"The Voice of the New Due Process Army" ————– Musings on Events in U.S. Immigration Court, Immigration Law, Sports, and Other Random Topics by Retired United States Immigration Judge (Arlington, Virginia) and former Chairman of the Board of Immigration Appeals Paul Wickham Schmidt. To see my complete professional bio, just click on the link below.
ABA President Judy Perry Martinez joined leaders from Kids in Need of Defense on Wednesday in condemning a new pilot program at the Houston Immigration Court that requires all cases involving unaccompanied immigrant children to be heard via video teleconference.
Under the program, the Trump administration calls for the testimony of unaccompanied children to be streamed from Houston to Assistant Chief Immigration Judge Sirce Owen, who will hear cases in Atlanta. The program will begin March 9 and last for about two months.
“What is about to happen in Houston is wrong,” Martinez said during a briefing on the program. “It will hurt children and is contrary to the American pursuit of justice. The American Bar Association opposes the policy, and we need action against it now.”
Martinez explained that the ABA Commission on Immigration has extensive experience with children in immigrant courts and created standards of care and conduct based on its experience. She said that among those standards is a strong opposition to video teleconferencing in immigration proceedings involving children.
She recalled visiting a children’s shelter during one of her trips to volunteer with the ABA’s South Texas Pro Bono Asylum Representation Project. She thought then about what runs through the mind of an unaccompanied child who just entered the United States and must go to court.
“For a child, it must be truly troubling, if not terrifying—especially for a child who doesn’t speak English, who doesn’t know what to expect in a U.S. courtroom and who may not have a lawyer or other trusted adult to guide him or her,” she said. “Imagine how much more bewildering that experience must be for a child in a courtroom with no judge in person, live there with them. Only a small TV screen.”
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Read the rest of the article at the above link.
Ah, picking on children, rather than trying to insure Due Process. There’s a name for those who pick on the most vulnerable.
Kevin has already posted about Baby Jails, the new book from immprof Philip G. Schrag (Georgetown) that explores the detention of migrant children.
I write today as someone who recently devoured this book. Let me start by telling you two things about myself: I hate flying and I am not much of a fan of nonfiction books. Combining these two things, I tend to read a riveting YA novel while flying in an effort to distract myself from how many feet I am unnaturally suspended above the earth’s surface. Yet I recently read Schrag’s book over the course of 3 flights. It was utterly engrossing.
The book is jam-packed with law and yet manages to read like a narrative. You get a feel for characters (Jenny Flores, certain attorneys and judges) and find yourself rooting from the sidelines even as you know victories will frequently fail to live up to their promise.
The book included numerous vignettes and insights that were entirely new to me. For example, did you know Ed Asner was responsible for Flores’ legal representation? Yes, the grumpy old man from Pixar’s Up set out to help his housekeeper’s daughter who was housed with Flores and connected the young women with Peter Schey, founder of the National Center for Immigrants’ Rights (now the Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law).
Here’s another one: Leon Fresco represented the government in a 2015 lawsuit brought by Schey to enforce the Flores settlement — arguing that the settlement didn’t apply to children traveling with parents and that the agreement was “no longer equitable.” Leon Fresco! I wrote about him a few years back — he was a key player in the failed 2013 comprehensive immigration reform led by the Gang of Eight.
I’m also impressed by how comprehensive the book is. I recently spoke to a friend who is on the cusp of publishing a book and we talked about how, at some point in the writing process, the publisher will charge by the word for additions of any kind. Yet Schrag’s book must have been edited and added upon right up until the last moment of publication. There is nothing of current import that is left behind (remain in Mexico, asylum cooperation agreements, third country transit).
This book is marvelous. A tour de force. I recommend it to everyone — even terrified flyers. Instead of gasping at every bump in the jet stream you’ll be scribbling away in the margins, furious at what our nation has done to children in the name of immigration enforcement.
-KitJ
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Thanks, Phil & KitJ, my friends and colleagues. Both of you are amazing inspirations to all of us in the “New Due Process Army.”
The Trump regime seeks to take child abuse many steps further to effectively “repeal by administrative fiat” all asylum protection laws, to insure that as many families and children as possible suffer, die. or are forced to remain in life-threatening conditions outside the U.S., and to abandon any effective cooperative efforts to improve conditions in “refugee sending” countries.
Meanwhile, many complicit Article III Judges (U.S. District Judge Dolly Gee being a notable exception) simply “look the other way” — not THIER kids and families being tortured and killed, so who cares what happens to them — and a depressing segment of the U.S. public just doesn’t care that the Trump regime is putting America among the most notable international human rights abusers. After all, THEY have jobs, THEIR kids aren’t the Trump regime’s targets (yet), and the stock market is going up. So, who cares what dehumanization, intentional human rights abuses, and violations of legal norms are taking place in their name?
Still, I think that Phil, Kit, the Round Table, and many other members of our “New Due Process Army” are clearly “on the right side of history” here. It’s just tragic that so many innocent folks, many of them children, will have to die or be irreparably harmed before America finally comes to its senses and restores morality and human values to our government.
We’ve got a chance to “right the ship” this November. Don’t blow it!
Due Process Forever; Government Child Abusers & Their Enablers Never!
T.C. WILLIAMS HIGH SCHOOL STUDENT TEAM MAKES IMMIGRATION VIDEO FOR C SPAN STUDENTCAM 2020 COMPETITION!
T.C. Williams HS LogoT.C. Williams Titan Logo
Recently, I had the honor of working with a team of three talented T.C. Williams High School students and Mary Giovagnoli, Senior Counsel for Legal Strategy at , on a video interview about immigration issues in the upcoming 2020 election. Here is the result produced by the amazing student team of Amal Sharif, Ben Janusz, and Alex Conkey:
This video is an entry in the C-Span StudentCAM 2020 Competition.
T.C. Williams is the public high school for ‘Alexandria, Virginia, where Cathy and I have lived since 1973. All three of our adult children, Wick, Will, and Anna, attended the Alexandria City Public Schools and are proud graduates of T.C. Williams High School (“Remember the Titans”).
Last year, the Trump administration ripped apart thousands of immigrant families despite knowing it did not have a tracking system in place that would ensure they could be reunited, according to a new report from the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services.
As a result, the public will likely never know how many immigrant children have been separated from their parents.
The Trump administration was prepared to separate more than 26,000 children from their families between May and September 2018 under a zero tolerance policy for unauthorized border crossing, according to the inspector general report released on Wednesday. But in spite of the plan for mass separations ― ultimately blocked in court in June 2018 ― the government didn’t have the technology to track family separations.
The estimate that roughly 3,000 children were taken from their parents between May and June 2018 is undoubtedly lower than the true number.
The Department of Homeland Security failed to accurately record the family relationships of roughly 1,400 children over a year and a half, from October 2017 to February 2019, according to the report.
Immigration officials knew about these technical issues long before the zero tolerance policy was implemented. But they failed to fix them before taking children from their families en masse, making an already traumatic situation for parents and kids all the more chaotic.
“It just confirms that the real policy and attitude of dehumanization of this population,” said Michelle Brané, the director of the Migrant Rights and Justice Program at the Women’s Refugee Commission. “I really think a part of this administration’s approach is that we don’t view this population as having human rights.”
DHS and HHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
I really think a part of this administration’s approach is that we don’t view this population as having human rights.
Michelle Brané, director, Migrant Rights and Justice Program at the Women’s Refugee Commission
The Trump administration has admitted that it didn’t have a proper system to track separated families across both DHS and HHS. HHS is responsible for unaccompanied immigrant children, including those taken from their families at the border.
In April, after an internal watchdog report revealed the Trump administration had likely separated thousands more children from their parents than previously known, HHS officials said it could take up to two years to identify them because of the disorganized data. In a court filing, a deputy director at HHS called the process of tracking down these children a “burden” and said the department didn’t have enough staff to take on the project.
During family separation, DHS’s IT system did not have the ability to properly label separated family members or track them after they were split up, according to the inspector general report. As a result, employees came up with various ad hoc methods of tracking families. But they were not standardized across the department and caused widespread confusion once the data reached ICE officers.
Agents were also not properly trained on how to use the existing technology, and mistakes were rampant. Shortly after the zero tolerance policy was implemented, eight children were separately entered into the system despite being from the same family, according to the report. There was also no plan to reunify families post-separation, despite the fact that parents were being deported without their children.
While the stated goal of the zero tolerance policy was to prevent immigrants from being apprehended and released into the U.S. while they awaited legal proceedings ― a process derisively known as “catch-and-release” ― the result was that children were traumatized and detained for record amounts of time.
Brané said the government has still failed to take accountability for its faulty tracking system and the lifelong trauma it has caused these families.
“There was an affirmative decision not to record,” she said. “They continue to drag their feet and act defensive as though this was some sort of natural disaster that happened to them that they didn’t respond to in the best way.”
