⚰️☠️👎🏻🤮ALL-MALE GOP PANEL OF 8TH CIR. GOES “FULL SALEM” ON SALVADORAN WOMAN — “If You Survive Your Ordeal, Woman, You Can’t Possibly Be a Refugee! Come Back And See Us After You’re Dead & Maybe We’ll Believe You,” Is The Wacko Message Delivered By Brain-Dead, Life-Tenured Male Jurists — American “Justice” Takes Yet Another Bizarre, Kafkaesque Turn As Judge Garland Silently Sits & Thinks Great Thoughts Without Taking Any Actions To End The Daily Abuses Against Humanity In His Name By Unqualified “Prosecutor-Owned & Operated Judges” & Ethically Challenged DOJ Attorneys Promoting Nonsense Before Federal Circuit Courts!

CELEBRATING WOMEN’S HISTORY MONTH WITH THE BOYS FROM THE EIGHTH CIRCUIT!

 

Trial by Ordeal
Woman Being “Tried By Ordeal”
17th Century Woodcut
Public Realm
Source: Ancient Origins Website
https://www.ancient-origins.net/history/trial-ordeal-life-or-death-method-judgement-004160
Trial By Ordeal
Woman Being “Tried By Ordeal”
17th Century Woodcut
Public Realm
Source: Ancient Origins Website
https://www.ancient-origins.net/history/trial-ordeal-life-or-death-method-judgement-004160

https://ecf.ca8.uscourts.gov/opndir/21/03/202248P.pdf

Guatemala-Pineda v. Garland, 8th Cir., 03-26-21

PANEL: SMITH, Chief Judge, ARNOLD and STRAS, Circuit Judges.

OPINION BY: Judge Arnold

Because you have to “see it to believe it” that these three guys actually graduated from law school and got promoted to the Federal Judiciary, the opinion is set forth in full here:

United States Court of Appeals For the Eighth Circuit ___________________________

No. 20-2248 ___________________________

Yeemy Guatemala-Pineda

lllllllllllllllllllllPetitioner

v.

Merrick B. Garland, Attorney General of the United States1

lllllllllllllllllllllRespondent ____________

Petition for Review of an Order of the Board of Immigration Appeals ____________

Submitted: February 17, 2021 Filed: March 26, 2021 ____________

Before SMITH, Chief Judge, ARNOLD and STRAS, Circuit Judges. ____________

ARNOLD, Circuit Judge.

After Yeemy Guatemala-Pineda entered the United States unlawfully, she applied for asylum so she wouldn’t have to return to her home country of El Salvador.

1Merrick B. Garland is serving as Attorney General of the United States, and is substituted as respondent pursuant to Federal Rule of Appellate Procedure 43(c).

She feared that if she returned there gangs would persecute her because of her religious activities. After a winding course of immigration proceedings that began more than ten years ago, the Board of Immigration Appeals ultimately denied her request for asylum. We deny the petition for review since we think substantial evidence supports the BIA’s decision.

Guatemala-Pineda, whom we will call Pineda as her real name is Yeemy Michael Pineda, attempted to enter the United States in 2010 at age 22 but was apprehended by immigration authorities and charged with being inadmissible as an alien without proper documentation. See U.S.C. § 1182(a)(7)(A)(i)(I). She conceded that the charge was true but applied for asylum, which protects, among others, refugees present in the United States who are unable or unwilling to return to their home country because they have a well-founded fear that others will persecute them on account of their religion. See 8 U.S.C. §§ 1101(a)(42)(A), 1158(b)(1)(A). Pineda testified before an immigration judge that she was a practicing Christian who had participated in a church project of door-to-door evangelization that specifically targeted gang members. She related that a handful of gang members had at one time “cornered” and “grabbed” her during a church function and tried to recruit her to their gang, explicitly telling her that they did not want to see her working with the church. Though they also threatened to “take [her] by force” and find her wherever she went, they did not otherwise physically harm her.

After that incident Pineda stopped attending church, opting instead to participate in religious services at other people’s homes. During one of these home services, Pineda testified, gang members appeared outside and demanded that the group stop singing. She believed they were the same gang members who had threatened her before; they specifically called her by name and said they were “coming for” her. Two weeks later, at another home gathering, gang members again appeared outside, announced they were armed, and demanded that she come outside

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or “they were going to get” her. The people inside threw themselves on the ground and waited about two hours until the gang members departed.

At that point, Pineda testified, she obtained a job selling clothes in San Salvador, which was about ninety minutes from her home. She explained that gang members did not bother or threaten her while at work, though one time she had to crouch down when she heard gunshots directed toward another person.

The immigration judge concluded that, even though Pineda had not demonstrated past persecution, she did have a well-founded fear of future persecution, and so granted her application for asylum. When the government appealed to the BIA, the BIA remanded the case to the immigration judge to consider, among other things, whether Pineda could reasonably relocate within El Salvador to avoid future persecution. On remand, Pineda testified that, if forced to return to El Salvador, she would return to her mother’s house because she had no other place to go. She noted that her entire family lives in the same city and that she could not relocate to another city as a single Christian woman. She also elaborated on her time working in San Salvador, explaining that she commuted alone and worked three to five days a week for a few months before leaving for the United States. Pineda also testified that, though she did not experience difficulties from gang members in San Salvador or while commuting, thieves did steal her paycheck three or four times and her cell phone twice, often while she was riding on a bus.

Pineda also presented testimony from an expert on Central American gangs. He testified that El Salvador is “the most violent country in the world for women” and that four things put Pineda “at not only high but very predictable risk” of harm should she return to El Salvador: her religious practices and activities, her past refusal to comply with gang demands, her flight from El Salvador to escape gang threats, and the ability of gangs to learn of her return. Further, he opined, Pineda would be at high risk anywhere in El Salvador because she is a young, single woman with no

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protective family network, making “internal relocation a very, very difficult proposition.”

The immigration judge again granted Pineda’s request for asylum, concluding that she had carried her burden to show that internal relocation was unreasonable, as “[s]he is a young single woman returning to a country the size of Massachusetts where abuse and violence against women is one of the principal human rights problems.” The judge acknowledged that Pineda had worked in San Salvador for three months without interference from gangs but pointed out that during that time she had been robbed of her paycheck or cell phone at least five times and “did not proselytize in the streets.” In sum, there were simply no other parts of the country “that are any better than the area that gave rise to [Pineda’s] original claim.” On appeal, however, the BIA pointed out that Pineda was able to avoid gang persecution while working in San Salvador. It also noted that, even though Pineda was the victim of crimes during her commute, it was unclear whether she could have avoided these and similar crimes by moving to San Salvador instead of commuting from her hometown. The BIA therefore remanded for the immigration judge “to reconsider the overall reasonableness of any relocation by the respondent throughout El Salvador.”

On remand, Pineda’s case was assigned to a different immigration judge. The new judge concluded, after receiving additional arguments from the parties and what he termed “extensive country condition evidence,” that Pineda had failed to shoulder her burden to show that she could not relocate elsewhere in El Salvador since she was able to avoid gang persecution while working in San Salvador. The BIA upheld that determination.

In her petition for review from that holding, Pineda challenges the determination that she failed to show she could not safely relocate to another part of El Salvador. We review both the BIA’s decision and the immigration judge’s decision to the extent the BIA adopted the findings or reasoning of the immigration judge. See

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Degbe v. Sessions, 899 F.3d 651, 655 (8th Cir. 2018). We will uphold the decision so long as substantial evidence supports it. See Cinto-Velasquez v. Lynch, 817 F.3d 602, 607 (8th Cir. 2016). When applying that “extremely deferential” standard, we will not reverse “unless, after having reviewed the record as a whole, we determine that it would not be possible for a reasonable fact-finder to adopt the BIA’s position.” See Eusebio v. Ashcroft, 361 F.3d 1088, 1091 (8th Cir. 2004).

Since Pineda does not contend that she has shown past persecution, she must show she has a well-founded fear of future persecution to prevail. See 8 U.S.C. § 1101(a)(42)(A); see also 8 C.F.R. § 1208.13(b). But “[a]n applicant does not have a well-founded fear of persecution if the applicant could avoid persecution by relocating to another part of the applicant’s country of nationality.” 8 C.F.R. § 1208.13(b)(2)(ii). Because Pineda has not demonstrated past persecution, and the gangs she fears are not government or government sponsored, she bears the burden to show that relocation would not be reasonable. See id. § 1208.13(b)(3)(i). In these circumstances relocation is presumed to be reasonable. See id. § 1208.13(b)(3)(iii).

We hold that substantial evidence supports the BIA’s determination that Pineda could relocate to another part of El Salvador if forced to return. We believe that a reasonable factfinder could give substantial weight to the lack of gang harassment Pineda suffered while working in San Salvador for a number of months. Even if gangs generally have significant reach throughout the country and are able to locate people like her quickly, as Pineda maintains, the fact that they did nothing to her for months as she worked in San Salvador is hard to overlook. And even though the first immigration judge to preside over Pineda’s proceedings found that internal relocation would not be reasonable, that does not necessarily mean that substantial evidence did not support the second immigration judge’s decision. It might just go to show that the reasonableness of relocation in this case is one on which reasonable people could disagree.

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To bolster her case, Pineda emphasizes that she suffered other serious harm in San Salvador when she had paychecks and cell phones stolen from her. Pineda is right that, to prevail, she need not show that she suffered other serious harm on account of a protected ground, such as religion. See Hagi-Salad v. Ashcroft, 359 F.3d 1044, 1048 n.5 (8th Cir. 2004). But that other harm must rise to “the severity of persecution” for her to carry the day. Id. “Persecution is an extreme concept,” involving things like death or the threat of death, torture, or injury to one’s person or freedom. See De Castro-Gutierrez v. Holder, 713 F.3d 375, 380 (8th Cir. 2013). Pineda did not describe anything that occurred to her during her commutes to and from San Salvador or her employment there that approaches this high standard.

We therefore conclude that substantial evidence supports the BIA’s determination, considering that Pineda worked for months in San Salvador without trouble from gangs. Though we recognize that Pineda’s expert opined that she was at risk, we think the BIA did not unreasonably focus on there being no evidence that she was persecuted during the months she worked in San Salvador. We have upheld a decision on this kind of question based on less, as, for instance, where an asylum seeker had stayed in another part of a country without being harmed for five weeks. See Molina-Cabrera v. Sessions, 905 F.3d 1103, 1106 (8th Cir. 2018).

Though we sympathize with Pineda’s subjective fear of returning alone to a different part of El Salvador, we cannot say that the BIA’s relocation determination is unsupported by substantial evidence. Because we uphold this portion of the BIA’s decision, we do not consider whether substantial evidence supported the BIA’s conclusion that the government of El Salvador was unwilling or unable to control the gangs that Pineda feared.

Petition denied.

______________________________

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

No, it’s not, as Judge Arnold disingenuously claims “something on which reasonable people could disagree.” No reasonable adjudicator qualified in asylum law and due process could reach this ridiculously wrong result!

Naturally, not understanding asylum law (why would that be a requirement for an Article III Judge, just because it’s probably the #1 and certainly most hotly contested topic in Federal Civil Litigation these days), Judge Arnold and his “boys club” out on the Great Plains fail to give this credible respondent “the benefit of the doubt” to which she is entitled under UNHCR guidance.

Indeed, as I used to tell my former BIA colleagues, usually to little avail before launching another dissent, “if reasonable people could differ, the result should be clear — the respondent wins because she gets ‘the benefit of the doubt.’” Sadly, even at a time when the BIA functioned at a much much higher level than it does today, it was the Immigration Judge and immigration enforcement who often in practice got the “benefit of the doubt” from many of my former colleagues, not the asylum applicant.

As my friend Dan Kowalski over at LexisNexis Legal Community summed up: “Proves the point that ‘the only true refugee is a dead refugee.’” Unlike the various BIA Judges and Circuit Judges involved in this deadly travesty, Dan actually understands asylum law, due process, and human values. 

One might fairly ask the question of why “practical scholars” like Dan are on the “outside” and lesser talents are on the Federal Bench at all levels? The answer has much to do with why there is an “institutionalized racism crisis” in today’s American justice system. “Trial By Ordeal,” really isn’t that great a “look” for 21st Century American Justice! (Any more than is institutionalized racism and “The New Jim Crow”).

Dan Kowalski
Dan Kowalski
Online Editor of the LexisNexis Immigration Law Community (ILC)

Conveniently, this “gang of three” CJs showed little real understanding of 8 C.F.R. 208.13 as it existed at the time of the BIA’s second decision, which states:

adjudicators should consider, but are not limited to considering, whether the applicant would face other serious harm in the place of suggested relocation; any ongoing civil strife within the country; administrative, economic, or judicial infrastructure; geographical limitations; and social and cultural constraints, such as age, gender, health, and social and familial ties. Those factors may, or may not, be relevant, depending on all the circumstances of the case, and are not necessarily determinative of whether it would be reasonable for the applicant to relocate.

Just on the information regurgitated in their opinion, Ms. Guatemala-Pineda showed by expert witness testimony and by her own credible testimony and experiences that there is no “reasonably available relocation alternative” in El Salvador. There clearly is “ongoing civil strife” in El Salvador. And, anyone with even minimal knowledge of the country would know that (to put it charitably) the “administrative, economic, and judicial infrastructures” are somewhere in the zone between dysfunctional to non-existent. She also credibly pointed out why it would not be reasonable under the circumstances to require her to leave her mother’s home and move to San Salvador. 

Forcing someone to commute to a job 90 minutes away, for 3-5 days per week work, in what is perhaps the most dangerous city in the country, during which she already suffered “three or four paycheck robberies and a cell phone robbery” in about three months — that’s a total of five robberies” in a relatively short span — is by no means a “reasonable internal relocation alternative” based on all relevant factors! 

