool of applicants was such that only [immigration judges] would be hired, including two from the same city.”

Keller said immigration judges are “generally eminently qualified to be board members, but to bring in all six from the immigration court? I’d like to think that the pool of applicants was more diverse than that.”

Paul Wickham Schmidt, a retired immigration judge who headed the board under President Bill Clinton, said the panel always had arbitrary hiring procedures that changed with each administration and suffered from “quality control” issues. But the Trump administration has “pushed the envelope the furthest,” he said.

“This administration has weaponized the process,” he told CQ Roll Call. “They have taken a system that has some notable weaknesses in it and exploited those weaknesses for their own ends.”

The reputation and track record of the newest immigration judges has also raised eyebrows.

According to an analysis of EOIR data by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University, each of these newest six judges had an asylum denial rate over 80 percent, with Couch, Cassidy, and Wilson at 92, 96, and 98 percent, respectively. Nationally, the denial rate for asylum cases is around 57 percent. Previous to their work as immigration judges, all six had worked on behalf of government entities, including the Department of Homeland Security, Department of Justice and the military.

“It mirrors a lot of the concerns at the trial level,” said Laura Lynch, senior policy counsel at the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA). She said several new hires at the trial level have been Immigration and Customs Enforcement attorneys.

“Every day across the country, people’s lives hang in the balance waiting for immigration judges to decide their fate,” she said. “Asylum grant rates for immigration court cases vary widely depending on the judge, suggesting that outcomes may turn on which judge is deciding the case rather than established principles and rules of law.”

Immigration experts note that denial rates depend on a variety of factors, including the number and types of cases that appear on a judge’s docket. Perhaps a better measure of an immigration judge’s decision-making may be the rate that rulings get returned by the appeals board.

For 2017, the last full year for which data is available, Couch and Wilson had the third and fourth highest number of board-remanded cases — at 50 and 47 respectively, according to federal documents obtained by Bryan Johnson, a New York-based immigration lawyer. The total number of cases on their dockets that year were 176 and 416, respectively.

Some of the behavior by the newer judges also have earned them a reputation. In 2018, AILA obtained 11 complaints against Cassidy that alleged prejudice against immigrant respondents. In a public letter the Southern Poverty Law Center sent last year to McHenry, the group complained that Cassidy bullied migrants in his court. He also asked questions that “exceeded his judicial authority,” Center lawyers wrote.

Another letter, sent in 2017 by SPLC lawyers and an Emory University law professor whose students observed Cassidy’s court proceedings, noted the judge “analogized an immigrant to ‘a person coming to your home in a Halloween mask, waving a knife dripping with blood’ and asked the attorney if he would let that person in.”

SPLC also has documented issues with Wilson, noting how he “routinely leaned back in his chair, placed his head in his hands and closed his eyes” during one hearing. “He held this position for more than 20 minutes as a woman seeking asylum described the murders of her parents and siblings.”

Couch’s behavior and his cases have made news. According to Mother Jones, he once lost his temper with a 2-year-old Guatemalan child, threatening to unleash a dog on the boy if he didn’t stop making noise. But he is perhaps better known as the judge who denied asylum to “Ms. A.B.,” a Salvadoran domestic violence survivor, even after the appellate board asked him to reconsider. Sessions, the attorney general at the time, ultimately intervened and made the final precedent-setting ruling in the case.

Couch has a pattern of denying asylum to women who have fled domestic violence, “despite clear instructions to the contrary” from the appellate board, according to Johnson, the immigration lawyer who said Couch “has been prejudging all claims that have a history of domestic violence, and quite literally copying and pasting language he used to deny other domestic violence victims asylum.”

Jeremy McKinney, a Charlotte-based immigration lawyer and second vice president at AILA, went to law school with Couch and called him “complex.” While he was reluctant to characterize the judge as “anti-immigrant,” he acknowledged “concerning” stories about the Couch’s court demeanor.

“In our conversations, he’s held the view that asylum is not the right vehicle for some individuals to immigrate to the U.S. — it’s one I disagree with,” McKinney said. “But I feel quite certain that that’s exactly why he was hired.”

Politicizing court system

Increasingly, political appointees are “micromanaging” the dockets of immigration judges, said Ashley Tabaddor, head of the union National Association of Immigration Judges. Appointees also are making moves that jeopardize their judicial independence, she said. Among them: requiring judges to meet a quota of 700 completed cases per year; referring cases even if they are still in the midst of adjudication to political leadership, including the Attorney General, for the final decision; and seeking to decertify the immigration judges’ union.

These are “symptoms of a bigger problem,” said Tabaddor. “If you have a court that’s situated in the law enforcement agency … that is the fundamental flaw that needs to be corrected.”

In March, the American Bar Association echoed calls by congressional Democrats to investigate DOJ hiring practices in a report that warned the department’s “current approach will elevate speed over substance, exacerbate the lack of diversity on the bench, and eliminate safeguards that could lead to a resurgence of politicized hiring.”