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So, the victims of these human rights violations continue to suffer while the regime’s “perps” go free and even brag about their White Nationalist racist dehumanization actions. Some are still in Government positions, others are giving speeches, and the evil mastermind of “zero tolerance” Jeff Sessions is running for office. Incredibly, Sessions was actually in charge of insuring that our Government complied with the law and respected individual rights. Instead, he carried out a Jim Crow racist program of human rights abuses, demeaning the Department of Justice and the rule of law in the process. How does this make sense?
This happens when regime flunkies believe that they will never be held accountable for their actions and abuses. Obviously, that’s a view that starts with their Supreme Leader and his party of enabling sycophants.
A federal judge in Los Angeles has blocked the Trump administration from activating new regulations that would have dramatically expanded its ability to detain migrant children with their parents for indefinite periods of time, dealing a blow to the president’s efforts to tamp down unauthorized border crossings.
U.S. District Judge Dolly M. Gee issued the permanent injunction Friday, hours after hearing arguments from the Justice Department and advocates for immigrants in a long-running federal case in the Central District of California.
Lawyers for the Justice Department had urged Gee to allow the Trump administration to withdraw from the Flores Settlement Agreement, a 1997 federal consent decree that sets basic standards for detaining migrant children. The decree led to a 20-day limit for holding children in detention facilities that have not been licensed by the states for the purpose of caring for minors.
President Trump has called Flores a “loophole” that has enabled hundreds of thousands of families, many from impoverished Central American countries, to cross the southern boundary and claim asylum. Those migrants generally are quickly released into the United States because of the 20-day limit on detaining children.
The Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Health and Human Services issued new rules in August that sought to terminate the settlement and lift the 20-day limit by allowing the federal government to license such facilities.
In the ruling Friday, Gee wrote that the regulations “fail to implement and are inconsistent with the relevant and substantive terms of the Flores Settlement Agreement,” and therefore cannot take effect, noting that the agreement is a binding contract that was never appealed.
“Defendants cannot simply ignore the dictates of the consent decree merely because they no longer agree with its approach as a matter of policy,” she wrote. “Defendants cannot simply impose their will by promulgating regulations that abrogate the consent decree’s most basic tenets.”
The Justice Department is widely expected to appeal the decision, but a spokesman for the department did not signal the administration’s next steps Friday.
“The Department of Justice is disappointed that the court is continuing to impose the outdated Flores Agreement even after the government has done exactly what the Agreement required: issue a comprehensive rule that will protect vulnerable children, maintain family unity, and ensure due process for those awaiting adjudication of their immigration claims,” a spokesman said. “The Trump Administration will continue to work to restore integrity to our immigration system and ensure the proper functioning of the duly enacted immigration laws.”
Withdrawing from the settlement is part of Trump’s “beautiful puzzle,” an assortment of tough immigration enforcement measures designed to reduce the flow of Central American families and unaccompanied minors streaming across the U.S.-Mexico border.
Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Tex.), chair of the congressional Hispanic Caucus, hailed the ruling Friday.
“I am pleased that our justice system has stopped the Trump Administration plans to indefinitely detain families in prisonlike conditions,” Castro said. “This victory gives us hope and is a reminder to us all — elected officials, immigration lawyers, organizers, and advocates — to keep fighting. Flores is not a loophole — it’s a lifesaving standard that protects the basic rights and dignity of migrant children.”
Acting Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan, who has pushed for the termination of the Flores pact, said officials did not want to hold families longer than 50 days, but critics said the proposed regulations left open the possibility that minors could be detained for months or years.
More than 800,000 migrants have been taken into federal custody at the border this year, and the majority have been in family units. Advocates say they are fleeing dangerous and unstable regions in Central America’s “Northern Triangle,” the nations of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.
Undoubtedly, Trump’s personal “Solicitor General,” Noel Francisco, will ask the Supremes to bypass the Ninth Circuit and endorse official child abuse. And, based on she Supremes’ majority’s totally spineless performance in allowing the “Let ‘Em Die In Mexico” program to proceed, notwithstanding its blatant Constitutional, statutory, and regulatory defects, why not? (Barr v. East Side Sanctuary Covenant). The Supremes are establishing themselves as “Trump’s Court” – a feckless and complicit body of judicial cowards — just like he arrogantly claims.
How many more kids and families will die, be mistreated, or scarred for life because the supposedly most powerful judges in our nation are afraid to stand up to lawless, immoral, and inhumane actions by Trump & his toadies?
Nancy Gibbs Professor, Harvard University Former Editor, Time
Nancy Gibbs writes in WashPost:
Nancy Gibbs is director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University and a former editor of Time.
It is not an act of particular virtue to love your children and treat them well; instinct and evolution privilege our own kids, and from the moment they blink into the world, we would risk anything for their safety, sacrifice anything for their happiness.
It’s how we treat other people’s children that measures and tests us today. And here, as we shudder at the impact of his immigration policies on families, I can’t help but think that President Trump is channeling parents on both the right and the left who’ve decided that other people’s children don’t matter, as long as their own get ahead.
Anyone asserting the existence of certain universal values could always default to this: No decent society would ever argue that it’s okay to torture children. Which made it all the more chilling when U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers in Mississippi swept up about 680 undocumented workers, leaving some children to return from the first day of school to locked houses, missing parents and shattered families. The spectacle — and it was flaunted as a spectacle, the largest one-state immigration enforcement effort in U.S. history — does not just challenge us on how best to balance politics, economics and justice. It asks us, “When is it okay to torment other people’s kids?”
For Trump, the answer was clear and blithely callous: “This serves as a very good deterrent,” he declared. What parent watching the sobbing children would dare step foot across a border illegally? “I just hope to keep it up,” he said.
You don’t have to be an apologist for open borders to conclude that there are ways to promote security that stop short of emotional torture. Yes, children often suffer when parents commit crimes, but that is the collateral damage of enforcement, not its goal.
Still, the mentality that justifies harming children so long as they’re not your own is not unique to the president. From the beginning of this year to mid-August, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed more than 1,200 cases of measles, the most since 2000. Arrogance plus ignorance takes its toll: Parents who won’t “risk” vaccinating their own children discount the risk to others. If they think vaccines are more dangerous than the diseases they prevent, they should hope other parents stop vaccinating, as well. But more likely they are counting on others to comply so that their own children can have the best of all worlds: no vaccine and little chance of exposure to disease.
In a different way but in the same spirit, the psychotically ambitious parents of the “Varsity Blues” college admissions scandal did not care who they deprived of a spot at Stanford or the University of Southern California as long as their children succeeded. Unlike many things in life, college admissions is zero-sum; an unqualified student who bribes her way in takes a spot from someone who tried to earn it. Need extra time for the SAT? Get a doctor to diagnose a learning disability. Between 2009 and 2016, the number of students getting special accommodations more than doubled, according to an analysis by the Wall Street Journal. At one school in affluent Westchester County, N.Y., nearly 1 in 5 students had special testing privileges, which was nearly 10 times the national average.
These are starling parents, like the birds that destroy other birds’ eggs to take their nests and protect their own. For if every parent puts his or her child first at all costs, communities degrade, schools can’t function, society becomes ungovernable. And while they are not natural objects of sympathy, the cheaters’ children suffer, as well. The most obvious victims are the ones who end up sick or disabled by infections that could have been avoided. But moral infection eats you from the inside, rots relationships, wounds self-worth. As the college admissions scandal unfolded, I kept wondering what scars the parents’ ambitions left on their children. “The ruin of a nation,” a Ghanian proverb warns, “begins in the homes of its people.”
Which brings us back to our larger family. America’s identity derives from ideals that set us apart from the places we left to come here: freedom and fairness, justice and mercy, where anyone with moxie and muscle can build a future. We care for our neighbors; we honor service and sacrifice. Soldiers died for these values; parents watched sons and daughters go to war, sacrifice that which was most precious, to defend something bigger than ourselves.
This president doesn’t seem to think very much of our national character. He discounts our instinctive generosity to those in need, our compassion not just for our own children but all children, our confidence that we can succeed together, not just at each other’s expense.
What happens when nothing is bigger than oneself, no value is worth sacrificing for and it’s every man for himself? We are finding out.
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Trump constantly preaches a foul doctrine of “beggar thy neighbor.”
This paper critiques US immigration and asylum policies from perspective of the author’s 46 years as a public servant. It also offers a taxonomy of the US immigration system by positing different categories of membership: full members of the “club” (US citizens); “associate members” (lawful permanent residents, refugees and asylees); “friends” (non-immigrants and holders of temporary status); and, persons outside the club (the undocumented). It describes the legal framework that applies to these distinct populations, as well as recent developments in federal law and policy that relate to them. It also identifies a series of cross-cutting issues that affect these populations, including immigrant detention, immigration court backlogs, state and local immigration policies, and Constitutional rights that extend to non-citizens. It makes the following asylum reform proposals, relying (mostly) on existing laws designed to address situations of larger-scale migration:
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and, in particular, US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) should send far more Asylum Officers to conduct credible fear interviews at the border.
Law firms, pro bono attorneys, and charitable legal agencies should attempt to represent all arriving migrants before both the Asylum Office and the Immigration Courts.
USCIS Asylum Officers should be permitted to grant temporary withholding of removal under the Convention Against Torture (CAT) to applicants likely to face torture if returned to their countries of origin.