Additionally, that she felt unable to proselytize in accordance with her religious beliefs in San Salvador also indicates that relocation there is unreasonable. Freedom to carry out reasonable religious commitments without fear of harm is a fundamental human right.

Very interesting to compare how GOP Circuit Judges treated very clear interference with Ms. Guatemala-Pineda’s ability to fulfill her religious beliefs in this case with how many GOP judges in the U.S. swoon over every minor interference with right wing religious beliefs — even those grounded in obvious bigotry — in the U.S. Here, by contrast, the GOP Circuit Judges fobbed off the interference with Ms. Guatemala-Pineda’s evangelical activities — at one point she felt unable to worship publicly at her church — as of no particular concern.

Not to mention that Ms. Guatemala-Pineda’s expert confirmed that:

El Salvador is “the most violent country in the world for women” and that four things put Pineda “at not only high but very predictable risk” of harm should she return to El Salvador: her religious practices and activities, her past refusal to comply with gang demands, her flight from El Salvador to escape gang threats, and the ability of gangs to learn of her return. Further, he opined, Pineda would be at high risk anywhere in El Salvador because she is a young, single woman with no protective family network, making “internal relocation a very, very difficult proposition.”

In plain terms, it’s only a matter of time before Ms. Guatemala-Pineda is persecuted, seriously harmed, or killed if returned to El Salvador. But, her life, as a woman of color, is obviously of little concern to the “gang of three.”

Let’s look at it another her way. Suppose we were tell Judges Smith, Arnold, and Staus that they had to relocate in a way that meant every third or fourth paycheck would be stolen and that they would be robbed of their cellphone every three months, with no recourse to a functioning police system. (Note that these dudes would be much better able to absorb such losses of income and expensive property than Ms. Guatemala-Pineda.) Or, that we were going to relocate their cushy ivory tower jobs to a place where they would be required to commute 90 minutes by public transportation every day. Or, that they might occasionally have to get down behind the bench to avoid rampant gunfire. Or, that they no longer could worship at their church of choice or openly engage in religious activities in their communities, but must limit themselves to “in-home worship” — not just during the pandemic, but permanently. Or, they had to live in a place where “GOP-Judiciacide” was at the highest level in the world and the police offered little or no protection, indeed were often involved themselves in abuse and killings of judges or turned a blind eye to the perpetrators. 

Think our “tone-deaf group of guys in robes” would take a different view of “reasonable” if they put themselves in Ms. Guatemala-Pineda’s place and it were happening to them? You betcha!

A few other things to note about this gross miscarriage of justice:

  • Two panel members were appointed by Bush II, one by Trump;
  • Ms. Guatemala-Pineda originally won her case before the Immigration Judge, who after hearing all the evidence and carefully considering relocation found that Ms. Pineda has shown that there was no “reasonably available relocation alternative” in El Salvador;
  • The BIA baselessly remanded the case on ICE’s appeal to a new IJ to get the “preferred result” — a denial of relief and potential death sentence for a woman of color (See, e.g., Jeff “Gonzo Apocalypto” Sessions & Matter of A-B-);
  • In a functioning system staffed by asylum experts, this case could easily have been granted at the Asylum Office rather than kicking around the dysfunctional EOIR system for a decade — two merits hearings before the IJ — two appeals to the BIA — and Circuit Court review — all to REACH A CLEARLY INCORRECT AND UNJUST RESULT THAT NO TRUE ASYLUM EXPERT I KNOW WOULD AGREE WITH!
  • And, we wonder why EOIR has more than doubled the number of IJs yet still almost tripled their uncontrolled backlog to a mind-boggling 1.3 million cases! Ten years to turn an easy asylum grant into a denial (yet other cases are rushed through to denial on an assembly line without any real deli]beration or analysis) might give us a hint of why the system is totally dysfunctional and completely unfair (not to mention patently unconstitutional)!
    • Since EOIR is known for its incompetent record keeping, I’m willing to bet that there are thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of additional “lost in space” files, warehoused somewhere that are simply “off docket” and unaccounted for.

Cases like this aren’t “academic exercises” — the judicial attitude that “screams off the pages” of this gross miscarriage of justice. They have real life, potentially deadly consequences for real humans beings, the most vulnerable of human beings, like Ms. Guatemala-Pineda. She has the same right to live as do the Circuit Judges, the BIA Judges, and the second Immigration Judge who got her case wrong! 

After a decade, this monstrosity is the best our “justice system” can offer? Gimme a break! I think I could choose any three students over at the CALS Asylum Clinic at Georgetown Law who would run circles around the cavalier analysis of these three supposedly “senior jurists” in this case! Cases like this basically are indictments of our Article III system, not to mention the ongoing mockery of justice at EOIR.

The anti-asylum, anti-immigrant bias, incompetent adjudication, and systemic mis-management at EOIR are of monumental proportions! The gross inconsistencies, lack of overall immigration, human rights, sensitivity to racial justice, and “practical due process” expertise at the appellate level of the U.S. Courts and particularly at the Supremes is very disturbing and threatens the very existence and legitimacy of our legal system.

Judge Garland has the power to start fixing this, today! He must vacate all the bogus Trump-era anti-immigrant precedents; toss the entire BIA, and replace them with real judges who possess the required subject matter expertise and overriding commitment to due process and fundamental fairness; establish merit-selection criteria for Immigration Judges honoring experience representing asylum applicants in court, immigration knowledge, human rights expertise, commitment to due process for individuals under law, sensitivity to racial justice, and demonstrated practical problem solving experience.

Then, apply those criteria to new Immigration Judge selections as well as to retention decisions for all current Immigration Judges. And, for Pete’s sake, “can” the incompetent bureaucracy and get some real professionals in there who can run an independent court system — starting with a functioning nationwide e-filing system and some competent judicial training as well as assisting IJs in managing their own dockets rather than constantly interfering and trying to “micromanage” from Falls Church and the 5th Floor of the DOJ (a process known as “Aimless Docket Reshuffling,” honed by the Trump kakistocracy @ DOJ).

When you’re done, Judge Garland, you’ll have: 1) many fewer bad decisions heading off the the Courts of Appeals; 2) a functioning Immigration Judiciary of experts who can help keep order and provide helpful expert guidance to the rest of the now out of control system; and 3) a great source of “battle trained and proven” well-qualified, progressive judicial talent who can change the trajectory of the now often moribund (yeah, even some of the younger Trump appointees are basically “brain dead,” so the term fits) and dilatory Article III Judiciary and who are also available to fill other high-level policy positions with competence, common sense, and humanity.

You’d also go down in history as a judge who got out of the ivory tower and actually solved pressing problems, implemented our Constitution, and built a better, fairer court system that made a difference in human lives and the future of our nation. Perhaps, even something like “thorough teamwork and innovation, built the world’s best courts guaranteeing fairness and due process for all.” That’s quite a legacy for future generations.

I can only hope Judge Garland finally pays attention to what’s happening across the river in Falls Church and takes immediate action to end the deadly and debilitating clown show 🤡🦹🏿‍♂️ @ EOIR. Otherwise, I fear he will find himself buried in immigration litigation and his tenure mired in the muck of responsibility for grotesque racial injustice and “running” the worst, most incompetent, unfair, and blatantly unconstitutional “court” system in America! 

🇺🇸⚖️🗽🧑🏽‍⚖️Due Process Forever! Hey Hey, Ho Ho, The Deadly EOIR Clown Show ☠️🤡 Has Got to Go!

EOIR Clown Show Must Go T-Shirt
“EOIR Clown Show Must Go” T-Shirt Custom Design Concept

Hey, maybe next year, we could all celebrate Women’s History Month with some decisions incorporating serious scholarship by progressive women judges that actually recognize, honor, and institutionalize relief from the unfair struggles faced by refugee women and people of color.

PWS

03-27-21

🗽🙏🏼CLINIC’S ANNA GALLAGHER WITH LENTEN REFLECTION — Despite The “Open Border” Blather, Our Border Remains Closed, The Rule Of Law Suspended, Refugees Are Denied Their Legal Right To Apply For Asylum, & The Cruelty & Human Suffering Occurs South Of The Border Where It Is “Out Of Sight, Out Of Mind!”

Anna Marie Gallagher, Esquire
Anna Marie Gallagher, Esquire
Executive Director
CLINIC
PHOTO: CLINIC website
I wake every morning to follow news of our sisters and brothers, thinking especially of the children, who have set out from places like El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua and Haiti–even as far as Cameroon and the Democratic Republic of the Congo–to seek protection at our doorstep. My heart aches for them and I pray for their safety.

Today’s readings remind us of our obligation, as followers of Christ, to speak the truth and follow the light. The truth is that people are suffering, both young and old, and desperately seeking safety and welcome in our country. Yet U.S. authorities and policies are often hostile to receiving them. Their arrival at our doors is deemed a “crisis.” As followers of Christ, we must and we will stand up, act bravely and generously, to speak the truth and welcome them.

The real crisis is not at the border, but within the families forced to make the difficult decision to leave, and in the hearts of those who refuse to follow Jesus’ light.  We, as Christians, must walk in the path of light as Jesus instructs, and do the right thing.  We must make room at our table and remember that we all belong to each other. We must take Jesus’ words to heart and remember to love the mother, the father and the child at the border as if they were our own.

This is not a crisis for us, although it certainly is for the men, women, and children who are fleeing. For us it is an opportunity to act out our faith precisely as Jesus taught.

As these sojourners leave their homes in search of safety, they may repeat a prayer similar to this: “Even though I walk in the dark valley I fear no evil; for you are at my side.” The rhythm of the words and their meaning must comfort them, knowing that God is their companion. What happens when they arrive here is up to us. We could look to God and ask what He would do, but we already know the answer.

Anna Gallagher is Executive Director of the Catholic Legal Immigration Network, Inc. (CLINIC).

 

pastedGraphic.png

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Unfortunately, too many folks promote a bogus picture of what’s at stake at our border. The “alternatives” they trumpet are basically increasing family separation and suffering in Mexico or somewhere else as pointed out in this Politico article by Jack Herrera:

The result is a new form of family separation — but instead of happening at the hands of federal agents in American government facilities, it’s taking place, family by family, in camps like the one Janiana lives in. The fact that minors won’t be expelled like everyone else has rapidly spread by word of mouth across the length of the border. And while many families choose to stick together, the pressure to separate weighs heaviest on the most vulnerable — families who fear death, whether from persecutors who have followed them to the border, or from extreme hunger.

For Janiana, the possibility of being sent back to Honduras reads as a death sentence. She shows me the scars from her torture at the hands of a powerful gang back home that her family got on the wrong side of. Fearing further reprisals, Janiana fled with her sister’s children, a teenage nephew and teenage niece as well as the niece’s several-month-old son. The children haven’t been reconnected with their mother yet, who successfully entered the U.S. to begin the process of claiming asylum in 2019, before the pandemic. Staying in Mexico, Janiana says, was never an adequate long-term solution and increasingly feels intolerable. She says the family already tried to make a new life in the southern state of Oaxaca, but danger pursued them there, where her nephew was murdered.

Today, Janiana says her only hope is that the U.S. will begin to accept asylum seekers again, especially as the country gets a better hold over the pandemic. At the moment, she says with resignation, “all we can do is wait.” Though there is one painful exception on her mind: If she were somehow able send the baby across alone, he might be allowed to stay.

“It breaks my heart to even think about it,” she says.

https://apple.news/A6sIRr9CpTwSl9_0bmN7rJA

Here’s an idea!

Why not get the trained Refugee Officers, Asylum Officers, Immigration Judges, ORR child services officers, and pro bono lawyers in place to comply with our legal obligations in a robust, timely, fair, and efficient manner?

Why not put experts, like Wendy Young of Kids in Needs of Defense, who understand how our system should work in charge of the welfare of the children? Why not put someone who understands the practical and legal needs at the border, like former Immigration Judge Ilyce Shugall, in charge of the Immigration Court response? Why not put someone like retired Judge Paul Grussendorf, who has also been an Asylum Officer and a UNHCR representative, in charge of the Asylum Office response? Why not put retired Assistant Chief Immigration Judge Robert Weisel, who worked with the UNHCR after retirement, in charge of coordinating the response with NGOs and the private sector?

Yes, the Trump regime definitely left a dismantled and dysfunctional immigration bureaucracy and structure behind. But, just repeating that time after time sounds more like an excuse than a plan or a solution.

Sure, it won’t happen overnight. But, it won’t happen at all without different folks in charge at the “retail level.” I see little evidence of any progress on a real long-term plan and the short-term response is also an unnecessary mess, given that the Biden Team has had more than four months since the election to get a new structure and new personnel in place.

While there are a few “bright spots,” like Michelle Brané and Katie Tobin, I sincerely doubt that the group in charge right now is capable of solving the practical problems in rebuilding and improving our asylum and immigration systems. Nowhere is that more obvious than at EOIR, where the dysfunctional “clown show” 🤡 stumbles on, for no apparent reason.

Many of us keep trying, to no avail, to warn Judge Garland that he literally is sitting on a powder keg with the fuse lit and burning.💣 I guarantee that the next “manufactured crisis” will be when the current group of asylum cases coming from the border hit the broken, dysfunctional, ridiculously and unnecessarily backlogged, grotesquely mismanaged, ill-prepared, and anti-asylum-biased “Immigration Courts.”  Waiting for the inevitable disaster, rather than bringing in a new “A Team” from the NDPA to start solving the problems now, is a monumental mistake by Judge G.

Why not fix the system to run the way it should, rather than spreading myths, throwing spitballs, and ignoring the unfolding human tragedy that can’t be solved with draconian enforcement and lame “don’t come” messages directed at forced migrants fleeing for their lives?

🇺🇸⚖️🗽Due Process Forever!

PWS

03-23-21

☠️YET ANOTHER DEADLY,  ⚰️ RIDICULOUS 🤡 EOIR MELTDOWN 🤮 OUTED! — Conservative 5th Circuit Excoriates BIA & Immigration Judge For Litany Of Errors In 38-Page Smackdown — Another Wrongful Denial Of Asylum To Honduran Exhausts Patience Of Even Normally Pro-Gov. Circuit Court!

