"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.
NQRFPT = “Not Quite Ready For Prime Time” — Unfortunately, it’s a more than apt descriptor for the Biden Administration’s overall inept and tone-deaf approach to due process and immigrants’ rights in the beyond dysfunctional and unjust “Immigration Courts” under EOIR @ Garalnd’s DOJ.
Mike LaSusa Legal and Natioanl Security Reporter Law369 PHOTO: Twitter
Influx Of Solo Kids Poses Challenge For Immigration Courts
By Mike LaSusa
Law360 (March 31, 2022, 2:44 PM EDT) — Unaccompanied minors arriving in increasing numbers at the southern U.S. border are likely to face a tough time finding legal representation and navigating an overwhelmed immigration court system that has no special procedures for handling their cases.
The number of unaccompanied children encountered by U.S. Customs and Border Protection has risen sharply over the past year, to an average of more than 10,000 per month, according to CBP data. Those kids’ cases often end up in immigration court, where they are subject to the exact same treatment as adults, no matter their age.
“Nobody really thought of this when the laws were enacted,” said retired Immigration Judge Paul Wickham Schmidt, now an adjunct professor at Georgetown Law. “Everything dealing with kids is kind of an add-on,” he said, referring to special dockets for minors and other initiatives that aren’t expressly laid out in the law but have been tried in various courts over the years.
About a third of the immigration court cases started since October involve people under 18, and of those people, 40% are 4 or under, according to recent statistics from the U.S. Department of Justice’s Executive Office for Immigration Review, which operates the courts.
It’s unclear how many of those cases involve unaccompanied children and how many involve kids with adult relatives, and it’s hard to make historical comparisons because of changes in how the EOIR has tracked data on kids’ cases over the years.
But kids’ cases are indeed making up an increasing share of immigration court dockets, according to Jennifer Podkul, vice president of policy and advocacy for Kids in Need of Defense, or KIND, one of the main providers of legal services for migrant kids in the U.S.
“The cases are taking a lot longer because the backlog has increased so much,” Podkul said. Amid the crush of cases, attorneys can be hard to find.
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The immigration courts should consider “getting some real juvenile judges who actually understand asylum law and have real special training, not just a few hours of canned training, to deal with kids,” said Schmidt, the former immigration judge.
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Those with Law360 access can read Mike’s complete article at the link.
For what seems to be the millionth time with Garland, it’s not “rocket science.”🚀 He should have brought in Jen Podkul, her “boss,” Wendy Young of KIND, or a similar qualified leader from outside Government, to kick tail, roll some heads, clean out the deadwood, and set up a “Juvenile Division” of the Immigration Court staffed with well-qualified “real” judges, experts in asylum law, SIJ status, U & T visas, PD, and due process for vulnerable populations.
Such judicial talent is out there. But, that’s the problem with Garland! The judicial and leadership talent remain largely “out there” while lesser qualified individuals continue to botch cases and screw up the justice system on a regular basis! Actions have consequences; so do inactions and failure to act decisively and courageously.
And, of course, Garland should have replaced the BIA with real judges — progressive practical scholars who wouldn’t tolerate some of the garbage inflicted on kids by the current out of control, undisciplined, “enforcement biased,” anti-immigrant EOIR system.
Instead, Garland employs Miller “restrictionist enforcement guru” Tracy Short as his “Chief Immigration Judge” and another “Miller holdover” David Wetmore as BIA Chair. No immigration expert in America would deem either of these guys capable or qualified to insure due process for kids (or, for that matter anyone else) in Immgration Court.
Yet, more than a year into the Biden Administration, there they are! It’s almost as if Stephen Miller just moved over to DOJ to join his buddy Gene Hamilton in abusing immigrants in Immigration Court. (Technically, Hamilton is gone, but it would be hard to tell from the way Garland and his equally tone-deaf lieutenants have messed up EOIR. Currently, he and Miller are officers of “America First Legal” a neo-fascist group engaged in “aiming to reinstate Trump-era policies that bar unaccompanied migrant children from entering the United States,” according to Wikipedia.)
Meanwhile, the folks with the expertise to solve problems and get the Immigration Courts back on track, like Jen & Wendy, are giving interviews and trying to fix Garland’s ungodly mess from the outside! What’s wrong with this picture? What’s wrong with this Administration?