Immigration Judges should put the asylum claims of those granted CAT withholding on the “back burner” — thus keeping these cases from clogging the Immigration Courts — while working with the UNHCR and other counties in the Hemisphere on more durable solutions for those fleeing the Northern Triangle states of Central America.
Individuals found to have a “credible fear” should be released on minimal bonds and be allowed to move to locations where they will be represented by pro bono lawyers.
Asylum Officers should be vested with the authority to grant asylum in the first instance, thus keeping more asylum cases out of Immigration Court.
If the Administration wants to prioritize the cases of recent arrivals, it should do so without creating more docket reshuffling, inefficiencies, and longer backlogs
My long-time friend Don Kerwin, Executive Director of CMS, has been a “Lt. General of the New Due Process Army” since long before there even was a “New Due Process Army” (“NDPA”). Talk about someone who has spent his entire career increasing human understanding and making the world a better place! Don is a great role model and example for newer members of the NDPA, proving that one can make a difference, as well as a living, in our world by doing great things and good works! Not surprisingly, Don’s career achievements and contributions bear great resemblance to those of our mutual friend, the late Juan Osuna.
So, when Don asked me to consider turning some of my past speeches about our immigration system and how it should work into an article to honor Juan, I couldn’t say no. But, I never would have gotten it “across the finish line” without Don’s inspiration, encouragement, editing, and significant substantive suggestions for improvement, as well as that of the talented peer reviewers and editorial staff of JMHS. Like most achievements in life, it truly was a “team effort” for which I thank all involved.
Those of you who might have attended my Boynton Society Lecture last Saturday, August 10, at the beautiful and inspiring Bjorklunden Campus of Lawrence University on the shores of Lake Michigan at Bailey’s Harbor, WI, will see that portions of this article were “reconverted” and incorporated into that speech.
Also, those who might have taken the class “American Immigration, a Cultural, Legal, and Anthropological Approach” at the Bjorklunden Seminar Series the previous week, co-taught by my friend Professor Jenn Esperanza of The Beloit College Anthropology Department, and me had the then-unpublished manuscript in their course materials, and will no doubt recognize many of the themes that Jenn and I stressed during that week.
Perhaps the only “comment that really mattered” was passed on to me by Don shortly after this article was released. It was from Juan’s wife, the also amazing and inspiring Wendy Young, President of Kids In Need of Defense (“KIND”):“Juan would be truly honored.”
Donald M. Kerwin Executive Director Center for Migration StudiesJuan P. Osuna (1963-2017) Judge, Executive, Scholar, Teacher, Defender of Due ProcessWendy Young President, Kids In Need of Defense (“KIND”)Me
CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico — For the two dozen migrant children living inside a small church on the outskirts of Ciudad Juarez, most days go like this: breakfast at 8 a.m., dinner at 6 p.m. and hours of nothing in between.
There is no school, and except for a handful of worn Bibles, there are no books. Dangers abound in the surrounding hills, so most haven’t left the razor-wire-ringed compound in weeks or even months.
“I feel imprisoned,” said 16-year-old Alison Mendoza.
She left Nicaragua with her parents and two younger sisters in March after her father received death threats for demonstrating against President Daniel Ortega, whose government has jailed and killed thousands of dissenters.
The family has been waiting here in Juarez for nearly two months for their chance to request political asylum in the United States. A Trump administration policy allows only a handful of asylum seekers to pass through ports of entry at the U.S. border each day.
Mendoza and her sisters, Sol, 6, and Michele, 11, are among the thousands of migrant children languishing along the border as a result of changing migration trends and White House policies that seek to deter asylum seekers.
They left friends and relatives behind and endured the trials of the migrant trail only to end up stuck in camps, cheap hotels and shelters such as Buen Pastor, which is now home to children and their families from as far away as Ghana and Congo. Pawns in an adult’s dispute, their future is entirely uncertain.
Two recent Trump administration mandates are almost certain to result in even larger numbers of migrant children being stranded here.
One calls for asylum seekers to wait in Mexico while their cases are adjudicated. About 3,000 migrant children and their families have been returned to Juarez under that program since April, according to Chihuahua state officials.
A mandate announced this week calls for asylum to be denied to migrants who did not apply for protection in at least one country they passed through while trying to reach the United States.
The rules mean that there is a very strong likelihood that if the Mendozas finally do cross the border to plead their case, they will be sent right back to Juarez.
“What will we do?” said Donald Mendoza, 37, who left behind a good job at a Managua university that would have allowed him to pay for all three girls’ college educations.
The Mexican government has committed to providing schooling to migrants who are returned from the U.S., but Mendoza doesn’t want to raise his girls in notoriously dangerous Juarez, where 10 people were slain on Sunday alone.
“This is not the life I planned for my children,” he said.
Buen Pastor opened its doors about 20 years ago to migrants — back then almost always single men — who passed through Juarez before seeking to sneak across the border.
“They would come, rest for a night or two, and then cross,” said Pastor Juan Fierro Garcia.
But over the last two years, entire families began trudging up the dirt road that leads to the church.
Many had heard that U.S. authorities were releasing migrants as long as they requested asylum and were traveling with children.
“We didn’t know much about the situation, just that families were passing,” said Joseph Venegas, 26, who left Honduras last month with his wife and their two sons.
After crossing into the U.S. illegally last week, and turning themselves in to border authorities, Venegas and his family were held for two days and then released back into Juarez with an order to appear at an asylum hearing in October. A Mexican official told them how to get to Buen Pastor.
Ten-year-old Jose sobbed on the way there. “I want to go back to Honduras,” he wailed.
“We had bad luck,” his father explained. “The law is the law and we have to respect it.”
“We are doing all of this for you,” Venegas added.
Venegas said the family decided to leave because a teachers’ strike meant Jose hadn’t been able to go to school for months.
But now, as he watched Jose sit morosely in one corner of the shelter and his wife nurse their coughing 4-month-old baby on a nearby bench, he wondered whether leaving had been in the best interest of his kids.
“What kind of childhood is this?” he asked.
The experience is a little easier on the younger children, many of whom don’t understand exactly what is happening, and who run around the shelter in a tight pack. The youngsters from Africa speak only a small amount of Spanish, but they still manage to make friends.
The lack of toys means the children entertain themselves around a big table, beating it like a drum until their parents complain or turning it into a fort under which they hide and whisper.
There are several small buildings clustered around the compound — a men’s dormitory, a women’s dormitory and the church sanctuary where families camp out each night on mattresses squeezed between the pews.
The crowded conditions and a constant stream of visitors — nongovernmental organization workers, pro bono lawyers and journalists all asking the same tired questions — mean there is zero privacy. Young women groom themselves and change clothes under the cover of blankets.
A psychologist from the state comes once a week. On a recent morning, she gathered the children around a big round table and led them in breathing exercises.
She asked them to go one by one, saying their names and where they were from.
“I’m Natalia from Honduras,” one girl said.
“I’m Akasia from Congo,” said another.
A thin child from Guatemala declined to speak, burying her head in her arms.
“She is sad,” the 7-year-old boy next to her explained.
“It’s OK,” the psychologist said. “It’s okay to be sad.”
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This kind of preventable harm inflicted by an Administration that has declared war on humanity and the rule of law is directly at the feet of three irresponsible Federal Judges of the Ninth Circuit who tanked by vacating the injunction against such gross abuses properly put in place by the U.S. District Judge in Innovation Law Labs v. McAleenan, ostensibly so that their colleagues could “deliberate” (actually “dither”) over a decision that would take responsible judges about 60 minutes to reach!How do guys like this sleep at night?
The issue in Innovation Law Labs involves the bogus “Migrant Protection Protocols,” more accurately described as “Remain in Mexico” or “Die in Mexico” that intentionally violates both Fifth Amendment Due Process and numerous provisions of the INA, including the rights to access to counsel of one’s own choosing, fair notice of hearings, adequate time to prepare and present a case, and the right to assert withholding of removal to a country where one fears persecution or torture.
Failure of privileged Article III Judges to protect the most vulnerable among us from Executive overreach and abuse, in this case clearly racially motivated, has real life adverse consequences, beyond the “judicial ivory tower,” that in many cases are irreversible.
All of us who believe in justice should be outraged by the Ninth Circuit’s dilatory performance in this case! It’s nothing short of child abuse sanctioned by the Federal Judiciary. It must stop!
Some of the lawyers interviewing immigrant children held in Border Patrol detention facilities were so disturbed by what they saw that they have decided to talk to the media.
Photograph by Cedar Attanasio / AP
Hundreds of immigrant children who have been separated from their parents or family members are being held in dirty, neglectful, and dangerous conditions at Border Patrol facilities in Texas. This week, a team of lawyers interviewed more than fifty children at one of those facilities, in Clint, Texas, in order to monitor government compliance with the Flores settlement, which mandates that children must be held in safe and sanitary conditions and moved out of Border Patrol custody without unnecessary delays. The conditions the lawyers found were shocking: flu and lice outbreaks were going untreated, and children were filthy, sleeping on cold floors, and taking care of each other because of the lack of attention from guards. Some of them had been in the facility for weeks.