Star Chamber Justice
“Justice”
Star Chamber
Style
Four Horsemen
BIA Asylum Panel In Action
Albrecht Dürer, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
EYORE
“Eyore In Distress”
Once A Symbol of Fairness, Due Process, & Best Practices, Now Gone “Belly Up”

https://www.ca5.uscourts.gov/opinions/unpub/18/18-60251.0.pdf

Morales Lopez v. Garland, 5th Cir., 03-19-21, unpublished

PANEL: Southwick, Graves, and Engelhardt, Circuit Judges

OPINION BY: James E. Graves, Jr., Circuit Judge

KEY QUOTE:  

Morales Lopez argues that the IJ improperly determined that she did not make a sufficient showing of past persecution and a well-founded fear of future persecution. Regarding past persecution, Morales Lopez argues that the IJ erroneously (1) required each incident of harm to rise to the level of persecution, (2) failed to consider all relevant incidents of harm, (3) required a showing of physical harm, and (4) failed to consider significant liberty deprivations suffered by Morales Lopez and her children. Morales Lopez further argues that (5) the substantial evidence compels a finding of past

10

Case: 18-60251 Document: 00515788451 Page: 11 Date Filed: 03/19/2021

No. 18-60251

persecution and (6) the IJ erred by failing to consider Morales Lopez’s psychological harm.

Regarding a well-founded fear of future persecution, Morales Lopez argues that the IJ erroneously (1) applied a preponderance-of-the-evidence standard instead of a reasonable-possibility standard; (2) failed to evaluate Morales Lopez’s fear of future persecution using the four-part test set forth in In re Mogharrabi; (3) conflated the past-persecution and well-founded-fear- of-future persecution analyses, (4) required Morales Lopez to offer direct proof of her persecutors’ motives, and (5) mischaracterized Ungar’s testimony. Morales Lopez further argues that (6) the substantial evidence compels a finding of a well-founded fear of future persecution.

Although we neither agree with nor reach all of Morales Lopez’s arguments, we agree with her overarching point: the IJ and the BIA improperly determined that Morales Lopez did not make a sufficient showing of past persecution and a well-founded fear of future persecution. We address Morales Lopez’s arguments in turn.

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

Judge James E. Graves, Jr.
Hon. James E. Graves, Jr.
U.S. Circuit Judge
Fifth Circuit
PHOTO: Wikipedia

Too bad this is unpublished. Once again, a Circuit Court has to provide the detailed analysis required by due process after the supposedly “expert” BIA commits error after error!

When they get below the “caption line” in an opinion, things go south fast for EOIR judges. I’d attribute that to a deadly combination of poor judicial selection, defective training, a “culture of prejudgement and denial,” large-scale overuse and misuse of the woefully inadequate and outdated “contemporaneous oral decision” format (not used by any other “court” for decisions of this importance and complexity), “haste makes waste” gimmicks, absurd “quotas,” inane “performance ratings,” constant political interference with decision-making, disastrously incompetent unprofessional docket management, and maliciously incompetent “leadership” from the DOJ. It’s an ungodly and inexcusable mess.

Sadly, my grim description doesn’t begin to capture just how embarrassingly unjust, unfair, dysfunctional, and just plain terrible EOIR’s “killer clown show” 🦹🏿‍♂️🤡 is. Not to mention that it is clearly unconstitutional, and a “living  repudiation of due process” as currently constituted and operated. Put this pathetic imitation of a “court system”out of its misery before it causes any more destruction of human lives and irreparable damage to our justice system!

Judge Garland, where, oh where, are you in American justice’s hour of need? Stop this disgraceful mockery of justice, humanity, and common sense! Now!

In the meantime, as I had warned, Judge Garland’s previously sterling record as a jurist 👨🏻‍⚖️ is being tarnished daily by association with some of the worst jurisprudence out there, courtesy of America’s Star Chambers,🏴‍☠️ a/k/a “Clown Courts,” 🤡🦹🏿‍♂️ now wholly owned by HIM, and “operated” in HIS name!

🇺🇸⚖️🗽Due Process Forever! Clown Courts🤡🦹🏿‍♂️ & Star Chambers☠️🏴‍☠️⚰️, Never!

PWS

03-21-21

WOW, HERE’S A SURPRISE: MANY KIDS FLEEING VIOLENCE IN THE NORTHERN TRIANGLE KNOW NOTHING ABOUT BIDEN BORDER POLICIES — They Are Just Trying To Save Their Lives!

“Floaters”
“Floaters — How The World’s Richest Country Responds To Asylum Seekers”
EDS NOTE: GRAPHIC CONTENT – The bodies of Salvadoran migrant Oscar Alberto Mart??nez Ram??rez and his nearly 2-year-old daughter Valeria lie on the bank of the Rio Grande in Matamoros, Mexico, Monday, June 24, 2019, after they drowned trying to cross the river to Brownsville, Texas. Martinez’ wife, Tania told Mexican authorities she watched her husband and child disappear in the strong current. (AP Photo/Julia Le Duc)
Gabe Gutierrez
Gabe Gutierrez
NBC News Correspondent
Atlanta, GA

Gabe Gutierrez reports for NBC Nightly News:

https://www.nbcnews.com/nightly-news/video/on-the-ground-along-the-texas-border-amid-surge-108780101899

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

Reminds me of the essay I recently posted from my friend, Don Kerwin at CMS:

The number of unaccompanied children and asylum-seekers crossing the US-Mexico border in search of protection has increased in recent weeks. The former president, his acolytes, and both extremist and mainstream media have characterized this situation as a “border crisis,” a self-inflicted wound by the Biden administration, and even a failure of US asylum policy. It is none of these things. Rather, it is a response to compounding pressures, most prominently the previous administration’s evisceration of US asylum and anti-trafficking policies and procedures, and the failure to address the conditions that are displacing residents of the Northern Triangle states of Central America (El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras), as well as Venezuela, Cuba, Haiti, and other countries…

The real immigration crisis is not at the border, but in the failure to respond effectively to the conditions driving forced migration, to establish orderly and viable legal immigration policies, to legalize the increasingly long-tenured undocumented population, and to reform and invest sufficiently in the US asylum and immigration court systems.

https://immigrationcourtside.com/2021/03/18/%e2%9a%96%ef%b8%8f%f0%9f%97%bdmore-truth-about-the-southern-border-from-one-of-americas-%f0%9f%87%ba%f0%9f%87%b8-leading-human-rights-experts-real-needs-not-fictitious-crises-accou/

Donald M. Kerwin
Donald M. Kerwin
Executive Director
Center for Migration Studies

It also echoes the words of veteran journalist Marc Cooper, posted by my friend Dan Kowalski over on LexisNexis Immigration Community:

When I was in Mexico reporting on the exodus, I would talk with dozens of migrants who were just a an hour or two away from starting their trek and, to a person, not one of them said they paid any attention to new US laws and regs as they were determined to cross no matter what. And no matter the sacrifices.

https://www.lexisnexis.com/legalnewsroom/immigration/b/outsidenews/posts/the-border-news-is-not-new

Dan Kowalski
Dan Kowalski
Online Editor of the LexisNexis Immigration Law Community (ILC)

Even the WashPost editorial page writers “get” the reality of human migration in a way the nativist fear-mongers never will:

Yet despite fearmongering by Republicans, the current influx is neither a public health emergency nor a national security threat. The vast majority of those allowed to enter the country will join relatives here while their asylum claims plod along. That wait is too long — it can stretch to three years or more — and the administration insists it will shrink the backlog. It has also earmarked $4 billion in aid from the pandemic relief bill for Central America — with strings attached to prevent its misuse — to attack the conditions that make life miserable there and drive migrants to seek refuge in this country.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-influx-of-migrants-isnt-a-crisis-but-it-could-become-one-without-careful-management/2021/03/19/bced56ba-874d-11eb-8a8b-5cf82c3dffe4_story.html

Trump Dumping Asylum Seekers in Hondiras
Dumping Asylum Seekers in Honduras
Artist: Monte Wolverton
Reproduced under license

Still, sadly, facts and reality seem largely irrelevant here. 

Despite denials from Secretary Mayorkas, the Biden Administration appears to be believing Kevin McCarthy’s BS on some level. 

Thursday, the Administration basically negotiated a “lite version” of Trump’s “Let ‘Em Die in Mexico” — essentially trading AstroZenica vaccine (which wasn’t approved for use in the U.S. anyway) for Mexico’s agreement to step up harsh enforcement measures against migrants crossing their Southern Border and to warehouse families arbitrarily rejected without due process by the U.S. under our bogus CDC directive. We already have seen how well that works out!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/podcasts/daily-202-big-idea/biden-will-send-mexico-surplus-vaccine-as-us-seeks-help-on-immigration-enforcement/

Remain in Mexico
A girl peers out from an encampment at the U.S.-Mexico border where she and several hundred people waited to present themselves to U.S. immigration to seek asylum. / Photo by David Maung

Any way you cut it, the realities of human migration, the lives of the desperate individuals involved, the views of human rights experts and advocates, and our supposed commitment to international conventions, the rule of law, and Constitutional Due Process take a back seat when the “bogus border debate” shifts into high gear.  

There is actually a very simple truth here: “Forced migration” is not “optional!” In fact, a number of forced migrants prefer “death in the attempt” to “death in place.” 

Therefore, all the “deterrents,” “border militarization,” “Baby Jails,” and “stay home statements” won’t ultimately stop the inexorable flow (although they might temporarily divert, modulate, or vary it  — usually just enough for the “powers that be” to declare “victory at sea” as a result of their failed policies while ignoring the human carnage and lost opportunities they leave behind).

Professor Philip G. Schrag
Professor Philip G. Schrag
Georgetown Law
Co-Director, CALS Asylum Clinic, Author of “Baby Jails”

Sure, there is a timing factor. Weather, the “business plans” and propaganda of smugglers (Trump’s “enforcement only” policies have been a boon for them in more ways than one, not only boosting their fees, but diverting enforcement resources away from the “real” law enforcement problems at the border involving drugs and human exploitation), and Biden’s pledge to restore humanity and the rule of law to America all factor into the equation in some way. 

But, they are not the the primary causes of forced migration, except to the extent that climate change (ignored and worsened by Trump and the GOP) has aggravated the poverty and economic disorder in the Northern Triangle by destroying the livelihoods of many farmers and making their land essentially worthless.

Tone-deaf GOP politicos like McCarthy and Sen. Rob Portman (R-OH) apparently think the solution is to continue to mock the rule of law, violate the Constitution, and simply declare the Southern Border closed forever, al a Stephen Miller. Let families and children “die in place” in their home countries, die on the journey at the hands of other governments, or rot forever in Mexico — “Out of sight, out of mind.” As long as it isn’t happening in our country and being covered by our news outlets, who cares about human lives? That was certainly the Trump approach!

That’s hardly a “solution,” except in neo-Nazi or Soviet-era terms. The harshest and most inhuman approaches will, as they have in the past and continue to do, fail to stop desperate humans who want to survive from doing what’s necessary to save their lives and preserve their families’ futures, even when that interferes with the GOP’s “whitewashed” version of “American greatness.”

The solution involves following Constitutional due process, re-establishing the rule of law (including a radical “reform and replace” of our dysfunctional Immigration Courts), and adhering to our international obligations, both in letter and spirit. It also requires an expanded, much more robust, legal immigration system that reflects the demands of our economy, the needs of migrants, and the realities of human migration, particularly from Latin America. Like it or not, there will be more immigration. 

As I have said before: “There are many ways in which we can diminish our own humanity, but none of them will stop human migration.”

Grim Reaper
Will G. Reaper Become The Lasting Image of America’s 21st Century Human Rights & Racial Justice Failures  In The Eyes Of The Rest Of Humanity & Future Generations?
Image: Hernan Fednan, Creative Commons License

Contrary to the GOP blather, immigration, voluntary, forced, coerced, legal, extra-legal, white, non-white, Christian, non-Christian, is what the real America is all about, for better or worse. Overall, immigration is a positive force for America.  

Here’s a great essay on the positive nature of immigration by Pedro Gerson on Slate. Pedro is the director of the Immigration Law Clinic at the Louisiana State University Law Center, and a former immigration staff attorney at the Bronx Defenders. The latter organization has been home to a number of notable members of the NDPA.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/03/border-immigration-crisis-laws-citizenship.html

Pedro Gerson
Pedro Gerson
Director, Immigration Law Clinic
LSU Law Center
SOURCE: Twitter

As Pedro says, human migration to America will continue notwithstanding GOP xenophobes. The only question is whether we will have the wisdom and courage to work with and take advantage of its power in constructive, creative, forward looking ways, rather than trying to “recreate Jim Crow!” 

Or, will we continue, as GOP restrictionists urge, to squander resources, goodwill, and human potential on futile efforts to eradicate what is perhaps the oldest and most fundamental phenomenon of human existence?

🇺🇸🗽⚖️Due Process Forever! Restore the rule of law! Fix The Disgraceful, Dysfunctional Immigration Courts, Judge Garland! End White Nationalist racism!