“Moreover, until the allegations of politically motivated hiring can be resolved, doubt will remain about the perceived and perhaps actual fairness of immigration proceedings,” the organization wrote. “The most direct route to resolving these reasonable and important concerns would be for DOJ to publicize its hiring criteria, and for the inspector general to conduct an investigation into recent hiring practices.”

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One of the most disgusting developments, that the media sometimes misses, is that having skewed and biased the system specifically against Central American asylum seekers, particularly women and children, the Administration uses their “cooked” and “bogus” statistics to make a totally disingenuous case that the high denial rates show the system is being abused by asylum seekers and their lawyers. That, along with the “fiction of the asylum no show” been one of “Big Mac’s” most egregious and oft repeated lies! There certainly is systemic abuse taking place here — but it is by the Trump Administration, not asylum seekers and their courageous lawyers.

 

This system is a national disgrace operating under the auspices of a feckless Congress and complicit Article III courts whose life-tenured judges are failing in their collective duty to put an end to this blatantly unconstitutional system: one that  also violates statutory provisions intended to give migrants access to counsel, an opportunity to fully present and document their cases to an unbiased decision maker, and a fair opportunity to seek asylum regardless of status or manner of entry. Basically, judges at all levels who are complicit in this mockery of justice are “robed killers.”

 

Just a few years ago, asylum seekers were winning the majority of individual rulings on asylum in Immigration Court. Others were getting lesser forms of protection, so that more than 60 percent of asylum applicants who got final decisions in Immigration Court were receiving much-needed, life-saving protection. That’s exactly what one would expect given the Supreme Court’s pronouncements in 1987 about the generous standards applicable to asylum seekers in INS v. Cardoza-Fonseca.

 

Today, conditions have not improved materially in most “refugee sending countries.” Indeed, this Administration’s bogus designation of the Northern Triangle “failed states” as “Safe Third Countries” is absurd and shows their outright contempt for the system and their steadfast belief that the Federal Judiciary will “tank” on their responsibility to hold this Executive accountable.

 

As a result of this reprehensible conduct, the favorable trend in asylum adjudication has been sharply reversed. Now, approximately two-thirds of asylum cases are being denied, many based on specious “adverse credibility” findings, illegal “nexus” findings that intentionally violate the doctrine of “mixed motives”enshrined in the statute, absurdly unethical and illegal rewriting of asylum precedents by Sessions and Barr, intentional denial of the statutory right to counsel, and overt coercion through misuse of DHS detention authority to improperly “punish” and “deter” legal asylum seekers.

 

Right under the noses of complicit Article III Judges and Congress, the Trump Administration has “weaponized” the Immigration “Courts” and made them an intentionally hostile environment for asylum seekers and their, often pro bono or low bono, lawyers. How is this acceptable in 21st Century America?

 

That’s why it’s important for members of the “New Due Process Army” to remember my “5 Cs Formula” – Constantly Confront Complicit Courts 4 Change. Make these folks with “no skin the game” feel the pain and be morally accountable for those human lives they are destroying by inaction in the face of Executive illegality and tyranny from their “ivory tower perches.”  

We’re in a war for the survival of our democracy and the future of humanity.  There is only one “right side” in this battle. History will remember who stood tall and who went small when individual rights, particularly the rights to Due Process and fair treatment for the most vulnerable among us, were under attack by the lawless forces of White Nationalism and their enablers!

 

PWS

 

10-31-19

HON. JEFFREY CHASE: More Than Three Decades After The Supremes’ Decision On Well- Founded Fear In Cardoza-Fonseca, Immigration Judges and BIA Judges Continue To Get It Wrong — 2d Cir. Recognizes Problem, But Fails To Take Effective Corrective Action Through Publishing Its Important Decision!

Jeffrey S. Chase
Hon. Jeffrey S. Chase
Jeffrey S. Chase Blog

https://www.jeffreyschase.com/blog/2019/10/25/when-does-fear-become-well-founded

Oct 25 When Does Fear Become “Well-Founded?”

During a recent radio interview, the reporter interviewing me expressed surprise when I mentioned that an asylum applicant need only show a ten percent chance of being persecuted in order to succeed on her claim.  That standard was recognized 32 years ago by the U.S. Supreme Court in the case of INS v Cardoza-Fonseca, 480 U.S. 421 (1987).  The holding represented a dramatic shift in asylum eligibility, as prior to the decision, the BIA (and therefore, the immigration judges bound by its decisions) had interpreted “well-founded fear” to require a greater than fifty percent chance of persecution.  But what was the practical impact of this change on the adjudication of asylum claims?