To discuss what the attorneys saw and heard, I spoke by phone with one of them, Warren Binford, a law professor at Willamette University and the director of its clinical-law program. She told me that, although Flores is an active court case, some of the lawyers were so disturbed by what they saw that they decided to talk to the media. We discussed the daily lives of the children in custody, the role that the guards are playing at the facility, and what should be done to unite many of these kids with their parents. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
How many lawyers were in your party? And can you describe what happened when you arrived?
We had approximately ten lawyers, doctors, and interpreters in El Paso this past week. We did not plan to go to the Clint Facility, because it’s not a facility that historically receives children. It wasn’t even on our radar. It was at a facility that historically only had a maximum occupancy of a hundred and four, and it was an adult facility. So we were not expecting to go there, and then we saw the report, last week, that it appeared that children were being sent to Clint, so we decided to put four teams over there. The teams are one to two attorneys, or an attorney and an interpreter. The idea is that we would be interviewing one child at a time or one sibling group at a time.
How many interviews do you do in a day?
We do a screening interview first to see if the child’s most basic needs are being met. Is it warm enough? Do they have a place to sleep? How long have they been there? Are they being fed? And if it sounds like the basic needs are being met, then we don’t need to interview them longer. If, when we start to interview the child, they start to tell us things like they’re sleeping on the floor, they’re sick, nobody’s taking care of them, they’re hungry, then we do a more in-depth interview. And those interviews can take two hours or even longer. So it depends on what the children tell us. So I’d say, with a team of four attorneys, if you’re interviewing several groups, which we sometimes try to do, or if you interview older children who are trying to take care of younger children, then you are interviewing, let’s say, anywhere from ten to twenty children per day.
How many kids are at the facility right now, and do you have some sense of a breakdown of where they’re from?
When we arrived, on Monday, there were approximately three hundred and fifty children there. They were constantly receiving children, and they’re constantly picking up children and transferring them over to an O.R.R. [Office of Refugee Resettlement] site. So the number is fluid. We were so shocked by the number of children who were there, because it’s a facility that only has capacity for a hundred and four. And we were told that they had recently expanded the facility, but they did not give us a tour of it, and we legally don’t have the right to tour the facility.
We drove around afterward, and we discovered that there was a giant warehouse that they had put on the site. And it appears that that one warehouse has allegedly increased their capacity by an additional five hundred kids. When we talked to Border Patrol agents later that week, they confirmed that is the alleged expansion, and when we talked to children, one of the children described as many as three hundred children being in that room, in that warehouse, basically, at one point when he first arrived. There were no windows.
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As Trump launches his latest “human hostages for outrageous ransom” scheme, it’s important for Democrats to hang tough against any reduction in rights for asylum seekers. The whole “loopholes” bogus claim is just another piece of this toxic White Nationalist racist narrative.
The only “change” needed would be to require the Trump Administration to comply with its domestic, international, and Constitutional duties to administer asylum laws fairly and generously for the protection of asylum seekers. An end of child abuse should be a prerequisite for any discussions.
The reality to keep in mind is that while ICE’s ability to inflict pain and suffering on ethnic communities as part of the racially-motivated “New Operation Wetback” is real, their capacity to actually remove undocumented residents is quite limited.
Contrary to the bogus narrative, several million of the 10 million so-called undocumented residents are actually here with permission and are therefore not currently subject to removal. Those include individuals with DACA, TPS, PD, Deferred Action, and in the EOIR Court System, or whose cases are pending in the Courts of Appeals.
Additionally, many, perhaps the majority, of those with so-called final “in absentia” orders of removal never received proper legal notice of their hearings and will be entitled to file a “motion to reopen” with an automatic stay while those motions are pending. Those who are not yet in the EOIR system will go to the end of a backlog that stretches out for many years.
Given their notoriously poor record keeping, it’s likely that many of ICE’s “last known addresses” are no good. Plus, the resistance that ICE’s racist fear-mongering tactics have engendered in many communities will hamper operations.
Additionally, ICE keeps claiming that is detention capacity is already “saturated.” Thus, most of those picked up, who will not be “immediately removable,” will have to be released.
In short, while we can expect some human tragedies and human rights abuses, the result of the Trump/DHS/ICE “saber rattling” will likely be another resounding operational failure that fuels the “Abolish ICE Movement” while energizing the vote to remove Trump and his GOP White Nationalist Cabal from office in 2020. Kind of an “everyone loses” outcome – but, despite all of his lies, boasting, and shamelessly false self-promotion, that’s all Trump has ever been about.
Four toddlers were so severely ill and neglected at a U.S. Border Patrol facility in McAllen, Texas, that lawyers forced the government to hospitalize them last week.
The children, all under age 3 with teenage mothers or guardians, were feverish, coughing, vomiting and had diarrhea, immigration attorneys told HuffPost on Friday. Some of the toddlers and infants were refusing to eat or drink. One 2-year-old’s eyes were rolled back in her head, and she was “completely unresponsive” and limp, according to Toby Gialluca, a Florida-based attorney.
She described seeing terror in the children’s eyes.
“It’s just a cold, fearful look that you should never see in a child of that age,” Gialluca said. “You look at them and you think, ‘What have you seen?’”
Another mother at the same facility had a premature baby, who was “listless” and wrapped in a dirty towel, as HuffPost previously reported.
The lawyers feared that if they had not shown up at the facility, the sick kids would have received zero medical attention and potentially died. The Trump administration has come under fire for its treatment ― and its alleged neglect ― of migrants who have been crossing the southern border in record numbers. The result is overcrowded facilities, slow medical care and in some instances, deaths.
Immigration authorities say they’re overwhelmed; activists say they’re not trying hard enough.
“It’s intentional disregard for the well-being of children,” Gialluca said. “The guards continue to dehumanize these people and treat them worse than we would treat animals.”
U.S. Customs and Border Protection declined to respond to HuffPost’s request for comment.
The Associated Press reported this week that children in border facilities don’t have adequate access to food, water, soap or showers. On Tuesday, a Justice Department attorney argued in court that the government should not have to provide detained children with soap, toothbrushes or beds.
The AP report is based on interviews a group of lawyers conducted with hundreds of children in three Texas-based Border Patrol stations last week as part of the Flores settlement ― an agreement that outlines conditions for detained children. The lawyers say children are also being held in these facilities for longer than the 72-hour limit the settlement specifies, and in some cases up to three weeks.
Lawyers are particularly concerned about the spread of illness inside Border Patrol facilities, which can sometimes turn fatal. Five children have died in Border Patrol custody since December, some of whom were initially diagnosed with a common cold or the flu. The processing center in McAllen, known as Ursula, recently quarantined three dozen migrants who were sick after a 16-year-old died of the flu at the same facility.
Children and their parents told lawyers that in some cases they didn’t have any access to medical treatment in Border Patrol facilities despite being visibly ill. Gialluca spoke with one 16-year-old mother whose toddler had the flu, but was told by a guard the child “wasn’t sick enough to see a doctor.” She said others also reported being denied medical attention despite having critically sick babies.
Medical experts say that because children have less developed immune and respiratory systems, their symptoms can escalate quickly if they aren’t properly treated.
Dr. Julie Linton, the co-chair of the American Academy of Pediatrics, previously told HuffPost that children can’t recover from illnesses in Border Patrol facilities. These centers are described as “hieleras” ― Spanish for iceboxes ― because of their freezing temperatures, and migrants describe sleeping on floors under bright lights that shine 24/7, with nothing but Mylar blankets to keep warm.
Gialluca met one 16-year-old mother whose 8-month-old baby was sick with the flu and forced to sleep outside for four days at the McAllen Border Patrol station. The mother said the guards took the clothing off the baby’s back, leaving her in a diaper, and forced them to sleep on concrete without a blanket.
A sick 2-year-old girl was shivering in a T-shirt and had shallow breathing, according to Mike Fassio, a Seattle-based immigration attorney who visited Ursula.
“I was very, very concerned,” he said, adding lawyers spoke with immigrants in a room outside of the facility. “When she left us, I knew she was going back to a place that was cold, crowded and unsanitary.” Fassio noted that guards referred to the children as “bodies.”
Some children were so exhausted they fell asleep during the interviews, said Clara Long, a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch who spoke with kids at a facility in Clint, Texas. Long met a 3-year-old boy who was dirty with matted hair and was being taken care of by his 11-year-old brother. She said that more than 10 sick children were being quarantined in cells.
While the group of roughly eight lawyers and interpreters at Ursula were supposed to be interviewing children about conditions in the facilities, they also ended up asking guards and government officials to bring kids to the hospital because they were so worried about their state. Gialluca added that she and her colleagues interviewed only a small portion of migrants in the facility, which is the largest processing center in the U.S. and can hold up to 1,000 people. She believes the number of migrants in need of hospitalization is likely much higher.
Government officials have blamed horrific conditions at detention facilities on the fact that Congress has not yet passed an emergency funding package that would include almost $3 billion to help care for unaccompanied migrant children. But Gialluca says border officials shouldn’t need more resources to treat immigrants like human beings.