PWS

03-19-21

⚖️🗽MORE TRUTH ABOUT THE SOUTHERN BORDER FROM ONE OF AMERICA’S 🇺🇸 LEADING HUMAN RIGHTS EXPERTS: “Real Needs, Not Fictitious Crises Account For The Situation at US-Mexico Border,” By Donald Kerwin Center For Migration Studies

Donald M. Kerwin
Donald M. Kerwin
Executive Director
Center for Migration Studies
In a new essay for the Center for Migration Studies of New York (CMS), CMS’s Executive Director Donald Kerwin writes:

The number of unaccompanied children and asylum-seekers crossing the US-Mexico border in search of protection has increased in recent weeks. The former president, his acolytes, and both extremist and mainstream media have characterized this situation as a “border crisis,” a self-inflicted wound by the Biden administration, and even a failure of US asylum policy. It is none of these things. Rather, it is a response to compounding pressures, most prominently the previous administration’s evisceration of US asylum and anti-trafficking policies and procedures, and the failure to address the conditions that are displacing residents of the Northern Triangle states of Central America (El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras), as well as Venezuela, Cuba, Haiti, and other countries…

The real immigration crisis is not at the border, but in the failure to respond effectively to the conditions driving forced migration, to establish orderly and viable legal immigration policies, to legalize the increasingly long-tenured undocumented population, and to reform and invest sufficiently in the US asylum and immigration court systems.

READ MORE

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

Thanks Don for speaking out against the scandalous GOP complete “border BS,” all too often parroted by the so-called “mainstream press.” Read the rest of Don’s essay at the link. 

Don has spent his entire career solving migration and human rights problems. The Biden Administration and everyone who believes in American democracy should listen to “practical experts” like Don, rather than ignorant, racially-motivated GOP politicos and White Nationalist nativists spouting the “same old, same old” myths, fear-mongering, and unhelpful “non-solutions.” 

If xenophobic rhetoric, cruelty, officially-sanctioned child abuse, evading our own legal and humanitarian responsibilities, and “enforcement only” were the “solutions,” the “problem at the Southern Border” — which has existed in one form or another for over a half century, would long ago have been solved. We can’t solve humanitarian situations that create forced migration with unilateral law enforcement gimmicks and cruelty toward the humans fighting for their lives. Human migration long pre-existed the formation of nation states and establishment of national boundaries.

Administration after administration, of both parties, have squandered time and taxpayer money on unsuccessful efforts to “enforce their way” out of forced migration situations. Contrary to GOP blather, Democratic Administrations have been almost as fixated as the GOP with unsuccessfully “detaining, deterring, and enforcing” their way out of human problems that demand more thoughtful human solutions. 

All Administrations at some point prematurely claim that their efforts have “succeeded.” None actually have succeeded in addressing the causes of the migration. Therefore, none of these “false solutions” proves “durable.”

Significantly, Don is one of the few commentators to fully grasp the integral connection between the Trump regime’s complete destruction of the integrity of the Immigration Courts and its lawless, yet highly ineffective, border policies. 

Real solutions don’t kill, harm, and maim refugees and forced migrants, encourage criminal cartels and corrupt foreign officials to prey on them, and stack up desperate humans in dangerous conditions just across the border because US Government officials were too biased and incompetent to operate under any semblance of the rule of law.

We can abide by our own laws, international norms, our Constitution, human decency, and common sense. It isn’t rocket science. 

But, it does require a combination of expertise, courage, humanity, and practical problem solving that has been conspicuously absent from our governing structure since 2017, and severely undervalued before that.

Also, it’s certainly not that the Biden Administration has suddenly re-established due process and the rule of law at the border. Far from it!

The vast majority of those arriving at the border, even those who are applying at legal ports of entry, are unceremoniously and summarily removed without any process at all, let alone due process of law. This is all based on a largely bogus Trump-initiated exercise of authority by the CDC to use COVID-19 as a pretext to suspend  the rule of law and constitutional due process at the border.

Moreover, we shouldn’t forget that even with the Biden Administration’s gradual efforts to re-establish a legal process for asylum seekers, unaccompanied children are still being held in Government detention for far longer than the 72-hours permitted under law. This problem won’t be solved, as some GOP nativists incredibly suggest, by dumping kids back across the Mexican Border, returning them to danger in their home countries without regard to their individual situations, or forcing them to turn to smugglers to make their way to relative safety in the interior of the U.S.

Nor will it be solved by long-term detention in disgraceful and inhumane “Baby Jails!” Ask my Georgetown Law colleague and author Professor Phil Schrag of the CALS Asylum Clinic about that!

Interestingly, some of the biggest complainers spreading the “open borders myth” are Greg Abbott and other Texas GOP politicos who have prematurely “reopened their state” in the middle of a pandemic in blatant contravention of best medical and public health advice. So, you can summarily dismiss their “crocodile tears” and bogus “hand wringing” about public health and safety.

That’s particularly true since the GOP is just coming off a massive example of how their incompetent mis-governance of Texas caused unnecessary misery and loss of life among Texas residents as a result of a highly predictable and long-foreseen “weather emergency.” Why does the mainstream media often continue to treat these “political hacks,” who couldn’t “govern” their way out of a paper bag, as credible spokespersons on anything, let alone human rights situations of which they have no expertise whatsoever?

🇺🇸🗽⚖️Due Process Forever! Re-Establish The Rule Of Law, Including Full, Robust Humanitarian Protections At The Border & In Our Disgracefully Dysfunctional Immigration “Courts.”

PWS

03-18-21 

☹️MEDIA SHOULD STOP GIVING GOP TOTALLY UNWARRANTED “FREE PASS” ON “BORDER BS!” — “The situation under former president Donald Trump was substantially worse from a humanitarian and a pragmatic governing perspective: worse for the migrants, worse for the rule of law and worse for our country.” — Greg Sargent @ WashPost sets the record straight!

 

Greg Sargent
Greg Sargent
Opinion Writer
Washington Post

https://apple.news/Axz03Bes6T3ODoCivCDQ96g

Republicans are convinced that attacking President Biden’s border policies will win them the midterms. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) has gleefully labeled the situation there “Biden’s border crisis.”

In this, Republicans are benefiting from a media debate that has gone off the rails.

There’s a huge hole in this GOP attack, but it’s rarely described clearly in news reports and commentary. You can read endless headlines warning of a “crisis.” But even if that’s so, a crisis relative to what, exactly ?

What’s missing is a serious comparison with the pre-Biden status quo. It’s as if the current situation exists in a vacuum: Before there was no crisis, and now there’s a crisis .

That’s absurd. The situation under former president Donald Trump was substantially worse from a humanitarian and a pragmatic governing perspective: worse for the migrants, worse for the rule of law and worse for our country.

Biden is cleaning up Trump’s mess

It’s true that child and teenage migrants are overwhelming our facilities.

Because they can’t get released alone, they must be held at Border Patrol facilities for 72 hours before getting transferred to the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which places them with relatives or guardians. The ORR facilities are jammed, backlogging border facilities.

This is a terrible situation. But it’s happening in large part because Biden is undoing a Trump policy that should be undone.

Due to covid-19, the previous administration turned away most asylum seekers — without hearings — under a legal provision allowing a temporary block on noncitizens from entering to protect public health.

Biden is no longer applying this provision to unaccompanied children and teenagers (while keeping it for adults), helping fuel child backlogs. But that’s a move in the right direction, both from a humanitarian and rule-of-law perspective.

Coronavirus will be tamed before long, and we have a legal obligation to allow migrants to exercise their right to seek asylum. And as David Bier notes, that provision is not for controlling migrant flows outside a genuine public health rationale. If anything, expelling adults abuses it.

So continuing to use this tool is not a tenable long-term solution to the humanitarian problem, and it’s not in keeping with the rule of law. That requires letting in the kids, and we will have to allow more adults to apply for asylum. The question is how we manage it.

. . . .

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

Read Greg’s full op-ed at the link.

I understand why Fox News, Breitbart, and the rest of the “truth averse” right wing media shills promote the GOP’s racist, xenophobic “border crisis” myths.

What I don’t get is why the so-called “mainstream media” doesn’t do its homework on the real situation on the border and the Trump-created mess facing Biden in restoring some sense of order and lawful behavior to an intentionally broken and dysfunctional system. 

A few journalists like Greg, his WashPost colleague Arelis Hernandez, Cindy Carcamo (LA Times), Nicole Narea (Vox News), and Priscilla Alvarez (CNN), to name some, have taken the time to get it right (or close to right). But, far too many reporters who should know better just repeat the Abbott, McCarthy, GOP disingenuous nonsense without critical analysis or pushback. 

And, what’s sorely missing is the perspective of those at the heart of this situation: the kids and families faced with such a desperate situation in their home countries that they are willing to seek mercy and refuge in a country that proudly advertises its lack of respect for their humanity, our own laws, and international norms that are supposed to insure fair and humane treatment. 

They aren’t numbers, stats, bar graphs, and trend lines — they are human beings. They assert rights to apply for refuge under international norms that the U.S. has written into laws –  laws we have unilaterally decided not to follow.

The overwhelming majority seek not to “evade” authorities, but to turn themselves in to our legal system: A system that functionally no longer exists at our Southern Border thanks to Trump and, to some extent, the Supremes. This is neither a “law enforcement” nor a “national security” crisis — it’s a fundamental breakdown in our legal system and a betrayal of humane values. 

That’s the real problem here. It originated long before the Biden Administration. To date, no GOP  politico has offered any type of constructive solution. And, too few journalists have held the GOP nativists accountable for their racist-inspired lies, misrepresentations, myths, and lack of any semblance of constructive proposals for rational, lawful, governance — real solutions for problems aggravated by their own toxic, inhumane, and often illegal policies!

🇺🇸⚖️🗽Due Process Forever!

PWS

03-17-21

⚖️🇺🇸👍🏼🗽DEAN KEVIN JOHNSON’S SUCCINCT RESPONSE TO GREG ABBOTT’S PREDICTABLE SOUTHERN BORDER BS IS WORTH A READ! — PLUS: ARELIS HERNANDEZ OF WASHPOST WITH SOME MUCH-NEEDED TRUTH & PERSPECTIVE FROM THOSE ACTUALLY LIVING ON THE SOUTHERN BORDER: “We need more lawyers and judges, not more troops or technology.”

 

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

https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/immigration/2021/03/texas-governor-abbott-statement-on-unaccompanied-minor-crisis-created-by-biden-administration.html

There, of course, are pressing humanitarian issues to address along the U.S./Mexico border.  But to say that this issues are a result of “open border policies” is simply wrong.  No major party political leader to my knowledge is calling for “open borders.”  Rather, the “open borders” mantra is something that Republican politicians invoke to attack immigration policies that they do not like.

Democrats have another explanation for the current situation at the border.  House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told ABC News’ “This Week” that the policies of the Trump administration, which radically transformed immigration enforcement from 2017-21, are to blame for the recent increase in unaccompanied migrant children at the southern border,

“This is a humanitarian challenge to all of us,” Pelosi said. “What the administration has inherited is a broken system at the border and they are working to correct that in the children’s interests.”

To address humanitarian concerns, Homeland Secretary Alejandro N. Mayorkas has directed the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to support an effort over the next 90 days to safely shelter unaccompanied children who make the dangerous journey to the U.S./Mexico border.

KJ

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

Thanks, Kevin, for adding some reality and perspective to the discussion. You can read Abbott’s statement at the link. Notably, the Republicans have offered no constructive solutions to this humanitarian issue, either in or out of power, other than to engage in child abuse and continually violate the laws, both international and domestic. 

The criticism from the likes of Abbott, who as “Governor” of Texas has presided over a power grid disaster that actually killed and threatened the health of Texas residents and who has thumbed his nose at public health recommendations that save lives, is particularly disingenuous. And, naturally, the dangerous and deadly results of Abbott’s and the GOP’s mis-governance of Texas have fallen disproportionately on Latinos and other communities of color. The Abbott/GOP response has been to attempt to disenfranchise citizens of color in Texas! 

The same can be said of GOP House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy whose main contribution to America’s safety and security has been to whitewash the deadly assault on our Capitol that his “supreme leader” orchestrated. Again, a person with no credibility. 

Those seeking a more nuanced and accurate picture of what’s really happening at the Southern Border should read the lengthy report of Arelis Hernandez in the WashPost:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/migrants-are-not-overrunning-us-border-towns-despite-the-political-rhetoric/2021/03/15/b193f3f2-8345-11eb-ac37-4383f7709abe_story.html

Migrants are not overrunning U.S. border towns, despite the political rhetoric

Leaders in Texas border towns say their economies are suffering because of pandemic restrictions on cross-border travel.

. . . .

City officials and nonprofit organizations can’t force families to stay in the hotels but Darling, the McAllen mayor, said so far no one they track has left isolation prematurely.

“We tell them if they want to leave on our buses, they need to follow our rules,” he said. The city has spent nearly $200,000 of taxpayer money it hopes will be reimbursed by the federal government, but Abbott’s rejection of Federal Emergency Management Agency funding from the Biden administration will complicate matters for localities.

Darling said his city is full of compassionate people, and they are doing the rest of the country a favor in taking care of migrant families on the front end of their journeys.

Along the border, faith organizations, local emergency managers and immigration advocates say they have learned from previous surges how best to coordinate. They are preparing to receive flights and buses full of asylum seekers, mostly recently released families with small children, to ease capacity issues that critics say the Department of Homeland Security officials should have anticipated.

Coronavirus restrictions have put capacity limits on shelters run by community organizations on the U.S. side of the border, but so far the numbers are not at 2019 levels, said Pastor Michael Smith of the Holding Institute in Laredo. Shelters and temporary detention facilities operated by the U.S. Health and Human Services’ contractors, however, are over capacity.

But without more orderly intervention, the numbers could overwhelm. The Biden administration plans to deploy FEMA to the border to help with the migration surge as the administration tries to quickly scale up space to temporarily hold and process migrants and unaccompanied children — many between the ages of 13 and 17.

“The failure to have an administrative process is causing a humanitarian crisis,” Smith said during a news conference organized by Laredo activists. “There are solutions to the issues, but they are not solutions that call for militarizing the border.”

“We need robust infrastructure at our ports of entry to handle people seeking asylum,” said Tannya Benavides, of the No Border Wall coalition. “We need more lawyers and judges, not more troops or technology.”