Following the Supreme Court’s decision, the BIA and circuit courts set out to define what an asylum seeker must show to satisfy the lower standard.  The general test adopted by the circuit courts requires a finding that the asylum seeker possess a genuine subjective fear of persecution, and that there is some objective basis for such fear in the reality of the circumstances so as to make such fear reasonable.1  Prof. Deborah Anker in her treatise The Law of Asylum in the United States emphasizes the link between the subjective and objective standards, noting that while the objective element is meant to ensure “that protection is not provided to those with purely fanciful or neurotic fears,” it is “critical, however, that the adjudicator view the evidence as the applicant – or a reasonable person in his or her circumstances – would and does not simply substitute the adjudicator’s own experience as the vantage point.”  This is obviously quite different than the purely objective approach necessary under the prior “more likely than not” standard.

In Qosaj v. Barr, No. 17-3116 (2d. Cir. Sept. 18, 2019), the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in an unpublished decision, once again considered the question of what is required for a fear of persecution to be “well-founded.”  Although the primary target of the government’s persecution was the petitioner’s husband, an activist with the opposition Democratic Party in their native Albania, police twice sprayed the restaurant jointly owned by the couple with bullets, pushed the petitioner herself to the ground during raids of their home, and at one point threatened to kidnap the petitioner and sell her into prostitution if her husband did not back the ruling Socialist Party candidate for parliament.  The local Socialist Party leader also threatened the petitioner that the restaurant would be burned to the ground with her family in it if they did not stop hosting Democratic Party meetings there.

The immigration judge found the petitioner to be completely credible and to have a genuine subjective fear of persecution.  However, the IJ denied asylum on the ground that the fear was not objectively reasonable, because the authorities had opportunities to harm her when they were persecuting her husband, but in the IJ’s opinion, did not do so.  The judge thus concluded that nothing suggests that the authorities would “suddenly” be inclined to harm the petitioner in the future if they had not done so in the past.

The Second Circuit rejected the above standard as “too exacting,” adding that the applicant’s fear can be objectively reasonable “even if it is improbable that he will be persecuted upon his return to his own country.”  The court added that there only need be “a slight, though discernible, chance of persecution,” noting that the standard is whether “a reasonable person in the same circumstances would have such a fear.”

At oral argument, the Chief Judge of the Second Circuit, Hon. Robert Katzmann, directly asked the government attorney if she would be afraid to return to Albania if she faced the same facts as the respondent, adding that he himself would be.

The question of whether one in the asylum seeker’s shoes would be afraid to return is the proper approach to determining if the subjective fear is reasonable.  Back in 1992, before either of us were appointed judges, my former colleague William Van Wyke, a brilliant legal mind, authored a much talked about article entitled “A New Perspective on ‘Well-Founded Fear.’”  Judge Van Wyke’s approach was to consider the asylum seeker the factfinder: having assessed all of the facts in the home country, the asylum seeker decided that the threat of persecution was enough to warrant fleeing the country.  In Judge Van Wyke’s perspective, the asylum adjudicator is placed in the position of an appeals court, reviewing the asylum seeker’s decision for reasonableness.  Although such approach sounds radical, it’s really just another way of applying the circuit court standard.

However, too many decisions deny asylum because they pose the wrong question.  If a traveler is told that the flight she has booked has a 10 percent chance of crashing, the question isn’t whether it would thus seem unlikely under an objective analysis that that the plane would crash, or whether in fact the plane did actually crash, or whether those passengers that did board the same flight landed safely and went on with their lives without incident.  The question is whether based on the knowledge she possessed, was it reasonable for the passenger not to board the flight?  Of course, the answer is yes.  The objective likelihood that all would be fine wouldn’t be enough to cause any of us to board the plane.  Therefore, that slight risk of danger was enough to render the passenger’s subjective fear reasonable.  Or as the Second Circuit held in Qosaj, “no reasonable factfinder could conclude that” the petitioner “did not show at least a ‘discernible [ ] chance of persecution,’” which the Second Circuit confirmed as enough “to render her subjective fear objectively reasonable.”

But how often is this standard applied correctly in asylum adjudication?  For example, case law allows an asylum adjudicator to conclude that an asylum applicant’s fear is not objectively reasonable based on the continued safety of family members who remain in the country of origin.  But if there is a sufficient ten percent risk of persecution, that means that there is 90 percent chance that nothing will happen.  Wouldn’t that mean that it is overwhelmingly likely that the remaining family would suffer no harm?  If so, why should their safety to present undermine the claim?  Or in assessing whether the government is unable or unwilling to control a non-state actor persecutor, shouldn’t the proper inquiry be whether there is a ten percent chance that the government would not afford such protection?2

It’s a shame that Qosaj wasn’t issued as a published decision.  Nevertheless, attorneys might find it useful to reference at least in the Second Circuit as a reminder of the proper application of the burden for determining well-founded fear.  And Congrats to attorney Michael DiRaimondo (who argued the case) and fellow attorneys Marialaina Masi and Stacy Huber of DiRaimondo & Masi on the brief (Note: I am of counsel to the firm, but had no involvement with this case).