“Money isn’t keeping guards from allowing people to access toilets,” she said. “Money isn’t causing guards to take clothing and medicine away from children.”
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Nicole Goodkind Political Reporter, Newsweek
Here’s Another report from Nicole Goodkind at Newsweek on the “malicious incompetence” and intentional misallocation of resources by Trump and his DHS sycophants that is willfully endangering kids’ lives as part of a cheap White Nationalist political stunt:
8-YEAR-OLD MIGRANTS BEING FORCED TO CARE FOR TODDLERS IN DETENTION CAMPS
A team of lawyers conducted 60 interviews with migrant children being held in an El Paso, Texas, detention camp and found conditions to be dismal.
Fifteen of those in the holding center had the flu and 10 more are quarantined with illness, according to the lawyers, who first gave the data to the Associated Press. Three infants are being detained alongside their teenage mothers, and many children are under the age of 12.
“A Border Patrol agent came in our room with a 2-year-old boy and asked us, ‘Who wants to take care of this little boy?’ Another girl said she would take care of him, but she lost interest after a few hours and so I started taking care of him yesterday,” one teenaged girl told the lawyers in an interview. The boy was not wearing a diaper and his shirt was covered in mucus, she said.
Law professor Warren Binford, who aided in the interviews, said she witnessed an 8-year-old girl caring for a 4-year-old child who was very dirty, the girl was unable to get the boy to take a shower. She also described the children she interviewed as sleep-deprived, often falling asleep while speaking with her.
“In my 22 years of doing visits with children in detention, I have never heard of this level of inhumanity,” said Holly Cooper, co-director of the University of California, Davis’ Immigration Law Clinic, to the AP.
The lawyers were inspecting the facility as part of the Flores agreement, which resulted from a landmark 1985 case that established that facilities where minor migrants are held must be kept “safe and sanitary.”
A representative of the Trump administration, the Justice Department’s Sarah Fabian, argued Tuesday that safe and sanitary conditions don’t necessarily have to include toothbrushes, soap or towels for children.
Nicole Goodkind is a political reporter at Newsweek. You can reach her on Twitter @NicoleGoodkind or by email, N.Goodkind@newsweek.com.
TRUMP ADMINISTRATION PLANS MAJOR ICE RAIDS FOR SUNDAY
U.S. immigration authorities plan to raid Miami, Houston, Chicago and Los Angeles and other cities. They intend to arrest up to 2,000 families, three U.S. officials with knowledge of the plans told The Washington Post. The orders reportedly come directly from President Donald Trump.
On Monday, the president tweeted: “Next week ICE will begin the process of removing the millions of illegal aliens who have illicitly found their way into the United States. They will be removed as fast as they come in.”
Officials told The Washington Post that the Department of Homeland Security agency plans to hold families in hotel rooms until they are deported. Acting DHS Secretary Kevin McAleenan is allegedly targeting families that have completely dropped out of the court process, but has warned that the operation could lead to further cases of families being separated.
Los Angeles Police Department Chief Michel Moore confirmed the raids on Friday, saying that about 140 families in southern California will be targeted in pre-dawn raids early next week. The chief also made clear that the raids are done on a federal level and that the police department will not be involved.
On Thursday, Carla Provost, chief of the United States Border Patrol argued that the Department of Homeland Security was not receiving enough money to properly care for migrants on the southern border, and that was leading to terrible conditions in detention centers. On Wednesday, the Senate Appropriations Committee agreed to $4.6 billion in emergency funds for what the Trump administration has referred to as a “border crisis.”
Texas Congressman Joaquin Castro questioned how the agency could afford mass raids while asking for more money Friday. “The Trump Administration says it needs more money (supplemental bill) for the situation at the border yet they may be starting massive immigration raids next week. So how do you have the money for that if you’re running out of money ICE?” he tweeted.
“These potential raids are a disgusting political ploy to stoke fear and rile up Trump’s base for 2020,” wrote Sandra Cordero, Director of Families Belong Together, an immigration advocacy group, in a statement. “Past raids have left children alone and afraid in empty homes, praying they won’t be left to care for younger siblings by themselves, with no idea if they’ll see their parents again. This is yet another flagrant disregard for the welfare of children on behalf of a cruel administration bent on fomenting fear and creating chaos.”
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Come on, Carla, cut the BS and butt covering. The “mix” of arrivals at the Southern Border began to shift to refugee families from the Northern Triangle back in the summer of 2014. So, CBP and DHS have had five years to prepare for this “change” which is actually “old news.”
More “old news” is the increased flow of asylum seekers with kids which began back before Thanksgiving. Plenty of time for CBP and DHS to bring back retired asylum officers and adjudicators and reassign other adjudicative personnel to the border to insure prompt, orderly, safe, and efficient processing of asylum applicants at ports of entry, thus eliminating the incentive (or necessity) for folks to turn themselves in after crossing the border between ports.
Also, plenty of time to work with NGOs, pro bono groups, states, and communities to insure representation and proper placement of family groups in various locations throughout the country without panic or “dumping.”
Another bogus claim spread by Trump, Provost, and the rest of the sycophants: that the prevalence of kids among new asylum arrivals is somehow totally a response to the Flores settlement (which actually has been in effect for decades).
Undoubtedly, with the Trump Administration’s active assistance, unscrupulous smugglers and coyotes are encouraging some folks to bring children as the only way to have a shot at fair processing under the tilted U.S. asylum system promoted by Trump. Indeed, as I have observed before, the Trump Administrations has consistently been a “best friend” to gangs, smugglers, traffickers, cartels, and druggies seeking to “jack up” profits by further exploiting the human misery caused by the Trump Administration’s “maliciously incompetent “ approach to immigration, effective law enforcement, and humanity generally. https://apple.news/AFQw_eqcHSZCYxUznmP0wpQ
Undoubtedly, some of these unscrupulous individuals are telling families to travel with kids. But, the truth is that according to the UNHCR, over one-half of today’s refugees are children. https://www.unhcr.org/children-49c3646c1e8.html.
So, the prevalence of children among new arrivals should properly been seen as part of a sad worldwide trend that Trump and his cronies disgustingly have done everything possible to encourage, exploit, and aggravate. It most certainly is not primarily caused by the Flores settlement or by giving soap, toothbrushes, blankets, or medical care to children being abused in the “DHS Gulag” administered in part by disingenuous folks like Provost.
Any honest observer of what’s going on knows that the majority of the asylum applications that passed credible fear probably could have been granted (or given protection under the Convention Against Torture — “CAT”) by the Asylum Office without even going to Immigration Court under the proper generous interpretation of our asylum laws, an honest interpretation of CAT that reflects the true conditions in the Northern Triangle, and a very “doable” change in procedures.
Only dishonest fools in the Trump Administration (and a few from the Obama Administration) would maintain that gender isn’t a social group subject to widespread persecution in the Northern Triangle, deny that gangs have assumed the role of quasi-governmental entities thus making most of the harm they inflict on resisters “political persecution,” and make the beyond ludicrous claim that the corrupt failed states of the Northern Triangle have either the ability or much real interest in protecting those subject to persecution.
And, Carla, why aren’t you out there today registering a public protest of the waste of time and funds in ICE going after families with ridiculously inappropriate “raids” when everyresource could and should be focused instead on providing humanitarian assistance to asylum seekers arriving at the Southern Border?
This racist-inspired “Sunday Morning Reign of Terror” directed at U.S. ethnic communities is specifically designed to return helpless families to the very dangerous countries from which they originally fled! Thus, Trump and his phony DHS are intentionally feeding “fresh meat” to gangs and cartels and insuring that the cycle of northward migration, no matter how dangerous, will continue until everyone who needs to leave its either gone or dead (the latter apparently the “solution” favored by Provost, Trump, Morgan, McAleenan, Miller, and others).
Provost, McAleenan, Morgan, and their co-conspirators are all participants in a cynical scheme to intentionally “crash” the asylum system, rather than competently administering it. They are intentionally endangering the lives of children and other vulnerable asylum seekers, many entitled to legal protections, to promote, along with GOP restrictionists, totally bogus, dishonest, and completely unnecessary and unwarranted restrictions of the precious, life-saving right of refugees to seek asylum in the U.S.
It’s an unbelievably dishonest and cowardly scheme, and a complete breach of both oaths of office and public trust. It might be that those who long ago abandoned American values will lap up this insult to human values and human dignity.
But, there are plenty of us out here who know and understand exactly what you are doing. We will not only resist it, but will be historical witnesses to your cruel, inhuman, and unlawful schemes and gimmicks to “abuse and kill the innocent.” And, we’ll be keeping count.
Cages With ‘Kids’ Pop Up Around NYC To Protest Immigrant Detention
The art installations were meant to bring awareness to the horrific conditions children and other migrants face at the southern U.S. border.
Some people in New York City were confronted with an alarming image as they walked down the street on Wednesday morning: a chain-link cage on the sidewalk containing a child-size mannequin wrapped in a foil blanket, with audio playing of migrant children crying.