Arelis R. Hernandez
Arelis R. Hernandez
Southern Border Reporter
Washington Post

Great article by Arelis! I highly recommend it. My only caveat is that we need not just more lawyers and judges, certainly correct, but better Immigration Judges who are experts in asylum law, have experience representing asylum seekers, and can fairly, efficiently, and consistently identify those with valid claims to protection under the law before it was perverted by the Trump regime. Also, the Government could use more qualified Asylum Officers who could screen and finally adjudicate the grantable cases, under correct legal criteria set forth by better-qualified Immigration Judges and a completely new due-process-human rights-oriented BIA without even having to send the cases to court. 

These are the bold steps necessary to get out of the cycle of “same old, same old” — which inevitably ends with harsh measures directed at asylum seeking families and children that do nothing to address the causes of forced migration. “Enforcement-only deterrent measures” never have solved, and never will solve, the long-term problem in a constructive manner. The cycle of failed, yet expensive and inhumane deterrents, just keeps repeating itself Administration after Administration.

I have already suggested tapping into retired Asylum Officers and other retired USCIS Adjudicators with the necessary asylum expertise. I’m betting that my retired Round Table colleague, and former Asylum Officer and UN Official, Judge Paul Grussendorf would be available to help lead such an effort. 

To solve this problem, the Biden Administration must put some experts who understand the practicalities of refugee and asylum situations in place and let them solve the problem. It should come as no shock that the current gangs at DHS and EOIR —largely holdovers who participated in the Trump regime’s cruel, failed, and illegal “enforcement only” policies at the border — are not going to be able to get the job done. At least they can’t without some effective “adult supervision” from those committed to humane, legal, and timely processing of asylees and other migrants in full compliance with due process and best practices.

The Trump regime eschewed any attempt to build a fair, effective, timely asylum adjudication system that complied with domestic and international law as well as due process. Instead, they concentrated on eradicating the entire U.S. refugee and protection system through regulations (many enjoined), Executive Orders (some enjoined), bogus administrative “precedents,” and stacking the Immigration Courts with overtly anti-asylum or “go along to get along” “judges.” Right now, the entire system is in shambles — the most obvious example being the totally dysfunctional mess at EOIR!

To “win the game,” the Biden Administration needs to get the right players on the field. While there has been some notable progress, that hasn’t happened to date. And, with politicos like Abbott and McCarthy stirring the pot daily, time is running to get the “A Team” in place to combat their lies, distortions, and nonsense. 

🇺🇸🗽⚖️Due Process Forever!

PWS

01-16-21

 

🗽🇺🇸SETTING THE RECORD STRAIGHT: PROFESSOR HEATHER COX RICHARDSON EXPLAINS THE SITUATION AT THE SOUTHERN BORDER 


Heather Cox Richardson
Heather Cox Richardson
Historian
Professor, Boston College

From Letters From An American, March 13, 2017:

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/march-13-2021?r=330z7&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email&utm_source=email

Republican pundits and lawmakers are, once again, warning of an immigration crisis at our southern border.

Texas governor Greg Abbott says that if coronavirus spreads further in his state, it will not be because of his order to get rid of masks and business restrictions, but because President Biden is admitting undocumented immigrants who carry the virus. Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) is also talking up the immigration issue, suggesting (falsely) that the American Rescue Plan would send $1400 of taxpayer money “to every illegal alien in America.”

Right-wing media is also running with stories of a wave of immigrants at the border, but what is really happening needs some untangling.

When Trump launched his run for the presidency with attacks on Mexican immigrants, and later tweeted that Democrats “don’t care about crime and want illegal immigrants, no matter how bad they may be, to pour into and infest our Country,” he was tangling up our long history of Mexican immigration with a recent, startling trend of refugees from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras (and blaming Democrats for both). That tendency to mash all immigrants and refugees together and put them on our southern border badly misrepresents what’s really going on.

Mexican immigration is nothing new; our western agribusinesses were built on migrant labor of Mexicans, Japanese, and poor whites, among others. From the time the current border was set in 1848 until the 1930s, people moved back and forth across it without restrictions. But in 1965, Congress passed the Hart-Celler Act, putting a cap on Latin American immigration for the first time. The cap was low: just 20,000, although 50,000 workers were coming annually.

After 1965, workers continued to come as they always had, and to be employed, as always. But now their presence was illegal. In 1986, Congress tried to fix the problem by offering amnesty to 2.3 million Mexicans who were living in the U.S. and by cracking down on employers who hired undocumented workers. But rather than ending the problem of undocumented workers, the new law exacerbated it by beginning the process of guarding and militarizing the border. Until then, migrants into the United States had been offset by an equal number leaving at the end of the season. Once the border became heavily guarded, Mexican migrants refused to take the chance of leaving.

Since 1986, politicians have refused to deal with this disconnect, which grew in the 1990s when the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) flooded Mexico with U.S. corn and drove Mexican farmers to find work, largely in the American Southeast. But this “problem” is neither new nor catastrophic. While about 6 million undocumented Mexicans currently live in the United States, most of them–78%– are long-term residents, here more than ten years. Only 7% have lived here less than five years. (This ratio is much more stable than that for undocumented immigrants from any other country, and indeed, about twice as many undocumented immigrants come legally and overstay their visas than come illegally across the southern border.)

Since 2007, the number of undocumented Mexicans living in the United States has declined by more than a million. Lately, more Mexicans are leaving America than are coming.

What is happening right now at America’s southern border is not really about Mexican migrant workers.

. . . .

pastedGraphic.png

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Read Heather’s complete article at the link.

The Biden Administration needs to stay the course and continue to treat this as the humanitarian situation that it is, rather than portraying desperate kids and families like an invading army. These issues can be addressed without engaging in egregious violations of international laws, domestic laws, and our Constitution. Even with the current flow, we are not going to be “overrun” with migrants. Indeed, by most reliable accounts, we will need increased immigration for our recovery and long-term economic well-being.  

A critical piece will be revoking the Sessions/Whitaker/Barr precedents, replacing the current BIA with real judges who are experts in immigration, asylum, human rights, and due process, removing most of the cases unnecessarily lingering on the self-bloated EOIR docket, and getting some real expert guidance on asylum law and due process out there from the “new BIA” to guide decision-making at both DHS and EOIR.

Our asylum, refugee, and immigration systems can be fixed. But, not with the “players” left behind by the past regime. And, certainly not with more scofflaw, uber-enforcement-only gimmicks, cruelty, and inhumane policies like those that have failed time after time in the past.

🇺🇸⚖️🗽Due Process Forever!

PWS

03-14-21

⚖️🗽🛡RECOGNIZING WOMEN REFUGEES: Professor Karen Musalo @ ImmigrationProf Blog — Don’t Add A “6th Protected Ground” To The Statute; Get Some Better-Qualified Judges 🧑🏽‍⚖️ Who Will Respect & Follow Existing Law To Protect Those Already Covered, But Wrongfully Denied Refuge By Bad Judging & Restrictionist Policies!

 

Karen Musalo
Professor Karen Musalo
Director, Center for Gender & Refugee Studies, Hastings Law

https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/immigration/2021/03/guest-post-the-wrong-answer-to-the-right-question-how-to-address-the-failure-of-protection-for-gende.html

By Immigration Prof

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The Wrong Answer to the Right Question:  How to Address the Failure of Protection for Gender-Based Claims?

By Professor Karen Musalo, Bank of America Professor of International Law, Director of the Center for Gender & Refugee Studies, UC Hastings

In 1996 I was honored to litigate the first case at the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA), Matter of Kasinga,[1] that opened the door to protection for women fleeing gender-based harms.  To qualify for recognition as a refugee under U.S. law, an individual must establish “persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution” on account of one of five grounds – “race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a particular social group.”[2]  This definition in the 1980 Refugee Act essentially adopts the standard set forth in the 1951 UN Refugee Convention[3] and its 1967 U.N. Refugee Protocol,[4] which the U.S. ratified in 1968.

The woman seeking asylum in the Kasinga case fled female genital cutting and forced marriage.  In a ground-breaking decision, the BIA ruled that cutting was persecution, and it was “on account of” her membership in a gender-defined social group.  In so ruling, the BIA was following the guidance that UNHCR has issued over a number of years, noting that the absence of gender as a protected ground should not impede protection for women fleeing persecution, because the particular social group ground encompasses gender-defined groups.[5]

The Kasinga decision was a breakthrough for women, and a highwater mark in U.S. adjudicators following international guidance.  It also raised expectations that U.S. law would continue to evolve and extend protection to women fleeing the many forms of gender-based violence to which they are subject.  However, that has not been the case, and there have been retreats from protection across administrations, although undoubtedly we witnessed the most dramatic attempts to end protection in gender claims during the Trump administration, which issued extremely limiting Attorney General decisions, such as Matter of A-B- I,[6] and Matter of A-B- II –[7] as well as regulations[8] – currently enjoined[9]—that explicitly rule out gender-based claims.

The Biden administration has committed itself to reviewing the issue of protection for those fleeing gender-based violence.[10]  As we consider how to remedy the issue, some argue for a legislative amendment to the refugee definition, adding gender as a sixth ground to the statute’s five protected grounds of race, religion, nationality, political opinion and membership in a particular social group.  This is the wrong solution.  It would not only repeat the errors of the past (amending the refugee definition in 1996, discussed below), but it would also fail to adequately protect survivors of gender-based violence.  At the same time, it would lead to the quite foreseeable consequence of leaving many deserving asylum seekers outside the ambit of refugee protection.  It is also likely to signal to other Convention State parties that unless they also add a sixth ground, they could deny protection to women and girls without running afoul of the treaty’s obligations.

In order to prescribe a remedy, one first has to diagnose the illness; in order to understand why the sixth ground solution is wrong, we need to examine what occurred after Kasinga that limited protection in subsequent claims involving women fleeing gender-based persecution. . . . .

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

Read the rest of Karen’s outstanding analysis at the link.

Here’s a question from last summer’s “Jeopardy style” final exam in Immigration Law & Policy @ Georgetown Law:

A: Judge Schmidt’s favorite case.

Q: What is Matter of Kasinga?

Happy to say that everyone got that one right! Of course, I wrote the decision in Matter of Kasinga!

Karen’s bottom line: “We should be working to bring the U.S. into compliance with UNHCR’s social group interpretation, rather than surrendering to its flawed interpretation, by adding a sixth ground.”

The key is better Federal Judges, from the Immigration Courts all the way up to the Supremes: Judges who are “practical scholars” in human rights and applied due process; judges who have represented asylum seekers, particularly women, and understand their plight.

This week, President Biden announced the creation of the White House Gender Policy Council. https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-actions/2021/03/08/executive-order-on-establishment-of-the-white-house-gender-policy-council/

That’s a nice gesture. But, as I always say, actions are what really counts. So here are actions that Judge Garland can take immediately as Attorney General to finally fulfill the promise of Matter of Kasinga:

  • Vacate the atrocious, misogynist, perversion of asylum law (not to mention facts of record) by Sessions in Matter of A-B-;
  • Appoint some female “practical scholars in human rights” to appellate judgeships on the BIA.

That’s how to really honor Women’s History Month!

To understand the human impact of Sessions’s grotesque misconstruction of asylum law and the relevant facts in Matter of A-B-, check out this video short featuring Karen and others along with Ms. A-B-:   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRQpXRWlQL0

I generally agree with Karen’s concerns about specific gender-based legislation potentially having an unintended negative effect. That is certainly the fate of past unsuccessful attempts to include gender-based asylum in the regulations.

They essentially were “hijacked” by DOJ litigators and enforcement-oriented policy officials looking for ways to facially appease women’s rights groups, while actually proposing to restrict eligibility and make it easier for OIL and the SG’s Office to defend denials of asylum. They also sought to create hyper-technical requirements that would have effectively made it impossible for any unrepresented individual to properly set forth a “cognizable particular social group.”

These, in and of themselves, are reasons for removing the Immigration Courts from the DOJ and creating an independent Article I structure. The “ultimate insult to injury” was when EOIR enthusiastically participated in Stephen Miller’s currently-enjoined attempt to completely write gender-based asylum out of the law. Absurdly, that came at a time when gender-based persecution has become endemic throughout the world!

Not surprisingly, the DOJ, a prosecutorial agency at heart, is most often interested in “litigation strategies” to make it easier for the Government to successfully defend the burgeoning immigration litigation in Federal Court, rather than guaranteeing justice for asylum seekers and other migrants. Quite ironically, what would really reduce the volume of civil immigration litigation is more practical, expert decision making from better qualified Immigration Judges at the “retail level” of the system.

Gimmicks to “game” the Federal Court system against asylum seekers and other migrants by skirting due process and fundamental fairness have actually contributed to, rather than reduced, the amount of civil immigration litigation the Circuits. It has also generated many avoidable “Circuit conflicts” that require attention on Supremes’ limited docket. The failure of the DOJ, the Immigration Courts, and the Federal Courts to recognize and protect the due process rights of asylum seekers and other migrants has directly carried over into the failure of our justice system to achieve equal justice under law for racial minorities.

“Institutionalized racism” is inextricably linked to “Dred Scottification” of migrants of color in the Immigration Courts! The Biden Administration can’t solve the former without addressing the latter!

Bad judging and skewed policies on the “retail level” create multiple problems that adversely affect the entire Federal Justice system. I guarantee that they will not be solved by more restrictionist gimmicks and and unduly narrow and tone-deaf interpretations by judges and policy officials who lack the necessary expertise in immigration and human rights laws and the real-life understanding and perspective of the human consequences of the choices that judges make on a daily basis.

But, I also think that in addition to better judges, it is important to revise the statutory language to make it more explicitly inclusive and clarify that gender-based asylum, family based asylum, and other protected groups are examples, but not limits, of those covered by “particular social group.” Also, the statute should reverse the BIA’s stilted restrictionist interpretations (all too often incorrectly given “deference” by Circuit Courts shirking their duty) of “nexus” as a vehicle to deny asylum rather than an expansive concept that can and should be used to extend life-saving protections where necessary.