Notes:

1. See, e.g., Blanco-Comarribas v. INS, 830 F.2d 1039, 1042 (9th Cir. 1987).

2. I thank attorney Joshua Lunsford for bringing this point to my attention.

Copyright 2019 Jeffrey S. Chase.  All rights reserved.

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Here’s a link to the full decision in 

Qosaj v. Barr, No. 17-3116 (2d. Cir. Sept. 18, 2019):

https://casetext.com/case/qosaj-v-barr

Jeffrey’s article raises two important points.

First, three decades after Cardoza-Fonseca, and nearly four decades after the enactment of the Refugee Act of 1980, EOIR Judges are still getting the fundamentals wrong: basics, like the correct legal standards to be used in evaluating asylum claims. 

Getting that asylum standard correct should be neither complex nor difficult. Just look at how relatively short, concise, and to the point the Second Circuit’s reversal in Qosaj was, particularly in comparison with the legal gibberish spouted by Barr and Sessions in attempting to rewrite the law intentionally to screw migrants in some of their unconstitutional and unethical precedents.

Improper adjudication by Immigration Judges is hardly surprising in a system that emphasizes law enforcement and speedy removals over quality and Due Process. Then, it’s compounded by politicos attempting to improperly and unethically influence the judges by spreading false narratives about asylum applicants being malafide and their attorneys dishonest. 

It’s really quite the opposite. There is substantial reason to believe that the system has been improperly, dishonestly,  and  politically “gamed” by the DOJ to deny valid claims (or even access to the system) to “discourage” legitimate asylum seekers and further to intentionally abuse those (often pro bono or low bono) lawyers courageously trying to help them.

Also, massive appointments of Immigration Judges at both the trial and appellate levels, some with questionable qualifications, and all with no meaningful training on how to recognize and grant asylum claims have compounded the problem. 

Does anyone seriously think that the “New Appellate Immigration Judges” on the BIA, some of whom denied asylum at rates upwards of 95%, were properly applying the generous legal standards of Cardoza-Fonseca to asylum seekers? Of course not! So why is this unconstitutional and dysfunctional system allowed to continue?

Which brings me to my second point. It’s nice that the Second Circuit actually took the time to correct the errors, unlike some of the “intentionally head in the sand Circuits” like the 5th and the 11th, who all too often compound the problem with their own complicity and poor judging. But, failing to publish important examples of DOJ/EOIR “malicious incompetence” like this is a disservice to both the country and the courts. 

It leaves the impression that the Second Circuit doesn’t really value the rights of asylum seekers or view them as important.  It also signals that the court doesn’t really intend to hold Barr and EOIR accountable for lack of quality control and fundamental fairness in the Immigration Court system. 

Furthermore, it deprives immigration practitioners of the favorable Article III precedents they need to fight the abuses of due process and fundamental fairness being inflicted on asylum seekers every day at the “retail level” — in Immigration Court. It also fails to document a public record of the widespread “malicious incompetence” of DOJ and EOIR under Trump’s White Nationalist restrictionist regime.

It’s also horrible for the court. You don’t have to be a judicial genius to see where this is going. Unqualified, untrained Immigration Judges are being pushed to cut corners and railroad asylum seekers out of the country. The BIA has been “dumbed down” and weaponized to “summarily affirm” this substandard work product. That means that the circuit courts are going to be flooded with garbage — sloppy, unprofessional work. As the work piles up or is sent back for quality reasons, the Administration will blast and blame the Article III courts for their backlogs and for delaying deportations.

So why wait for the coming disaster? Why not be proactive? 

The Second Circuit and the other Circuits should be publishing precedents putting the DOJ and EOIR on notice that Due Process, fair treatment, and quality work is required from the Immigration Courts. If it’s not forthcoming, why shouldn’t Barr and the officials at DOJ and EOIR responsible for creating this mess be held in contempt of court?

Two historical notes. First, our good friend and former colleague, Judge Dana Leigh Marks, then known as Dana Marks Keener, successfully represented the respondent before the Supremes in Cardoza-Fonseca (for the record, as DHS DGC. I was aligned with the SG on the “losing” side). Therefore, I sometimes call Judge Marks the “Founding Mother” of modern U.S. asylum law.

Second, immigration practitioner Michael DiRaimondo who successfully argued Qosaj before the Second Circuit began his career in the General Counsel’s Office of the “Legacy INS” during the “Inman-Schmidt Era.” He then went on to a distinguished career as the INS Special Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Eastern District of New York before entering private practice. Way to go, Michael D! 

PWS

10-27-19

ARBITRARY & CAPRICIOUS: In An Asylum System Designed To Abuse & Discourage Legitimate Asylum Seekers, U.S. Immigration Judge Robert Hough’s Persistence Saves Two Lives, At Least For Now

https://apple.news/ALbbeLJpzTOWr1LCa2mcLQg

Molly Hennessy Fiske
Molly Hennessy-Fiske
Staff Writer
LA Times

Molly Hennessy-Fiske reports for the LA Times:

Identical twins. Identical asylum claims. Very different luck at the border

The system gives enormous power to U.S. customs officers, Border Patrol agents and asylum officers, whose whims and judgment calls decide the fate of many migrants.