It was meant to draw Americans’ attention to the children and other migrants being held in alarming conditions at the U.S.-Mexico border.
Speakers in the cages played the viral recording released by ProPublica last summer of kids wailing for their “mamá” and “papá” after having been separated from them at the border as a result of the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” immigration policy.
“We want to bring this back to the consciousness of the American people,” RAICES CEO Jonathan Ryan told HuffPost. “One of the many unfortunate consequences of the repeated traumatic stories coming from the border is that, as horrified and angry as people have been, we also become desensitized. It’s important for people … to be confronted with the reality that this is about children, human beings, whose lives are forever affected.”
“This is being done in our name by people who we elected,” he added. “And if we don’t do something to stop this, this will become who we are.”
About two dozen cages were dropped around the city from about 4 a.m. to 5 a.m., Ryan said. By midafternoon most of them had been taken down by police or city employees, with three remaining around 2 p.m., per Ryan. The New York Police Department confirmed to HuffPost that more than half a dozen cages had been removed around Manhattan, but did not respond to questions as to why.
The online campaign associated with the installations recalls the family separations under President Donald Trump’s hard-line zero-tolerance policy, which led to the separation of thousands of children from their parents last year. The policy sparked protests nationwide and was reversed by executive order in late June. But a January report from the Department of Health and Human Services found the administration may have separated thousands more kids from their families than was previously known, and it did not know how many or whether they were reunited.
RAICES also wants people to become aware of other issues migrants face, Ryan said.
He noted undocumented immigrant families are still separated “routinely” at the border, including when migrant kids are split from other guardians like uncles and aunts or older siblings. Separations occur inside the country too, he said, when a child’s undocumented mom or dad is arrested by immigration agents, for instance in a workplace raid.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection apprehended over 109,000 people at the border in April ― more than double the number of migrants detained during that month last year. A majority of the migrants apprehended were either families traveling together or unaccompanied kids.
A Department of Homeland Security watchdog, reporting on Border Patrol facilities in El Paso, Texas, found last month that detained migrants were kept in dirty and extremely crowded conditions, forcing some people to stand on toilets to get some breathing room.
Last week, Trump said he reached an agreement with Mexico that includes “rapidly” returning to Mexico anyone who crosses the border seeking asylum in the U.S. Advocates are concerned about the dangerous conditions in cities such as Tijuana and Ciudad Juárez, where more migrants will now be forced to wait as their claims are processed.
“When the American people hear stories of this problem being fixed by the ‘remain in Mexico’ policy, it hasn’t been fixed, it’s just further from their view,” Ryan said. “The suffering will only increase.”
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Ah, life in the ivory tower of the Article III Federal Judiciary, where you seldom are confronted with the human faces or ugly reality of your abuses and failures to protect the human rights of others.
The “Remain in Mexico” Program is an ongoing affront to our Constitution, the rule of law, and simple human decency for which the judges of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals who are enabling this ongoing humanitarian outrage and giving it “legal cover” should be held fully morally and historically accountable!
James Hohmann reports for the Washington Post’s “Daily 202:”
— Hundreds of minors are being held at U.S. facilities at the southern border beyond legal time limits. Abigail Hauslohner and Maria Sacchetti report: “Federal law and court orders require that children in Border Patrol custody be transferred to more-hospitable shelters no longer than 72 hours after they are apprehended. But some unaccompanied children are spending longer than a week in Border Patrol stations and processing centers, according to two Customs and Border Protection officials and two other government officials. … One government official said about half of the children in custody — 1,000 — have been with the Border Patrol for longer than 72 hours, and another official said that more than 250 children 12 or younger have been in custody for an average of six days. …
“The McAllen Border Patrol station, a facility near the southern tip of Texas that is routinely overwhelmed, was holding 775 people on Tuesday, nearly double its capacity. The Washington Post this week made a rare visit inside the facility, where adults and their toddler children were packed into concrete holding cells, many of them sleeping head-to-foot on the floor and along the wall-length benches, as they awaited processing at a sparsely staffed circle of computers known as ‘the bubble.’ … Experts say transferring children out of detention facilities as quickly as possible is critical, especially for ‘tender age’ children — those 12 or younger, who face physical and mental health issues even during short periods in detention. They sleep fitfully, do not eat well and suffer anxiety, said Amy Cohen, a child psychiatrist and expert witness in the Flores case.”
— Border agents apprehended 1,036 migrants in a record roundup near El Paso earlier this week. The apprehensions, which included 63 children traveling alone, reflect an uptick in the number of large groups trying to cross the border. Border agents apprehended a group of 424 migrants, the previous record, just last month. (NBC News)
Here’s the statement of ABA President Bob Carlson:
May 31, 2019
Statement of ABA President Bob Carlson, Re: Improper Detention of Immigrant Children
Share this:
WASHINGTON, May 31, 2019 — The American Bar Association is deeply disturbed by reports that hundreds of unaccompanied children seeking refuge in the United States are being held by the U.S. Border Patrol in violation of the law and federal policies.According to federal law and court orders, immigrant children generally cannot be held by law enforcement for more than 72 hours before being transferred to shelters that are better equipped to care for their physical and psychological needs. Yet news reports cite recent federal data that hundreds of children, many aged 12 and younger, have been held in Border Patrol custody for an average of six days, in facilities that are intended to be short-term processing stations.The current situation is unacceptable. Leaders at every level of the federal government, including the White House and Congress, must immediately find legal and humane alternatives that relieve the suffering of these children – and then work to create and fund comprehensive, long-term solutions.
With more than 400,000 members, the American Bar Association is one of the largest voluntary professional membership organizations in the world. As the national voice of the legal profession, the ABA works to improve the administration of justice, promotes programs that assist lawyers and judges in their work, accredits law schools, provides continuing legal education, and works to build public understanding around the world of the importance of the rule of law. View our privacy statement online. Follow the latest ABA news at www.americanbar.org/newsand on Twitter @ABANews.
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How “gonzo” has our country become? Our dishonest and unqualified “President” makes idiotic threats against our “friends” because his Administration has been too maliciously incompetent to deal with a relatively predictable flow of individuals merely seeking to exercise their legal rights. Somehow, the mess in Central America, for which we share a great part of the blame, becomes Mexico’s problem to solve. But, while the vast majority of those arriving at our borders are surrendering themselves to apply under our laws, the Trump Administration is violating the law on a grand scale by mistreating children and others in detention.
In a rational country, there would be a massive, bipartisan, expedited movement to remove this unqualified demagogue from office before he does more damage to our country and our world. But not in today’s America.
Sadly, that appears to be the real meaning of “American exceptionalism.”
WASHINGTON — The number of undocumented immigrant children in U.S. custody is reaching breaking-point levels again, months after the Trump administration had reduced the total in shelters in response to anger over policies that kept children there.
The recent increase is largely due to a surge in the number of children crossing the U.S.-Mexico border rather than an administration policy. Overall crossings this year have skyrocketed to decade-high levels.
As of Thursday, the number of undocumented immigrant children in U.S. custody had increased to more than 13,000, according to figures obtained by The Chronicle. The number is a near-record high, and puts the shelter network that the Department of Health and Human Services runs to keep such children in custody near maximum capacity.
Trump administration officials have asked Congress for nearly $3 billion more to increase shelter capacity. Without it, they say, Health and Human Services could run out of money for the system by June.
While the shelter network has come under increased attention in the aftermath of President Trump’s separation of families at the border last summer in order to prosecute the parents, the vast majority of children in the system come to the U.S. by themselves.
The 13,000 figure has been exceeded only once before. Last fall, the total surpassed 14,000 children in custody for the first time in history, topping out close to 15,000.
That was due mainly to an administration policy under which Immigration and Customs Enforcement rigorously screened adults who were applying to take the children out of custody. The change slowed the process and often deterred such sponsors, usually family members, from coming forward. ICE also arrested some for being undocumented immigrants.
The practice so infuriated members of Congress that in a government funding bill in February, they barred ICE from using the information it collected as part of the screenings to arrest immigrants.
The Trump administration instituted a policy in December to try to release undocumented children from its custody more quickly, rescinding its requirement to fingerprint every adult in the home where the child would be living. Only the adult sponsoring the child is fingerprinted now.
By January, that had brought the number of children in custody below 11,000, according to Health and Human Services, with thousands of beds available.
Always great to get Tal’s timely and highly readable reporting!
What’s the solution? Well, it’s notthe Trump Administration’s “preferred solution” of allowing the Border Patrol to mindlessly rocket vulnerable kids back to the Northern Triangle to be killed, tortured, exploited, abused, or forced to join gangs. It’s actually part of a worldwide trend that has seen more and more of the total refugee population comprised of children. So, this phenomenon shouldn’t have come as a surprise to a competent Administration focused on dealing with refugee situations humanely under the laws.
A rational solution would be to work closely and cooperatively with NGOs with expertise in child refugees (like, for example, Kids In Need Of Defense (“KIND”) or the Safe Passage Project), pro bono lawyers, and communities to figure out what is in the best interests of these children.