We’re about to find out! Big time, as Garland’s broken, due-process denying “court” system continues it’s “death spiral,” ☠️ taking lots of kids and other human lives down with it!
Dan Carter and Paul Stekler write in the LA Times:
Then Alabama Gov. George Wallace, wearing suit at left, is shown on June 11, 1963, standing at the door of Foster Auditorium in Tuscaloosa, Ala., as he tries to block the admission of two black students to the then- all-white University of Alabama. (Calvin Hannah / Associated Press)
In late September 1968, presidential election polls showed that third-party candidate George Wallace’s campaign was surging. With the support of a quarter of white voters, Wallace was within single digits of the Democratic nominee, Vice President Hubert Humphrey. Wallace’s dominance in Southern states threatened to prevent any candidate from securing an electoral college majority, throwing the November election into the House of Representatives.
His was an extraordinary rise. In his inaugural speech as Alabama governor just five years earlier, Wallace had promised “segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” He then gained national attention by personally standing in a schoolhouse door at the University of Alabama to block the admission of two black students.
By 1968, he seldom used explicitly racist language, but instead demanded “law and order” and railed against “crime,” “drugs,” “welfare mothers,” “forced busing” and “big city thugs.” He created the racially encoded language that still haunt our politics.
So when President Trump whips up rallies with his thinly veiled racist attacks on brown-skinned immigrants, Muslims and unpatriotic blacks, it is not a new development. The racial divide has been a political tool for those willing to use it for 50 years. As former President Obama pointed out in his Sept. 7 speech, “It did not start with Donald Trump. He is a symptom, not the cause. He’s just capitalizing on resentments that politicians have been fanning for years.”
In 1968, the white backlash to the Civil Rights movement and the ’60s urban riots drew voters to Wallace. But others took note — particularly Richard Nixon’s campaign advisor Kevin Phillips, who, in his book “The Emerging Republican Majority,” saw the potential of a major partisan realignment. Over the next six years, President Nixon adapted a more subtle version of the Wallace message, appealing to what he called “the silent majority.” In the years that followed, white voters in the once solidly Democratic South became the bedrock of the Republican Party.
The Republican Party’s Southern Strategy initially focused on shifting voters with a segregationist bent to the party, but it proved adaptable to other whites uneasy with the increasing role of minorities in American life and politics. These appeals resurfaced many times over the years, most memorably in the infamous Willie Horton ad during George H.W. Bush’s 1988 campaign, but also in the symbolism of Ronald Reagan’s decision to make his first 1980 campaign appearance at the Neshoba County Fair in Philadelphia, Miss. — where three civil rights workers were murdered in 1964. With the election of Obama and a growing awareness that whites will eventually be a minority in America, the ground for such appeals has stayed quite fertile.
When Trump descended from Trump Tower in 2015, he immediately set himself apart from the gaggle of GOP presidential contenders by replacing the coy racial language of his predecessors with an unfiltered bullhorn. He has railed against prominent black leaders and athletes, talked about brown-skinned immigrants as murderers and rapists, and insisted dark-skinned Muslims constitute such a threat that we need to ban travel from entire countries.
Wallace’s bid for the presidency faltered in its final weeks, but a very small shift of voters in four states would have deadlocked the race. Wallace poured gasoline on the fire of racial division first, but Trump managed to carry that flame all the way into the White House. Who would have predicted that 50 years after the 1968 election, polls would show that more than half of Americans think their president is a racist?
Many factors have contributed to today’s tribalistic politics, but race remains the bedrock of that division. Transcending racism is essential if our government is to break out of its current paralysis. If we do not succeed and Wallace’s legacy of dividing us by race continues to shape American political life, then perhaps he won after all.
Historian Dan Carter, author of the George Wallace biography “The Politics of Rage,” and University of Texas filmmaker Paul Stekler collaborated on the PBS documentary “George Wallace: Settin’ the Woods on Fire.”
Folks like Trump, Sessions. Miller, Bannon, and the GOP enablers, are not “Making American Great Again.” No, they’re bringing back one of the darkest chapters in our post-WW II history: “Making America Racist Again.”