The 12-year-old identical twins entered Texas from Mexico days apart in the foothills of Mt. Cristo Rey. One came with their father. The other arrived with their mother.

It was June. The family’s plan was to get caught by Border Patrol agents as quickly as possible, then claim asylum so they could stay in the U.S. legally while awaiting immigration court hearings.

The parents had hoped that crossing the border separately, each with one son, would improve the chance that they all would be allowed into the country legally.

But that’s not what U.S. immigration officials decided. They released Nostier Leiva Sabillon and his father in Texas, and sent Anthony Leiva Sabillon and his mother back to Mexico.

The difference in treatment shows how arbitrary the U.S. immigration system has become as the Trump administration tries to stem the flow of migrants from Central America.

More than 54,000 migrants have been subjected to the controversial policy known as “Remain in Mexico,” which took effect this year and requires most asylum seekers who are not from Mexico to wait there while the U.S. weighs their cases.

Homeland Security Department leaders credit the program — along with a new requirement that migrants apply for asylum first in the countries they travel through before reaching the U.S. — with dramatically reducing apprehensions at the southern border.

Migrant advocates say the new policies give enormous power to U.S. customs officers, Border Patrol agents and asylum officers, whose whims and judgment calls decide the fate of many migrants.

Things looked grim for Nostier and his 39-year-old father, Carlos Leiva Membreño, when they were picked up by the Border Patrol.

“The good news is that you are already in the United States,” an agent told them, according to Leiva. “The bad news is that you are going back to Juarez.”

The pair was detained.

But days later their luck changed. With minimal questioning, they were released with instructions to appear in immigration court in Maryland, where they planned to join relatives.

The decision remains a mystery to them. Leiva described it as a miracle.

“God had his angels protect me and my son,” he said.

They appeared in court in Baltimore, then moved in with Nostier’s great aunt in Houston and had their case transferred there this fall. They are not scheduled to appear in court until Aug. 21, 2020, giving them at least a year of freedom.

Through relatives, Leiva found a construction job in Idaho and left Nostier in Houston.

After some trouble getting vaccinated — parental consent is usually required — his aunt managed to register him for school.

He had been the chubbier twin, outgoing and older by a minute, with dreams of becoming a military commander to protect his family.

Having never been without his brother, he grew shy, quiet and brooding.

Anthony and their mother were 740 miles away in the Mexican city of Juarez.

Dilcia Sabillon Aceituno, 40, told immigration officials that the family had fled Naco, Honduras, because members of the 18th Street gang — an organization that she said had killed two of her cousins — were pressuring her to put her twins to work for them dealing drugs.

She didn’t want her sons to become criminals.

Border Patrol agents listened, but it didn’t seem to matter. Sent back to Mexico, she and Anthony moved into a migrant shelter in the dangerous Anapra neighborhood to await an Aug. 15 court appearance in El Paso.

They and four other migrants shared a room without electricity or a lock on the door. There was a school next door, but Anthony’s mother couldn’t afford to send him.

On the dirt streets, boys bullied him, and men shouted threats, beat his mother and cursed her for being Honduran.

Hiding in their room, Anthony, who wanted to be a doctor, helped his mother with daily blood tests and insulin for her diabetes. She noticed he was losing weight, growing pale and depressed.

“I tell him not to be sad, he will be with his twin soon,” she said as they sat in their room at the shelter last month.

She filled out an asylum application in English with the help of an American immigration lawyer from Minnesota who visited the shelter to provide free legal assistance. It was a lucky break: Most migrants in the Remain in Mexico program have no lawyers.

At the August court hearing, Sabillon told the judge she was afraid of returning to Mexico. Anthony said he wanted to be with his brother.

The judge sent them to be interviewed by an asylum officer by phone, a common arrangement over the last year as the government has struggled to keep up with the flood of new cases.

The officer rejected their claim, returning them to Mexico days later.

“They don’t listen,” she said.

There was nothing to do but wait a month for their next immigration hearing.

Anthony traded daily audio messages with his brother in Houston. Nostier was enjoying school, where he made friends who spoke Spanish and began learning English. An older cousin helped him with his homework.

He had also started playing soccer with other Honduran boys at his great aunt’s apartment complex.

“Don’t worry,” he told Anthony. “You will be playing with us here soon.”

His mother wasn’t so sure.

The lawyer who had helped them was moving to Washington and could no longer represent them. Sabillon would have to represent herself.

On Sept. 26, Sabillon woke her son at 3:30 a.m. so they could dress by flashlight at the shelter, gather their paperwork and board a shelter van to the bridge. She slipped a wooden rosary around her neck.