Then, pursue the right options: Special Immigrant Juvenile Status (”SIJS”) for some; expedited grants of asylum through the Asylum Office under the Wilberforce Act for others; TPS for others, recognizing the reality that there is an “ongoing state of armed conflict” in the Northern Triangle; an exercise of prosecutorial discretion (“PD”) for others; and humane and organized repatriation for others, where that is actually in the child’s best interests.
There are plenty of tools available under existing laws to deal with this issue. We just have an Administration that refuses to use them and prefers to create a “crisis” to justify “throwing children under the bus.” Mistreating children is cowardly and bodes ill for the future of any country that permits it to happen. What goes around comes around!
(CNN)On your 18th birthday, immigration officials will come for you, a lawyer explained. You will be shackled, you will be placed in an orange jumpsuit, and you will be taken to jail. “But I need you to know you are not a criminal.”
This is how Allison Norris, toll litigation staff attorney at Americans for Immigrant Justice, prepares her teenage clients in federal migrant detention shelters who are nearing age 18 without the prospects of a suitable sponsor to whom they can be released.
One of these clients is Veronica, whose name has been changed to protect her identity for fear of retribution. At age 17, she arrived in the United States alone, fleeing sexual predators in El Salvador.
Between the time Veronica arrived and when she turned 18, just over four months, Norris says, she attempted to find a sponsor. But none of the family friends who applied met the extensive list of requirements of the Office of Refugee Resettlement in order for her to be released from the shelter for migrant children in South Florida where she was detained.
On her 18th birthday, she woke up scared, wondering what would happen to her, Veronica said. Norris’ detailed warnings had not exactly calmed her down.
At 8 a.m. on her birthday, immigration officials arrived at the shelter. She was placed in ankle shackles and put in a “very cold room” for hours before being taken into adult detention, Veronica said.
In the months that followed, Veronica describes feeling depressed, crying every day and losing hope. Because she wasn’t serving a specific sentence, she had no idea how long she’d spend in detention.
With hours to fill in a cell she shared with three older women, she relived in her mind the attacks she suffered in El Salvador.
“I didn’t know what was worse: to have died in El Salvador or to be locked up,” she said.
Veronica is part of a group of kids known as ORR age-outs. When unaccompanied minors arrive in the United States, they are placed in the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, part of the US Department of Health and Human Services, a humanitarian agency in nature.
Once they turn 18, teens are moved into the custody of the Department of Homeland Security — more specifically, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a law enforcement agency known as ICE. Migrant youth cannot, by law, stay in the shelters that housed them before they turned 18.
“I have interviewed the children right before they turn 18 and they go into these facilities,” said Yenis Castillo, a forensic psychologist with the nonprofit advocacy group Physicians for Human Rights. “All the kids I interview are terrified.”
In the weeks leading up to their 18th birthdays, Castillo said, she has seen teens act out, develop chronic headaches or high blood pressure, become depressed and even become suicidal.
“When people undergo trauma, they live in a constant state of alert, and on top of that, then we are sending them to prison,” she said.
Neha Desai, director for immigration at the National Center for Youth Law, has toured immigrant child detention centers across the country. “Everywhere I go, the kids that are in most extreme and visible distress are the ones that are approaching age-out. There’s so much anxiety in that period of time,” she said.
The Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, passed in 2000 and reauthorized in 2008 and 2013, states that when unaccompanied immigrant children in the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement turn 18, ICE “shall consider placement in the least restrictive setting available after taking into account the [individual’s] danger to self, danger to the community, and risk of flight.”
“What we’ve seen is that they very rarely do,” said Xiaorong Jajah Wu, immigration attorney and deputy program director at the Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights. Wu oversees offices in Houston and Chicago, where she says it is the child’s attorney or child advocates who put forth alternatives to adult detention, “basically begging ICE not to take these kids on their 18th birthday.”
Wu said her team has not seen what they’d consider “any level of thought” being put into the decision of whether to take a migrant youth into adult detention.
In California, Lindsay Toczylowski, an immigration attorney and founder and executive director of the immigrant Defenders Law Center, says the move into adult detention has become the norm rather than the exception for teens over the past two years.
“What we’ve seen is a lack of discussion for ICE when deciding whether or not they are going to take a kid into custody,” she said. Toczylowski also worries about the way in which this is done, which she describes as “overkill,” considering that these are typically petite teens from rural communities in Central America who have committed no crimes.
Kate Melloy Goettel, senior litigation attorney at the National Immigrant Justice Center, noted that “Congress really understood that these kids are vulnerable. And now we are just trying to get ICE to understand that they have obligations under the law to really try to find options other than detention.”
These options, Goettel explains, includes placement with family members, non-family sponsors, shelters, group homes and institutional placement.
Jennifer Elzea, press secretary for ICE, wrote in an email that “custody determination is made by ICE on a case-by-case basis, taking into account the totality of the individual’s circumstance, to include flight risk, threat to the public and threat to themselves.” Elzea acknowledged understanding the requirement that the agency consider the least restrictive setting available and to consider alternatives to detention.
Goettel is part of the team of attorneys at the National Immigrant Justice Center who, in March 2018, sued Homeland Security and ICE on behalf of two migrant teens who were placed in adult prisons when they turned 18. The lawsuit alleges that ICE “failed to consider them for placement in ‘the least restrictive setting available’ and to provide them with meaningful alternatives to detention, as required by amendments to the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act.”
According to documents obtained from the Office of Refugee Resettlement as part of the class-action lawsuit, 528 children aged out of custody in 2015. The number doubled to 1,044 in 2016, remained about the same at 1,091 in 2017 and, in the first half of 2018 alone, included 1,240 kids.
In November, Health and Human Services confirmed that there were a record 14,000 unaccompanied children in Office of Refugee Resettlement custody.
Since the lawsuit was filed, a judge required ICE to reassess the custody of the two original teens and place them in the “least restrictive setting possible.” In August, the court granted a motion for class action certification, meaning the lawsuit against Homeland Security is now on behalf of all unaccompanied migrant children in custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement who “age out” when they turn 18.
When asked about the lawsuit, Elzea said, “ICE does not comment on pending litigation”
As for Veronica, she spent just over two months in adult detention. Norris, her attorney, says that a family friend with lawful status was able to get all required documents quickly, and Homeland Security released Veronica to live with her.
But, Norris says, the process can take much longer for other teens, many of whom lose hope while in detention and ask to be sent back to their home countries.
“They fought all this way to come here, raised all this money to go on this very dangerous journey to escape horrific violence, and all of a sudden they’ve been in detention for three months, and they’re like ‘just send me back. I can’t take it anymore,’ ” she said.
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The obvious solution: protect the kids; resist the Trump Kakistocracy. That’s what the New Due Process Army does!
But they were willing to do whatever it took. Going back to Guatemala was simply not an option, they said. Monterroso explained that in October, their family was forced to flee after a gang threatened to murder the children if they didn’t pay an exorbitant bribe, five months’ worth of profits from their tiny juice stall. The family hid for a day and a half in their house and then sneaked away before dawn. “There is nobody that can protect us there,” Monterroso said. “We have seen in the other cases, they kill the people and kill their children.” Her voice caught. “The first thing is to have security for them,” she said of her kids, “that nothing bad happens to them.”
All told, more than 159,000 migrants filed for asylum in the U.S. in fiscal year 2018, a 274% increase over 2008. Meanwhile, the total number of apprehensions along the southern border has decreased substantially—nearly 70% since fiscal year 2000. President Donald Trump has labeled the southern border a national crisis. He refused to sign any bill funding the federal government that did not include money for construction of a wall along the frontier, triggering the longest shutdown in American history, and when Democrats refused to budge, he threatened to formally invoke emergency powers. The President says the barrier, which was the centerpiece of his election campaign, is needed to thwart a dangerous “invasion” of undocumented foreigners.
But the situation on the southern border, however the political battle in Washington plays out, will continue to frustrate this U.S. President, and likely his successors too, and not just because of continuing caravans making their way to the desert southwest. Months of reporting by TIME correspondents around the world reveal a stubborn reality: we are living today in a global society increasingly roiled by challenges that can be neither defined nor contained by physical barriers. That goes for climate change, terrorism, pandemics, nascent technologies and cyber-attacks. It also applies to one of the most significant global developments of the past quarter-century: the unprecedented explosion of global migration.
. . . .
They abandoned their homes for different reasons: tens of millions went in search of better jobs or better education or medical care, and tens of millions more had no choice. More than 5.6 million fled the war in Syria, and a million more were Rohingya, chased from their villages in Myanmar. Hundreds of thousands fled their neighborhoods in Central America and villages in sub-Saharan Africa, driven by poverty and violence. Others were displaced by catastrophic weather linked to climate change.
Taken one at a time, each is an individual, a mixture of strengths and weaknesses, hope and despair. But collectively, they represent something greater than the sum of their parts. The forces that pushed them from their homes have combined with a series of global factors that pulled them abroad: the long peace that followed the Cold War in the developed world, the accompanying expansion of international travel, liberalized policies for refugees and the relative wealth of developed countries, especially in Europe and the U.S., the No. 1 destination for migrants. The force is tidal and has not been reversed by walls, by separating children from their parents or by deploying troops. Were the world’s total population of international migrants in 2018 gathered from the places where they have sought new lives and placed under one flag, they would be its fifth largest country.