Otherwise, as Trump, Sessions, Barr, and Miller demonstrated, needed protection becomes largely a matter of who is appointing the judges at any particular point in time. Protection must and should be more durable — for all refugees including, but not limited, to those seeking  gender-based protection!

Better Federal Judges are the beginning, but by no means the end, of what is needed to make due process, fundamental fairness, and genuine refugee protections the hallmarks of American law. They are also required to turn institutionalized racism into equal justice for all persons in America, regardless of race, religion, gender, or other defining personal characteristics.

🇺🇸⚖️🗽Due Process Forever! Asylum Laws Must Protect, Not Reject!🧑🏽‍⚖️🛡

PWS

03-10-21

🏴‍☠️INSIDE A FAILED AND UNJUST SYSTEM: Reuters Report Explains How The Trump Administration Destroyed Due Process, Fundamental Fairness, & Humanity In The U.S. Immigration Courts!

Reade Levinson
Reade Levinson
Reporter, Reuters
Kristina Cooke
Kristina Cooke
Reporter, Reuters
Mica Rosenberg
Mica Rosenberg
National Immigration Reporter, Reuters
Four Horsemen
BIA Asylum Panel In Action
Albrecht Dürer, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-immigration-trump-court-special-r/special-report-how-trump-administration-left-indelible-mark-on-u-s-immigration-courts-idUSKBN2B0179

Reade Levinson, Kristina Cooke, & Mica Rosenberg report for Reuters:

(Reuters) – On a rainy September day in 2018, Jeff Sessions, then U.S. attorney general, addressed one of the largest classes of newly hired immigration judges in American history.

“The vast majority of asylum claims are not valid,” he said during a swearing-in ceremony in Falls Church, Virginia, according to his prepared remarks. If judges do their job, he said, “the number of illegal aliens and the number of baseless claims will fall.”

It was a clear message to the incoming class: Most of the immigrants who appear in court do not deserve to remain in the United States.

As U.S. President Joe Biden works to undo many of the restrictive immigration policies enacted by former President Donald Trump, he will confront one of his predecessor’s indelible legacies: the legion of immigration judges Trump’s administration hired.

The administration filled two-thirds of the immigration courts’ 520 lifetime positions with judges who, as a whole, have disproportionately ordered deportation, according to a Reuters analysis of more than 800,000 immigration cases decided over the past 20 years.

Judges hired under Trump ordered immigrants deported in 69% of cases, compared to 58% for judges hired as far back as the administration of President Ronald Reagan. Because hundreds of thousands of immigrants have cases before the court each year, that 11 percentage-point difference translates to tens of thousands more people ordered deported each year. Appeals are rarely successful.

Biden has promised to dramatically expand the courts by doubling the number of immigration judges and other staff. That’s a worthwhile effort, said Stephen Legomsky, a former chief counsel of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services who is now a professor emeritus at Washington University School of Law in St. Louis. “But the challenge is going to be tremendous.”

Although there are no statutory limits on the number of judges who can be hired, expanding the court would be costly and could take years, immigration law experts said.

“The fact that these (Trump-era) judges are already in place inhibits him a great deal,” Legomsky said of Biden.

Stephen Miller, the key architect of Trump’s immigration agenda, told Reuters that the administration had aimed to hire more immigration judges as part of an effort to “create more integrity in the asylum process” and quickly resolve what he termed meritless claims to cut down on a massive backlog.

“Most of the people that are coming unlawfully between ports of entry on the southwest border are not eligible for any recognized form of asylum,” Miller said in an interview. “There should be a very high rejection rate.”

Under U.S. law, immigrants are eligible for asylum only if they can prove they were being persecuted in their home countries on the basis of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group or their political opinions. Miller said many migrants arriving at the border are coming for economic reasons and present fraudulent asylum claims.

Sessions, who as attorney general had the final say in hiring immigration judges, told Reuters that “the problem is not with the Trump judges. The problem was with some of the other judges that seemed to not be able to manage their dockets, or, in many cases, rendered rulings that were not consistent with the law.

The Trump administration’s successors to Sessions, who was forced out in 2018, did not respond to requests for comment.

. . . .

“There has been a significant lack of basic understanding of immigration law and policy with many – not all – but many of the new hires under the Trump administration,” said Susan Roy, an attorney and former immigration judge appointed during the administration of President George W. Bush who has represented immigrants before some new judges.

Reuters spoke with eight other former immigration judges, five of whom served under Trump, who generally echoed her view. Sitting immigration judges are not permitted to speak to the media.

Even for judges with immigration backgrounds, the type of experience they have has been controversial. In 2017, a report commissioned by the Justice Department found a lack of diversity of experience among judges hired, due to an excess of former prosecutors here from Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

. . . .

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Read the rest of the report at the link.

Hon. Sue Roy is a distinguished member of our Round Table of Former Immigration Judges 🛡⚔️ now in private practice representing asylum seekers and other migrants in Immigration Court.

Hon. Charles Honeyman, quoted elsewhere in the article, is also a member of the Round Table who actually was removed from a case for failing to carry out what he believed to be improper instructions from his “supervisors” who were implementing Sessions’s anti-immigrant policies.

Stephen Legomsky is a former USCIS Senior Executive and esteemed retired Professor who generally is acknowledged as one of American’s leading scholar-experts on immigration and human rights.

Judge Dana Leigh Marks, quoted elsewhere in the article, is a former President of the National Association of Immigration Judges who also successfully argued the landmark  Supreme Court  case INS v. Cardoza-Fonseca, which established the generous well-founded fear standard for asylum.

Sessions and Miller are notorious White Nationalist xenophobes who have neither represented asylum seekers nor been Immigration Judges. Their efforts to eradicate international norms and legal protections for vulnerable asylum seekers, and their particular bias against female asylum seekers, have been widely criticized and panned by human rights experts throughout the world, as well as enjoined or overruled by some U.S. Courts. They were architects of the widely condemned child separation policy and the New American Gulag (“NAG”).

EOIR is the failed DOJ agency that houses the dysfunctional Immigration Courts.

🇺🇸🗽⚖️Due Process Forever! 

PWS

03-08-21

 

LATEST FROM “SIR JEFFREY” 🛡⚔️ — “Determining Political Opinion: Problems and Solutions — Jeffrey S. Chase | Opinions/Analysis on Immigration Law”

Jeffrey S. Chase
Hon. Jeffrey S. Chase
Jeffrey S. Chase Blog
Coordinator & Chief Spokesperson, Round Table of Former Immigration Judges

https://www.jeffreyschase.com/blog/2021/3/7/determining-political-opinion-problems-and-solutions

JEFFREY S. CHASE | OPINIONS/ANALYSIS ON IMMIGRATION LAW

Blog Archive Press and Interviews Calendar Contact

Determining Political Opinion: Problems and Solutions

Regarding political opinion, the refugee law scholar Atle Grahl-Madsen famously explained that refugee protection “is designed to suit the situation of common [people], not only that of philosophers…The instinctive or spontaneous reaction to usurpation or oppression is [as] equally valid” as the “educated, cultivated, reflected opinion.”1  A  recent decision of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit provides an opportunity to reflect on this premise.

In Zelaya-Moreno v. Wilkinson, a young man was targeted for recruitment by MS-13.  On two occasions, Zelaya directly announced to the gang’s members his reason for refusing to join: because gangs were bad for his hometown and country.  Both times, the gang members responded by beating him, fracturing his arm the second time.  They also threatened to kill him if he continued to refuse to join.  The questions raised are whether Zelaya’s instinctive, simply-worded response expressed a political opinion, and if so, did that opinion form part of the reason for the beatings and threat?

The Immigration Judge recognized Zelaya’s statement to the gang to be a political opinion for asylum purposes.  However, the IJ wasn’t persuaded from the record that Zelaya’s opinion was why the gang beat him.  As expressed by the IJ, the beatings were caused by “Zelaya’s refusal to join the gang, irrespective of the reasons.”  It doesn’t seem that the IJ considered whether the gang members imputed a political opinion to the act of refusal per se.

On appeal, the BIA took a far more extreme position, stating  that because gangs are not political organizations and their activities are not political in nature, “expressing an opinion against their group is not expressing a political opinion.”  This happens to be a position that EOIR and DHS (in defiance of much circuit case law and expert opinion to the contrary) later sought to codify in regulations that fortunately remain enjoined at present.

The Second Circuit in Zelaya-Moreno rejected the Board’s narrow view of political opinion.  In fact, the court only last year, in its decision in Hernandez-Chacon v. Barr, recognized the act of resisting rape by members of the very same gang in El Salvador as the expression of a feminist, anti-patriarchy political opinion.  Significantly, the victim in that case hadn’t stated any opinion to the gang members; it was only years later in front of the immigration judge that she gave her reason for resisting as “because I have every right to.”

As it has done in other decisions, the Second Circuit emphasized the need for a “complex and contextual factual inquiry” in political opinion determinations.  It conducted a survey of cases in which political opinion was found, and of others in which it wasn’t.  Unfortunately, the majority upheld the decision that Zelaya had not expressed a political opinion to the MS-13 members, stating that “[s]o far as the record shows, his objection to them is not rooted in any sort of disagreement with the policies they seek to impose nor any ideology they espouse.”

“So far as the record shows” is critical.  I haven’t seen the record in this case, but I believe it might serve to demonstrate that while Grahl-Madsen correctly assigned equal validity to the opinions of the commoner and the intellectual, in practice, claims brought by members of the former group often require assistance from the latter in persuading adjudicators of the political nature of their words or actions.

For example, in Hernandez-Chacon, context for the petitioner’s resistance was provided by the affidavit of a lawyer and human rights expert who was able to articulate the patriarchal gender bias in Salvadoran society from which a political opinion could be gleaned from the asylum-seeker’s act of resistance alone.  In another decision cited by the court, Alvarez-Lagos v. Barr, the Fourth Circuit was able to rely on the explanation of two experts on Central American gangs that the petitioner’s refusal to comply with extortion demands would be viewed by the gang as “political opposition” and “a form of political disobedience.”

In Zelaya-Moreno, the dissenting judge (in an opinion worth reading) was able to draw a political inference from the facts alone.  It seemed that the two judges in the majority required more.  But in finding the statements or actions of an applicant alone to be insufficient, is our present system of refugee protection genuinely designed to suit the situation of common people as well as philosophers?

In the view of the dissenting judge, yes.  In that judge’s words, Zelaya “sought refuge here after standing up to MS members, refusing their demands that he join them, and informing them that he did not support them and considered them a blight on his native El Salvador. Our asylum laws protect individuals like Zelaya-Moreno who face persecution for such politically courageous stands.”

But in the view of the majority, Zelaya had expressed nothing “more than the generalized statement ‘gangs are bad.’ Thus, we cannot conclude that Zelaya holds a political opinion within the meaning of the statute, and therefore that the BIA erred in concluding that he was not eligible for asylum on this ground.”   Would additional documentation providing the complex, contextual analysis the court mentioned earlier in its decision have delivered the two judges in the majority to the place already reached by their dissenting colleague?

The United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees is a good reference source on such issues.  In its Guidance Note on Refugee Claims Relating to Victims of Organized Crimes, UNHCR stated at para. 45 that in its view, “political opinion needs to be understood in a broad sense to encompass “any opinion on any matter in which the machinery of State, government, society, or policy may be engaged.”  It continued at para. 47 that powerful gangs such as MS-13 may exercise de facto power in certain areas, and their activities  and those of certain State agents may be closely intertwined.  At para. 50, UNHCR stated that “rejecting a recruitment attempt may convey anti-gang sentiments as clearly as an opinion expressed in a more traditional political manner by, for instance, vocalizing criticism of gangs in public meetings or campaigns.”  And at para. 51, UNHCR added that “[p]olitical opinion can also be imputed to the applicant by the gang without the applicant taking any action or making a particular statement him/herself.  A refusal to give in to the demands of a gang is viewed by gangs as an act of betrayal, and gangs typically impute anti-gang sentiment to the victim whether or not s/he voices actual gang opposition.”

Had this document been included in the record, would it have been enough to persuade the majority that the BIA had erred in rejecting Zelaya’s claim that he was targeted on account of his political opinion?  If so, how many pro se asylum applicants would understand the need to supplement their claims to provide this context, or know what type of document would be sufficient, or how to find it?

The Seventh Circuit had foreseen this problem 15 years ago.  In a 2006 decision, Banks v. Gonzales, the court opined that Immigration Court needs its own country experts, who would operate much as vocational experts do in disability hearings before the Social Security Administration’s judges.  In my opinion, an alternative approach would be for EOIR to follow the example of the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada, which maintains National Documentation Packages that are referenced in all cases by adjudicators of refugee claims.

During my time in government, I oversaw the creation of country condition pages on EOIR’s Virtual Law Library, which were built, and continue to be updated, by EOIR’s Law Library staff.  However, EOIR did not see fit to make its contents part of the records of hearing in asylum cases.  It is for this reason that UNHCR’s Eligibility Guidelines For Assessing International Protection Needs of Asylum Seekers in El Salvador, which contains much of the same language as the Guidance Note quoted above, and which expresses the specific conclusion that “persons perceived by a gang as contravening its rules or resisting its authority may be in need of international refugee protection on the grounds of their (imputed) political opinion,”2 is found on EOIR’s own website on the country page for “El Salvador,” yet wasn’t even considered in Zelaya-Moreno.

Considering the growing number of pro se applicants, the lack of legal resources available to those held in remote detention facilities, and the short time frame to prepare for hearings in certain categories of cases, I can’t see why the EOIR country pages should not be made part of the hearing record here as in Canada.  It’s possible that such a policy would have led to a different result in Zelaya.

Furthermore, the BIA hears plenty of cases involving expert opinions supporting the conclusion that those resisting gangs such as MS-13 were harmed on account of their political opinion.  Issuing precedent opinions recognizing the context that politicizes statements and actions such as Zelaya’s would result in much greater efficiency, consistency, and fairness in Immigration Court and Asylum Office adjudications.