“We’re going to our destiny,” she said as she hugged fellow asylum seekers goodbye.

After she and Anthony crossed the border bridge, U.S. officials collected their belongings to place in storage, then drove the pair and 23 other asylum seekers to their 8:30 a.m. hearing.

They were among the last to appear before the judge at 12:45 p.m. When he asked for their asylum application, Sabillon said she didn’t have it: It was in a bag Border Patrol agents had taken.

“Do you want more time to fill out an application?” Judge Robert Hough asked through a court interpreter.

“No,” she said.

“You understand if you don’t submit an application, you can be removed to Honduras. Is that what you want?” the judge said.

Sabillon began to cry.

“No, I have it over there, I just need to find someone to help me,” she said in Spanish between sobs as Anthony looked on. “Please, for his twin!”

The court interpreter said he couldn’t understand her. The judge referred her to be interviewed by an asylum officer, just like she was after her last hearing, and reset her case for Dec. 12. Mother and son were led from court looking stunned. It appeared they would be returned to Mexico.

But their luck was about to change. This time, the asylum officer who interviewed Sabillon by phone was sympathetic.

She told her story, the same one she had already been over with other immigration officials. But this time the officer decided to release her and Anthony until their asylum case was decided.

They spent a week in detention before being freed on Oct. 4. They arrived in Houston by bus the next day.

The twins have been inseparable since, clambering around the yard of the apartment complex where they’re staying and making TikTok videos with their cousins.

By last week, Nostier had grown talkative, preparing his brother to attend school next week. Anthony showed off Band-Aids to his cousins where he had received the required vaccinations.

He has also gained weight — along with a taste for spicy chicken wings. His mother predicted his cheeks would fill out soon and make the twins look identical again.

Neither had learned the details of why their family fled Honduras, and Sabillon was proud of that.

“They’re still innocent,” she said as she watched them roughhouse.

Sabillon wasn’t sure how to change her next court appearance from El Paso to Houston. She wondered if she should ask the court to combine her case with that of her husband, who was due to return from Idaho this weekend.

She was determined to find a lawyer. Without one, she figured their immigration case would be left to chance. She didn’t want to get sent back to Mexico again.

“My sons’ future is here,” she said.

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The key to this outcome was Judge Hough’s asking questions and sending the case back to the Asylum Office for a second look. Unfortunately, many Immigration Judges, pushed to crank out numbers, not justice, and falsely told by their “superiors” that all asylum claims are fraudulent anyway, would merely have ordered deportation.

The problem of arbitrary and capricious decision making in “life or death” asylum cases is hardly a new one. Indeed, it was well documented and publicly exposed by my colleagues Professors Andy Schoenholtz, Phil Schrag, and Jaya Ramji-Nogales in their seminal 2007 book Refugee Roulette. 

Despite some stabs at addressing the problem in subsequent years, it has remained a persistent feature of a broken system and is worse now that ever. That’s because this Administration actually views cruel, arbitrary, and capricious adjudication as both a demonstration of absolute Executive Power and a way of punishing and discouraging legal asylum seekers.

Some favorable precedents correctly applying asylum law, particularly in the area of domestic violence and family-based “particular social groups,” were moving the system slowly toward “consensus grants” on a significant number of clearly deserving Central American cases. They could eventually have been used to act favorably on perhaps one-third of the Northern Triangle Asylum cases without resorting to the Immigration Court system. These precedents could also have formed a basis for establishing a robust refugee program in the Northern Triangle itself, thus eliminating the need for the dangerous overland journey to the U.S. and reducing the influence of smugglers.

Instead of building on these modest, yet important, human rights successes, unethical Trump Administration politicos, including Sessions and Barr, illegally and maliciously removed them and replaced them with the idea, again unethically communicated to adjudicators, that denial should be the “preferred result” in every case. 

The corrupt system now encourages arbitrary and capricious decision-making on asylum cases and elimination or manipulation of judicial review as as a tool for discouraging those who should get our protection from daring to use our legal system.

Perhaps worse yet, with very transparent evidence of what is going on (the Administration largely admits that they are using the asylum system as a “deterrent” to asylum seekers) the Article III Courts, starting with the Supremes, have failed in their duty to require an asylum adjudication system that meets both the Due Process and Equal Protection requirements of our Constitution. 

Every life saved is a life saved. That’s why the “little things” like Judge Hough is doing matter. With lawyers and a chance to document and present their asylum cases, and to seek review before the Article III Courts, Dilcia and Anthony at least have a fighting chance to gain protection.