The mass movement of people has changed the world both for better and for worse. Migrants tend to be productive. Though worldwide they make up about 3% of the population, in 2015 they generated about 9% of global GDP, according to the U.N. Much of that money is wired home—$480 billion in 2017, also according to the U.N.—where the cash has immense impact. Some will pay for the passage of the next migrant, and the smartphone he or she will keep close at hand. The technology not only makes the journey more efficient and safer—smugglers identify their clients by photos on instant-messaging—but, upon arrival, allows those who left to keep in constant contact with those who remain behind, across oceans and time zones.
Yet attention of late is mostly focused on the impact on host countries. There, national leaders have grappled with a powerful irony: the ways in which they react to new migrants—tactically, politically, culturally—shape them as much as the migrants themselves do. In some countries, migrants have been welcomed by crowds at train stations. In others, images of migrants moving in miles-long caravans through Central America or spilling out of boats on Mediterranean shores were wielded to persuade native-born citizens to lock down borders, narrow social safety nets and jettison long-standing humanitarian commitments to those in need.
. . . .
The U.S., though founded by Europeans fleeing persecution, now largely reflects the will of its Chief Executive: subverting decades of asylum law and imposing a policy that separated migrant toddlers from their parents and placed children behind cyclone fencing. Trump floated the possibility of revoking birthright citizenship, characterized migrants as “stone cold criminals” and ordered 5,800 active-duty U.S. troops to reinforce the southern border. Italy refused to allow ships carrying rescued migrants to dock at its ports. Hungary passed laws to criminalize the act of helping undocumented people. Anti-immigrant leaders saw their political power grow in the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Sweden, Germany, Finland, Italy and Hungary, and migration continued to be a factor in the Brexit debate in the U.K.
These political reactions fail to grapple with a hard truth: in the long run, new migration is nearly always a boon to host countries. In acting as entrepreneurs and innovators, and by providing inexpensive labor, immigrants overwhelmingly repay in long-term economic contributions what they use in short-term social services, studies show. But to maximize that future good, governments must act -rationally to establish humane policies and adequately fund an immigration system equipped to handle an influx of newcomers.
. . . .
But protocols and treaties can, at best, hope to respond to the human emotions and hard realities that drive migration. No wall, sheriff or headscarf law would have prevented Monterroso and Calderón, or Yaquelin and Albertina Contreras, or Sami Baladi and Mirey Darwich from leaving their homes. Migrants will continue to flee bombs, look for better-paying jobs and accept extraordinary risks as the price of providing a better life for their children.
The question now is whether the world can come to define the enormous population of international migrants as an opportunity. No matter when that happens, Eman Albadawi, a teacher from Syria who arrived in Anröchte, Germany, in 2015, will continue to make a habit of reading German-language children’s books to her three Syrian-born kids at night. Their German is better than hers, and they make fun of her pronunciation, but she doesn’t mind. She is proud of them. At a time when anti-immigrant rhetoric is on the rise, she tells them, “We must be brave, but we must also be successful and strong.” —With reporting by Aryn Baker/Anröchte, Germany; Melissa Chan, Julia Lull, Gina Martinez, Thea Traff/New York; Ioan Grillo/Tijuana; Abby Vesoulis/Murfreesboro, Tenn.; and Vivienne Walt/Paris •
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I strongly encourage everyone to read Haley’s outstanding article at the link. It is one of the best and most easily understandable explanations of a complex phenomenon that I have seen recently. As I always say, “lots of moving parts.” But Haley and her colleagues have distilled the fundamental truths concealed by this complexity. Congrats and appreciation to Haley and everyone who worked on this masterpiece!
Haley debunks and eviscerates the restrictionist, racist “fear and loathing” baloney that Trump and his White Nationalist gang peddle. The simple truth always has been and continues to be that America needs more immigration.
The only real question is whether we are going to be smart and funnel it into expanded legal and humanitarian channels or dumb like Trump and push the inevitable migration into an extra-legal system. The latter best serves neither our country nor the humans pushed into an underground existence where they can be exploited and are artificially prevented from achieving their full potential for themselves and for us. Right now, we have a mix skewed toward forcing far, far too many good folks to use the extra-legal system.
We’ll only be able to improve the situation by pushing the mix toward the legal and the humanitarian, rather than the extra-legal. That’s why it’s virtually impossible to have a rational immigration debate with folks like Trump who start with the racist-inspired fiction that migrants are a “threat” who can be deterred, punished, and diminished.
Contrary to Trump and the White Nationalists, the real immigration problems facing America are 1) how can we best integrate the millions of law-abiding and productive undocumented individuals already residing here into our society, and 2) how can we most fairly and efficiently insure that in the future individuals like them can be properly screened and come to our country through expanded humanitarian and legal channels. Until we resolve these, American will continue to founder with immigration and fail to maximize its many benefits. That’s bad for us, for migrants, and for the future of our nation.
As a reminder, in the context of Congressional negotiations on border security, I recently put together a list of “practical fixes” to the immigration system which would address border security, humanitarian relief, and improved compliance with Constitutional Due process without major legislative changes — mostly “tweaks” and other common sense amendments that would make outsized improvements and certainly would be an improvement on squandering $5.7 billion and getting nothing but a largely symbolic “instant white elephant” border wall in return. So, here it is again in all its hypothetical glory: “THE SMARTS ACT OF 2019:
SECURITY, MIGRATION ASSISTANCE RENEWAL, & TECHNICAL SYSTEMS ACT (“SMARTS ACT”) OF 2019
Federal Employees
Restart the Government
Retroactive pay raise
Enhanced Border Security
Fund half of “Trump’s Wall”
Triple the number of USCIS Asylum Officers
Double the number of U.S. Immigration Judges and Court Staff
Additional Port of Entry (“POE”) Inspectors
Improvements in POE infrastructure, technology, and technology between POEs
Additional Intelligence, Anti-Smuggling, and Undercover Agents for DHS
Anything else that both parties agree upon
Humanitarian Assistance
Road to citizenship for a Dreamers & TPSers
Prohibit family separation
Funding for alternatives to detention
Grants to NGOs for assisting arriving asylum applicants with temporary housing and resettlement issues
Require re-establishment of U.S. Refugee Program in the Northern Triangle
Asylum Process
Require Asylum Offices to consider in the first instance all asylum applications including those generated by the “credible fear” process as well as all so-called “defensive applications”
Immigration Court Improvements
Grants and requirements that DHS & EOIR work with NGOs and the private bar with a goal of achieving 100% representation of asylum applicants
Money to expand and encourage the training and certification of more non-attorneys as “accredited representatives” to represent asylum seekers pro bono before the Asylum Offices and the Immigration Courts on behalf of approved NGOs
Vacate Matter of A-B-and reinstate Matter of A-R-C-G-as the rule for domestic violence asylum applications
Vacate Matter of Castro-Tum and reinstate Matter of Avetisyan to allow Immigration Judges to control dockets by administratively closing certain “low priority” cases
Eliminate Attorney General’s authority to interfere in Immigration Court proceedings through “certification”
Re-establish weighing of interests of both parties consistent with Due Process as the standard for Immigration Court continuances
Bar AG & EOIR Director from promulgating substantive or procedural rules for Immigration Courts — grant authority to BIA to promulgate procedural rules for Immigration Courts
Authorize Immigration Courts to consider all Constitutional issues in proceedings
Authorize DHS to appeal rulings of the BIA to Circuit Courts of Appeal
Require EOIR to implement the statutory contempt authority of Immigration Judges, applicable equally to all parties before the courts, within 180 days
Bar “performance quotas” and “performance work plans” for Immigration Judges and BIA Members
Authorize the Immigration Court to set bonds in all cases coming within their jurisdiction
Fund and require EOIR to implement a nationwide electronic filing system within one year
Eliminate the annual 4,000 numerical cap on grants of “cancellation of removal” based on “exceptional and extremely unusual hardship”
Require the Asylum Office to adjudicate cancellation of removal applications with renewal in Immigration Court for those denied
Require EOIR to establish a credible, transparent judicial discipline and continued tenure system within one year that must include: opportunity for participation by the complainant (whether Government or private) and the Immigration Judge; representation permitted for both parties; peer input; public input; DHS input; referral to an impartial decision maker for final decision; a transparent and consistent system of sanctions incorporating principles of rehabilitation and progressive discipline; appeal rights to the MSPB
International Cooperation
Fund and require efforts to work with the UNHCR, Mexico, and other countries in the Hemisphere to improve asylum systems and encourage asylum seekers to exercise options besides the U.S.
Fund efforts to improve conditions and the rule of law in the Northern Triangle
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No, it wouldn’t solve all problems overnight. But, everything beyond “Trump’s Wall” would make a substantial improvement over our current situation that would benefit enforcement, border security, human rights, Due Process, humanitarian assistance, and America. Not a bad “deal” in my view!