Realistically, I harbor no illusions that the recent change in administration will bring about such enlightened changes to asylum adjudication anytime soon.  But we must still continue to argue for such change.  As the dissenting opinion in Zelaya stated in its conclusion: “[w]hile it may be too late for Zelaya-Moreno, the BIA and the Department of Justice can right this wrong for future asylum seekers. I urge them to reconsider their approach to anti-gang political opinion cases to ensure those who stand up to fearsome dangers are welcomed into this country rather than forced back to face torture and death.”  As noted above, it wouldn’t take much effort on EOIR’s part to accomplish this.

Notes:

  1. Atle Grahl-Madsen, The Status of Refugees in International Law, 228, 251 (1966) (quoted in Deborah E. Anker, The Law of Asylum in the United States (2020 Ed.) § 5:17, fn. 3.
  2. UNHCR Eligibility Guidelines For Assessing International Protection Needs of Asylum Seekers in El Salvador at 29-30.

Copyright 2021 Jeffrey S. Chase.  All rights reserved.

Reprinted with permission.

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

Truly wonderful, Jeffrey! One of your “best ever,” in my view! (And, they are all great, so that’s saying something.) 

Imagine what could be achieved at the BIA with real judges, experts in asylum law, thoughtful, practical analysis, intellectual leadership, and inspiration to a fairer future, rather than the current Clown Show 🤡🦹🏿‍♂️ inventing bogus ways to ”get to no!”

As Jeffrey demonstrates, we could choose to protect rather than to reject. There has always been a tendency to do the latter at the DOJ; but, under White Nationalist nativist Jeff Sessions and his successors it has gone “hog wild” — rejection has been falsely portrayed as a “duty” rather than an extremely poor choice and an abdication of moral and legal responsibility!

Today’s BIA is basically incapable of problem solving. Time and again their strained, stilted anti-immigrant, anti-due-process, pro-worst-practices interpretations not only spell doom for those coming before them, but also promote inefficiency and backlogs in an already overwhelmed system. They also send messages of disdain and disrespect for the rights and humanity of people of color that redounds throughout our struggling U.S. Legal System.

I’ll keep saying it: Whatever positive message Judge Garland and his team at DOJ intend to send about racial justice will be fatally undermined as long as “Dred Scottification” and disdain for the due process rights of migrants is the “order of the day” at the one Federal Court System the DOJ runs: The U.S. Immigration Court!  As long as EOIR is a “bad joke” the rest of Judge Garland’s reforms will fall flat!

The right judges 🧑🏽‍⚖️ at the BIA could turn this thing around! Remains to be seen if it will happen. But, it’s not rocket science. It just requires putting the right folks in charge, in place, and giving them the support and independence to engage in “creative problem solving.”

Judge Garland should be confirmed next week. And the confirmation hearings for Lisa Monaco (DAG) and Vanita Gupta (AAG) have been scheduled.

Some additional points:

  • The dissenter in the Second Circuit’s decision in Zelaya-Moreno v. Wilkinson is Judge Rosemary Pooler. Judge Pooler has had a long and distinguished career. Perhaps she would like to cap it off by becoming Chair of the BIA and leading by example;
  • Shows the importance of experts, which is probably why the BIA has gone out of its way to demean them and encourage IJs to ignore their evidence;
  • Jeffrey’s analysis supports my “Better BIA for a Better America” 🇺🇸program;
  • As Justice Sotomayor says: “It is not justice.” That’s my view on today’s EOIR!  

Due Process Forever! ⚖️🗽

PWS

03-07-21

🏴‍☠️BIA CONTINUES TO SPEW FORTH ERRORS IN LIFE OR DEATH ☠️ ASYLUM CASES, SAYS 4TH CIR. — “Three-In-One” — Improperly Disregarding Corroborating Evidence; Incorrect Legal Standard On Past Persecution; Wrong Nexus Finding! — Arita-Deras v. Wilkinson

Four Horsemen
BIA Asylum Panel In Action
Albrecht Dürer, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Kangaroos
“Oh Boy! Three material mistakes in one asylum case! Do you think our superiors in the enforcement bureaucracy will give us extra credit on our ‘move ‘em out without due process quotas?’ Being a Deportation Judge sure is fun!”
https://www.flickr.com/photos/rasputin243/
Creative Commons License

https://www.ca4.uscourts.gov/opinions/191978.P.pdf

Arita-Deras v. Wilkinson, 4th Cir., 03-05-21, Published

PANEL:  GREGORY, Chief Judge, and AGEE and KEENAN, Circuit Judges

OPINION BY: Judge Barbara Milano Keenan

KEY QUOTE: 

Maria Del Refugio Arita-Deras, a native and citizen of Honduras, petitions for review of a final order of removal entered by the Board of Immigration Appeals (the Board).1 The Board affirmed an immigration judge’s (IJ) conclusion that Arita-Deras was not eligible for asylum, withholding of removal, or protection under the Convention Against Torture (CAT). The Board: (1) agreed with the IJ that Arita-Deras failed to support her claims with sufficient corroborating evidence; (2) found that Arita-Deras failed to prove that she suffered from past persecution because she had not been harmed physically; and (3) concluded that Arita-Deras failed to establish a nexus between the alleged persecution and a protected ground.

Upon our review, we conclude that the Board improperly discounted Arita-Deras’ corroborating evidence, applied an incorrect legal standard for determining past persecution, and erred in its nexus determination. Accordingly, we grant Arita-Deras’ petition and remand her case to the Board for further proceedings.

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

After eight years of bouncing around the system at various levels THIS “Not Quite Good Enough For Government Work” error-fest is what we get from EOIR! As I keep saying, no wonder they are running a 1.3 million case backlog, clogging the Circuit Courts with incredibly shoddy work, and in many cases sending vulnerable refugees back to death or torture under incorrect fact findings and blatantly wrong legal interpretations!

Again, nothing profound about this claim; just basic legal and analytical errors that often flow from the “think of any reason to deny” culture. EOIR just keeps repeating the same basic mistakes again and again even after being “outed” by the Circuits!

This case illustrates why the unrealistically high asylum denial numbers generated by the biased EOIR system and parroted by DHS should never be trusted. This respondent, appearing initially without a lawyer, was actually coerced by an Immigration Judge into accepting a “final order” of removal with a totally incorrect, inane, mis-statement of the law. “Haste makes waste,” shoddy, corner cutting procedures, judges deficient in asylum legal knowledge, and a stunning lack of commitment to due process and fundamental fairness are a burden to our justice system in addition to being a threat to the lives of individual asylum seekers.

Only when she got a lawyer prior to removal was this respondent able to get her case reopened for a full asylum hearing. Even then, the IJ and the BIA both totally screwed up the analysis and entered incorrect orders. Only because this respondent was fortunate enough to be assisted by one of the premier pro bono groups in America, the CAIR Coalition, was she able to get some semblance of justice on appeal to the Circuit Court! 

I’m very proud to say that a member of the “CAIR Team,” Adina Appelbaum, program Director, Immigration Impact Lab, is my former Georgetown ILP student, former Arlington Intern, and a “charter member” of the NDPA! If my memory serves me correctly, she is also a star alum of the CALS Asylum Clinic @ Georgetown Law. No wonder Adina made the Forbes “30 Under 30” list of young Americans leaders! She and others like her in the NDPA are ready to go in and start cleaning  up and improving EOIR right now! Judge Garland take note!

Adina Appelbaum
Adina Appelbaum
Director, Immigration Impact Lab
CAIR Coalition
PHOTO: “30 Under 30” from Forbes

Despite CAIR’s outstanding efforts, Ms. Arita-Deras still is nowhere near getting the relief to which she should be entitled under a proper application of the law by expert judges committed to due process. Instead, after eight years, she plunges back into EOIR’s 1.3 million case “never never land” where she might once again end up with Immigration Judges at both the trial and appellate level who are not qualified to be hearing asylum cases because they don’t know the law and they are “programmed to deny” to meet their “deportation quotas” in support of ICE Enforcement.

Focus on it folks! This is America; yet individuals on trial for their lives face a prosecutor and a “judge” who are on the same side! And, they are often forced to do it without a lawyer and without even understanding the complex proceedings going on around them! How is this justice? It isn’t! So why is it allowed to continue?

Also, let’s not forget that under the recently departed regime, EOIR falsely claimed that having an attorney didn’t make a difference in success rates for respondents. That’s poppycock! Actually, as the Vera Institute recently documented the success rate for represented respondents is an astounding 10X that of unrepresented individuals. In any functional system, that differential would be more than sufficient to establish a “prima facie” denial of due process any time an asylum seeker (particularly one in detention) is forced to proceed without representation. 

🇺🇸⚖️🗽🧑🏽‍⚖️VERA INSTITUTE RECOMMENDS FEDERAL DEFENDER PROGRAM FOR IMMIGRANTS — Widespread Public Support For Representation In Immigration Court!

Yet, this miscarriage of justice occurs every day in Immigration Courts throughout America! Worse yet, EOIR and DHS have purposely “rigged” the system in various ways to impede and discourage effective representation.

To date, while flagging EOIR for numerous life-threatening errors, the Article IIIs have failed to come to grips with the obvious: The current EOIR system provides neither due process nor fundamental fairness to the individuals coming before these “courts” (that aren’t “courts” at all)! 

Acting AG Wilkinson has piled up an impressive string of legal defeats in immigration matters in just a short time on the job. It’s going to be up to Judge Garland to finally make it right. It’s urgent for both our nation and the individuals whose rights are being stomped upon by a broken system on a daily basis!

🇺🇸⚖️🗽Due Process Forever! Failed Courts Never!

PWS

03–05-21

🇺🇸🗽NEW VISION: Biden Administration Reportedly Plans To Turn Gulags Into “Rapid Processing Centers!”

Celine Castronuovo
Celine Castronuovo
Staff Writer
The Hill
PHOTO: Twitter

https://apple.news/A_66ulAuzRTeEZzT59d_vTw

Celine Castronuovo reports in The Hill:

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is reportedly drafting plans to transform family migrant detention centers in South Texas into screening hubs as the Biden administration faces a growing number of migrants at the southern border.

The Washington Post, which obtained internal DHS draft documents outlining the plans, reported Thursday that senior ICE official Russell Hott informed staff in an email this week that the number of unaccompanied minors and families arriving in the U.S. in 2021 is “expected to be the highest” recorded “in over 20 years.”

According to the Post, Hott added that with more than 500 family members arriving per day, the shift from detention to Ellis Island-style processing centers “may not be sufficient to keep pace with apprehensions,” with the potential for some migrants to be housed in hotels.

DHS officials, who spoke to the Post on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly, said the transition to rapid processing and release centers has already begun.

The reported change comes as the latest move in President Biden’s efforts to reform the U.S. immigration system and keep up with the rising number of migrants crossing into the country amid shortages of bed space and personnel at detention centers.

The reported plans also mark a shift from policies under the Obama and Trump administrations, when most migrant families were quickly released or deported upon arriving in the U.S., with some being held in dormitory-style centers for extended periods of time as they awaited immigration proceedings.

The Biden administration has publicly said it is reviewing how family detention facilities are used, though the Post noted that the administration last week told a federal judge that the policies had not yet changed.

. . . .

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

Read the full article at the link.

The three keys are: 1) screening for COVID, background, and credible fear of persecution; 2) matching asylum applicants with representation, which promotes nearly “perfect attendance,” at hearings; 3) radically and rapidly reforming the Immigration Court system so that the Immigration Judges are “practical experts” on asylum law and eliminating the huge number of “deadwood” cases clogging dockets so Immigration Judges can conduct asylum hearings for recent arrivals on a timely, consistent, predictable basis, with an emphasis on due process and getting the result correct at the initial merits hearing. 

🇺🇸⚖️🗽Due Process Forever!

PWS

03-05-21

THE GIBSON REPORT — 03-01-21 — Compiled By Elizabeth Gibson, Esquire, NY Legal Assistance Group — FEATURING: Under The EOIR Big Top 🎪 Robed TV Carnival Barkers Hand Out Death Sentences ☠️ With Ignorance, Indolence, Indifference, & Insult To Injury!

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

COVID-19 & Closures

Note: Policies are rapidly changing, so please verify information with the government and colleagues.

 

EOIR Status Overview & EOIR Court Status Map/List: Hearings in non-detained cases at courts without an announced date are postponed through, and including, March 19, 2021 (The timing of postponement notices has been inconsistent and it is unclear when the next announcement will be. EOIR announced 3/19 on Wed. 2/10, 2/19 on Mon. 1/25, 2/5 on Mon. 1/11, and 1/22 on Mon. 12/28). There is no announced date for reopening NYC non-detained at this time.

 

USCIS Office Closings, Including Weather

 

TOP NEWS

 

Biden revokes Trump ban on many green card applicants

Reuters: U.S. President Joe Biden on Wednesday revoked a proclamation from his predecessor that blocked many green card applicants from entering the United States.

 

Biden to allow migrant families separated under Trump to reunite in the U.S.

Politico: ACLU Executive Director Anthony D. Romero was quick to welcome Mayorkas’ announcement, but cautioned that “the devil is in the details and Secretary Mayorkas has to shed all the caveats and qualifications around his announcement and follow through with everything that’s necessary to right the wrong.” See also Lawyers have found the parents of 105 separated migrant children in past month.

 

Biden to Discuss Border and Other Issues With Mexican President

NYT: The two leaders, who previously talked about ways to stem migration in a call on Jan. 22, just days after Mr. Biden took office, are expected to discuss addressing the root causes of persecution and poverty that force Central American families to flee to the United States.

 

First migrant facility for children opens under Biden

WaPo: Government officials say the camp is needed because facilities for migrant children have had to cut capacity by nearly half because of the coronavirus pandemic. At the same time, the number of unaccompanied children crossing the border has been inching up, with January reporting the highest total — more than 5,700 apprehensions — for that month in recent years.