(Unfortunately, neither the El Paso nor Houston Immigration Courts nor the Fifth Circuit have reputations for fair and impartial treatment of asylum seekers. Indeed, some of the most grotesque and legally unjustifiable abuses of Due Process and fundamental fairness have taken place right under the noises of 5th Circuit judges. That probably explains the unusual eagerness of DHS and DOJ to locate many branches  of the “New American Gulag,” and their embedded “Kangaroo Courts” including absurdly unjust “Tent Courts” within the Fifth Circuit. How else would you explain places like Jena, Louisiana and many other obscure locations within that state where counsel is often unavailable and access to clients is often illegally restricted or cut off. Indeed, complicity breeds contempt for human life and the legal system, something that smug Article III Judges refusing to do their Constitutional duties might live to regret. Without “regime change” in 2020, the reprieve for this family might be only temporary.)

But the fact that there are pockets of fairness, caring, and impartiality in a clearly unconstitutional system merely demonstrates the arbitrary and capricious way in which this system deals with life or death decisions and the complicity of both Congress and the Article IIIs in allowing this disgraceful, outrageous mockery of justice to continue!

Those who have weaponized the asylum system against the most deserving and vulnerable among us and the life-tenured judges who are unethically allowing this to happen on their watch should not escape accountability.

PWS

10-20-19

NICOLE NAREA @ VOX: As Life Threatening Due Process & Statutory Violations Predictably Mount Under The Ninth Circuit’s “Let ‘Em Die In Mexico” Program, Congressional Dems Demand IG Investigation Of “Tent Courts,” A/K/A Kangaroo Courts!

Nicole Narea
Nicole Narea
Immigration Reporter
Vox.com

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/10/18/20920000/house-democrats-investigation-tent-courts-border-port

 

House Democrats are calling for investigations into two temporary immigration courts that opened along the southern border last month where migrants who have been waiting in Mexico are fighting to obtain asylum in the US, according to a letter sent Thursday.

The courts — located in tent complexes near US Customs and Border Protection ports in Laredo and Brownsville, Texas — were built to hear cases from migrants who have been sent back to Mexico under President Donald Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy, officially known as the Migrant Protection Protocols.

Unveiled in January, the policy has affected over 50,000 migrants found to have credible asylum claims, including those who present themselves at ports of entry on the southern border and those who are apprehended while trying to cross the border without authorization.

The tent courts, which opened in early September with no advance notice to the public, have the capacity to hold as many as 420 hearings per day in Laredo and 720 in Brownsville conducted exclusively by video. Immigrants and their attorneys video conference with judges and DHS attorneys appearing virtually, streamed from brick-and-mortar immigration courts hundreds of miles away.

Democratic leaders, led by Congressional Hispanic Caucus chair Joaquin Castro, raised concerns Thursday that the tent facilities have led to violations of migrants’ due process rights by restricting their access to attorneys and relying on teleconferencing. They also expressed alarm that asylum seekers processed in the facilities are being returned to Mexico even though they are in danger there and that the public has largely been barred from entering the tent facilities, shrouding their operations in secrecy.

“Given the lack of access to counsel and the limitations of

, we are concerned these tent courts do not provide full and fair consideration of their asylum claims, as required by law,” the lawmakers wrote, urging the Department of Homeland Security and Department of Justice’s inspectors general to investigate. “The opening and operations of these secretive tent courts are extremely problematic.”

Few have been allowed to enter the courts

Acting Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan had assured that members of the public and the press would be permitted to access to the facilities so long as they do not “disrupt proceedings or individuals’ privacy.”

In practice, however, that’s not how they have operated, and as House Democrats pointed out Thursday, preventing the public from viewing immigration court proceedings violates federal regulations.

“We are concerned that the administration has intentionally built these tent court at Customs and Border Protection ports of entry to justify limited public access to these facilities, and that this lack of transparency may allow DHS to hid abuse and due process violations that may occur in the tents,” their letter said.

Laura Lynch and Leidy Perez-Davis, attorneys with the American Immigration Lawyers Association who visited the port courts shortly after they opened in September, said they and other lawyers from the National Immigrant Justice Center, Amnesty International, and the Women’s Refugee Commission were barred from observing proceedings in the courts absent a document showing that they were representing one of the migrants on site.

The few attorneys that had such agreements were allowed to enter the facility a little more than an hour before their clients’ hearings to help them prepare — insufficient time given that, for many, it is their first opportunity to meet in person, Perez-Davis said.

In the first few days that the courts were open, the only people allowed in the hearing rooms were immigrants and their attorneys — but critically, not their translators, Lynch said. There were few attorneys representing asylum seekers in proceedings at the port courts, and even fewer spoke fluent Spanish and could have conversations with their clients.

Officials have since allowed translators into the hearing rooms, Lynch said, but neither DHS nor the DOJ have issued any formal clarification of their policy.

Attorneys are also not allowed to attend “non-refoulement interviews” at the tent facilities, in which an asylum officer determines, usually over the phone, whether a migrant should be sent back to Mexico or qualifies for an exemption allowing them to go to a detention facility in the US.

Limiting access to the port courts also inhibits legal aid groups’ ability to conduct presentations for migrants informing them of their rights in immigration proceedings, as they typically do in immigration courts.

Perez-Davis said that she observed one hearing from San Antonio — where some of the remote immigration judges handling cases in the ports courts are based — in which a young migrant woman was confused about what “asylum” means. That kind of knowledge would have previously been provided in presentations by legal aid groups.

Videoconferencing doesn’t facilitate a fair proceeding

The use of video conferencing in immigration court proceedings has long been a subject of controversy. In theory, teleconferencing would seem to make proceedings more efficient and increase access to justice, allowing attorneys and judges to partake even though they may be hundreds of miles away.

But in practice, advocates argue that teleconferencing has inhibited full and fair proceedings, with some even filing a lawsuit in New York federal court in January claiming that it violates immigrants’ constitutional rights.

Immigrants who appear in court via teleconference are more likely to be unrepresented and be deported, a 2015 Northwestern Law Review study found. Reports by the Government Accountability Office and the Executive Office of Immigration Review have also raised concerns about how technical difficulties, remote translation services, and the inability to read nonverbal communication over teleconference may adversely affect outcomes for immigrants.

Yet despite such research, the immigration courts have increasingly used video as a stand-in for in-person interaction.

In the port courts in Laredo and Brownsville, video substitutes for that kind of interaction entirely — but it has not been without hiccups so far.

Lynch, Perez-Davis, and Yael Schacher, a senior US advocate at Refugees International, said they all observed connectivity issues. For migrants who must recount some of the most traumatic experiences of their lives to support their asylum claims, video conferencing makes their task harder, Perez-Davis said.

“I have been asking myself what happens if you’re in the middle of the worst story you’ve ever had to tell, and the video cuts out?” she said.

These courts are sending immigrants back to danger in Mexico

Migrants are required to travel in the dark and show up for processing before their hearings at the port courts early as 4:30 in the morning.

That puts them at increased risk, with recent reports of violence and kidnappings in Nuevo Laredo, which is directly across the border from Laredo, and Matamoros, which is adjacent to Brownsville. The State Department has consequently issued a level four “Do Not Travel”warning in both Nuevo Laredo and Matamoros.

Lynch and Perez-Davis said that attorneys are also increasingly afraid of crossing the border into Mexico in light of those safety concerns. Where they used to cross over the border to deliver presentations informing migrants of their rights and the US legal process in Mexican shelters, that is no longer happening to the same degree.

“It has chilled any sort of ability to provide legal representation,” Perez-Davis said.

DHS purports to exempt “vulnerable populations” from the Remain in Mexico policy and allow them to remain in the US, but in practice, few migrants have been able to obtain such exemptions in non-refoulement interviews.

The advocacy group Human Rights First issued a report earlier this month documenting dozens of cases in which inherently vulnerable immigrants — including those with serious health issues and pregnant women — and immigrants who were already victims of kidnapping, rape and assault in Mexico were sent back under MPP after their interviews.

With attorneys barred from advocating for migrants in these interviews, migrants will likely continue to be sent back to Mexico even if they should qualify for an exemption under DHS’s own guidelines.

“These interviews are a basic human rights protection to ensure that no one is returned to a country where they would face inhumane treatment, persecution or other harm,” Democrats wrote Thursday. “We are concerned that DHS is returning asylum seekers to harm in Mexico.”

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This situation persists as a direct and predictable consequence of the Ninth Circuit’s atrocious decision staying the District Court’s properly issued injunction in Innovation Law Lab v. McAleenan!

As I told the US District Court, District of Rhode Island, 2019 District Conference on “Independence & the Courts” today:

Constantly Confront Complicit Courts 4 Change. Make the guys in the ivory tower “own” the deaths, human rights abuses, unrelenting human misery, and mockeries of justice that their intransigence and failure to carry out their oaths to faithfully support and defend the Constitution of the U.S. is causing to the most needy and vulnerable among us — that is, to those who have the audacity to assert their legal rights under our laws.

What good are “independent” courts who won’t stand up for our individual rights under the Constitution? “Independence” does not entitle judges to use their privileged positions to be complicit or complacent in the face of great tyranny and the human misery and irreparable harm it causes!

And, thanks to Nicole for “keeping on” this horrifying chronicle of calculated and premeditated human rights abuses by an Executive Branch “gone rogue,” and the disastrous real life human consequences of ivory tower appellate judges failing to perform their Constitutional duties. They will not escape the judgment of history for their unwillingness to stand up to the abuses of a White Nationalist regime carrying out a predetermined agenda totally unrelated to governing in the public interest or complying with the rule of law.

Also, many thanks too Laura and Leidy for having the courage and dedication to put themselves “on the line” to let us know exactly what’s happening as a result of the massive failure of all three branches of our Government.

Join the New Due Process Army and take the fight to preserve our American values and our Constitution to all three branches of Government until they do their duties and stop the illegal and unconstitutional abuses of asylum seekers! 

PWS

10-18-19