 

Federal judge deals Biden another blow on 100-day deportation ban

Politico: U.S. District Judge Drew Tipton granted a preliminary injunction that blocks the moratorium the Biden administration announced on its first day.

 

ICE investigators used a private utility database covering millions to pursue immigration violations

WaPo: U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers have tapped a private database containing hundreds of millions of phone, water, electricity and other utility records while pursuing immigration violations, according to public documents uncovered by Georgetown Law researchers and shared with The Washington Post.

 

The Trump Administration’s Cruelty Haunts Our Virtual Immigration Courts

InTheseTimes: According to the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) — the Justice Department agency that oversees these immigration adjudication centers — nearly 300,000 asylum cases have been heard via videoconference in the past two years.

 

In The Story Of U.S. Immigration, Black Immigrants Are Often Left Out

NPR: Nana Gyamfi, Executive Director of the Black Alliance for Just Immigration, tells NPR’s Scott Simon about challenges Black immigrants to the U.S. face.

 

Consumer watchdog sues immigration services company, claiming it preys on detainees

NBC: The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau on Monday filed a lawsuit against Libre by Nexus, claiming the company is preying on immigrants through a bond scam that traps participants into paying expensive fees.

 

The five biggest omissions in massive Biden immigration bill

Examiner: Protocols for caring for families and children, border wall infrastructure, decriminalizing illegal immigration, immigration courts, employment-based immigration, and private detention facilities were not addressed in either the House or Senate versions of the bill.

 

LITIGATION/CASELAW/RULES/MEMOS

 

USCIS Launches Pilot Program to Facilitate Attorney or Representative Remote Participation in an Asylum Interview

USCIS has launched a temporary pilot program to facilitate attorney or representative participation in an asylum interview from a remote location via video or telephone. The pilot program is available only at the Arlington, Boston, Miami, Newark, and Newark/Manhattan Branch asylum offices. AILA Doc. No. 21030131

 

2nd Circ. Judge Dings Majority’s ‘Uncharitable’ Asylum Ruling

Law360: A fractured Second Circuit panel tossed an El Salvadoran asylum seeker’s appeal, finding that his opposition to gangs was not a political opinion and that he could avoid future beatings, a view the dissenting judge called an “uncharitable” interpretation of the case.

 

BIA Rules on Special Rule Cancellation of Removal

BIA ruled that an applicant for special rule cancellation of removal under INA §240A(b)(2) based on spousal abuse must demonstrate both that the abuser was their lawful spouse and was either a U.S. citizen or LPR at the time of the abuse. Matter of L-L-P-, 28 I&N Dec. 241 (BIA 2021) AILA Doc. No. 21022432

 

Justices ‘Baffled,’ ‘Confused’ By Asylum Cases

Law360: A pair of thorny immigration cases “baffled” and “confused” the inquisitive justices of the U.S. Supreme Court Tuesday as they wrestled with when testimony of asylum applicants must be presumed to be credible.

 

District Court Indefinitely Stops Government from Executing a 100-Day Moratorium on Removals

A district court grants nationwide preliminary injunction to prohibit enforcement and implementation of the 100-day pause on removals as outlined in the 1/20/21 DHS memo. (State of Texas v. USA, et al., 2/23/21) AILA Doc. No. 21012634

 

Presidential Proclamation Revoking Immigrant Visa Ban

On 2/24/21, President Biden issued Proclamation 10149 revoking Proclamation 10014, section 1 of Proclamation 10052, and section 1 of Proclamation 10131, which suspended immigrant visas due to the 2019 novel Coronavirus outbreak. (86 FR 11847, 3/1/21) AILA Doc. No. 21022490

 

DOS Provides Update on the Phased Resumption of Routine Visa Services

DOS updates its announcement and FAQs on the phased resumption of visa services following the rescission of Presidential Proclamation 10014, which suspended the entry of certain immigrant visa applicants into the United States. AILA Doc. No. 20071435

 

DOJ Appeals Ruling Limiting Immigrant Detentions Without a Court Hearing

Documented: Judge Alison Nathan’s Nov. 30 ruling  at U.S. District Court in Manhattan was the first to draw a constitutional line on how long an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainee waits for an initial hearing before a judge.

 

ICE Can’t Keep Transferred Detainee Out Of Fla. Class Action

Law360: A Florida federal judge ruled Friday that a Mexican citizen can join a class action challenging U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement detainee conditions at three South Florida facilities during the COVID-19 pandemic, saying the agency cannot escape jurisdiction by transferring him to a facility across the country.

 

Council Sues Customs and Border Protection to Release Records of Militarized Raids on Humanitarian Aid Station

AIC: The Council and partners filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit to compel the government to release documentation of three raids on a humanitarian aid station in the deadly desert in Southern Arizona.

 

HHS Withdrawal of Request for Comment on Proposed Revisions to Forms for Sponsors of Unaccompanied Children

The Department of Health and Human Services published a notice stating that it is no longer pursuing changes to the forms for sponsors of unaccompanied children on which it had requested public comment on 1/5/21 at 86 FR 308, and therefore withdraws its request for comment. (86 FR 11537, 2/25/21) AILA Doc. No. 21022531

 

DHS Secretary Mayorkas Announces Family Reunification Task Force Principles and Executive Director

DHS: Secretary Mayorkas announced that Michelle Brané will serve as the Task Force’s Executive Director.  Most recently, she served as the senior director of the Migrant Rights and Justice program at the Women’s Refugee Commission.

 

RESOURCES

 

·         Correction: The ERO ombudsman email that was circulating last week had a typo and should be: EROOmbudsman@ice.dhs.gov.

·         AILA: Policy Brief: Walled Off: How USCIS Has Closed Its Doors on Customers and Strayed from Its Statutory Customer Service Mission

·         AILA: Current Leadership of Major Immigration Agencies

·         AILA: Practice Alert: ICE Interim Guidance on Civil Immigration Enforcement and Removal Priorities

·         AILA: Practice Pointer: Employment Verification During the COVID-19 Outbreak

·         AILA: Summary of the U.S. Citizenship Act

·         AILA: Section-by-Section Summary of the U.S. Citizenship Act

·         AILA: Podcast: Representing a Mentally Ill Client Facing Removal Proceedings

·         AILA: Resource Related to Lawsuit Granting Preliminary Relief for Diversity Visa Applicants

·         ASISTA: New Advisory: Overview of U.S. Citizenship Act of 2021 & Its Impact on Immigrant Survivors

·         Black Immigrants Got Talent

·         CGRS: Children’s Asylum Manual: A Resource for Practitioners

·         CLINIC: Biden Administration Rescinds 2018 USCIS Notice to Appear Guidance

·         CLINIC: Department of State Shifts Human Rights Reports Comparison Charts

·         CMS: New Study about Immigrant Health in New York City

·         CRS: Are Temporary Protected Status Recipients Eligible to Adjust Status?

·         GAO: Actions Are Needed to Address the Cost and Readiness Implications of Continued DOD Support to U.S. Customs and Border Protection

·         ICYMI: Important Policy & ASISTA Updates

·         ILRC: What Every Noncitizen Must Know About Cannabis and Immigration

·         Immigration Mapping: From Hirabayashi to DACA

·         LGBT Adult Immigrants in the United States

·         LSNYC Practice Advisory on continuances: fourth edition of the sample motion

·         USCIS: Resources on U.S. Citizenship for Adult Adoptees

 

EVENTS

 

·         9/23/21 Representing Children in Immigration Matters 2021: Effective Advocacy and Best Practices

 

ImmProf

 

Monday, March 1, 2021

·         Join the Deported Veterans Symposium on March 10-12, 2021

·         LGBT Adult Immigrants in the United States

·         Jennifer Lee Koh Joins Pepperdine Law Faculty

·         Democrats Strategizing on Immigration Reform, Piecemeal or the Whole Enchilada?

Sunday, February 28, 2021

·         Year of the Ox’s “Viral” Song Gains Traction Amid Rise in Anti-Asian Violence

·         Brookings Institution: Biden’s Immigration Reset

Saturday, February 27, 2021

·         At the Movies: Minari (2020)

·         Immigration Article of the Day: Freedom of Movement, Migration, and Borders by Jaya Ramji-Nogales & Iris Goldner Lang

Friday, February 26, 2021

·         Vera Institute — A Federal Defender Service for Immigrants Why: We Need a Universal, Zealous, and Person-Centered Model

·         Black Immigrants Got Talent (BIG Talent)

·         At the Movies: The Marksman (2021)

·         Fortress (North) America

·         Immigration Mapping: From Hirabayashi to DACA

·         At the Movies: Alien Terminology and Change the Subject, a 2019 Documentary

·         Immigration Article of the Day: Fee Retrenchment in Immigration Habeas by Seth Katsuya Endo

Thursday, February 25, 2021

·         Big Strides In Reunifying Separated Migrant Familes; Long Ways Still To Go

·         Call For Papers: Forced Migration Review on “Public health and WASH”

·         Immigrant Leaves Maplewood Church After 3½ Years As ICE Decides Not To Deport Him

·         Sister Simone Campbell on Immigration Reform

·         #WeCanWelcome Asylum Seekers: Meet Mirna Linares de Batres

·         Throwback Thursday: My Trials by Judge Paul Grussendorf

·         Immigration Article of the Day: Tried and (Inherently) Prejudiced: Disposing of the Prejudice Requirement for Lack of Counsel in Removal Proceedings by Ayissa Maldonado

Wednesday, February 24, 2021

·         President Biden revokes Trump bans on many green card applicants, temporary foreign workers

·         Court Enjoins Biden Administration’s 100 Day Removal Pause

·         Ahilan Arulanantham joins UCLA School of Law as co-faculty director of the Center for Immigration Law and Policy

·         The five biggest omissions in massive Biden immigration bill

·         Immigration Article of the Day: Capital Controls as Migrant Controls by Shayak Sarkar, California Law Review, Forthcoming

Tuesday, February 23, 2021

·         From ‘aliens’ to ‘noncitizens’ – the Biden administration is proposing to change a legal term to recognize the humanity of non-Americans

·         Congressmember Debbie Leski’s Racist Remarks

·         Teaching Immigration Law: Law School Clinics in the US and UK

·         Immigration Article of the Day: Statelessness as Rhetoric: The Case for Revisioning Statelessness in Our Statist World by Francis Tom Temprosa

Monday, February 22, 2021

·         From the Bookshelves: Migrant Conversions:  Transforming Connections between Peru and South Korea by Erica Vogel

·         Supreme Court News: Court to Review Public Charge Case, Hear Asylum Credibility Oral Arguments Tomorrow

·         USCIS restores citizenship and naturalization test

·         Immigration Lawyers Toolbox®

·         Code Compare on Lexis Nexis

·         Human Rights Watch — US: Take New Approach at Mexico Border

·         In Challenging Times, A Call for African American/Asian American Unity

·         Former Trump senior advisor Stephen Miller slams Biden immigration proposal

·         Immigration Article of the Day: The Political (Mis)representation of Immigrants in Voting by Ming Hsu Chen and Hunter Knapp

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

Check out “Top News #7.” It’s an article by Arvind Dilawar in In These Times about “EOIR’s Black Sites,” 🏴‍☠️ euphemistically known as “Immigration Adjudication Centers” where imposters masquerading as “judges” “process” cases by TV on the deportation assembly line, often without regard to the law, the facts, and the humanity of their victims and the lawyers representing them.

Here’s an excerpt:

Lisa Koop, associate director of legal services for the National Immigrant Justice Center (NIJC), stood with her client in immigration court in September 2019. The client (name withheld for privacy) had escaped violence in Central America and fled to the United States with her young daughter. Here, they were taken into custody by immigration authorities, which landed them in this courtroom, waiting to hear whether they would be granted asylum.

They were initially scheduled with a traditional, in-person immigration judge. But that judge retired and the case was transferred to an “immigration adjudication center.” This new judge video conferenced in. Koop says the judge did not allow an opening statement, was not familiar with relevant precedent and did not ask Koop to address any particularities of the case in the closing argument. The judge ruled that, while the case was “very sad,” it did not meet the criteria for asylum, then wished Koop’s client “good luck” following deportation.

This outrageous mockery of due process, fundamental fairness, and real judicial proceedings is ongoing, in the Department of “Justice” — yes, folks, the Chief Prosecutor of the U.S. maintains his own “wholly owned” “court system”  in a nation where justice supposedly is unbiased and impartial — more than five weeks into the Biden Administration.

Last week, we heard a refreshingly emotional expression of personal gratitude and recognition of the essential role of refugee protections from Judge Merrick Garland. 

What we haven’t heard to date is a recognition that what will soon be “his” DOJ treats refugees (in this case vulnerable asylum seekers) with disdain and disrespect “revved up” by four years of White Nationalist abuses heaped on them by Judge Garland’s corrupt predecessors as AGs for Trump. We also have yet to hear what Judge Garland plans to do about the deadly and disreputable “EOIR Clown Show” 🤡🦹🏿‍♂️ which will soon be operating under his auspices and which, whether he realizes it or not, will form the the major part of his legacy to American Justice.

Judge Garland should call up folks like Lisa Koop at NIJC, Claudia Valenzuela at American Immigration Council, and their colleagues to get a “real life dose” of what it means to be or represent an asylum seeker in today’s dysfunctional and disreputable Immigration “Courts” that actually are 21st Century Star Chambers.

Star Chamber Justice
“Justice”
Star Chamber
Style

Better yet, he should replace the current EOIR Senior Executives and BIA Appellate Immigration Judges with Koop, Valenzuela, and others like them — “practical experts” in due process, equal justice, immigration, and human rights — who would restore and advance judicial integrity and fairness to a system that has abandoned and trampled upon those fundamental values!

Grim Reaper
G. Reaper Approaches ICE Gulag With “Imbedded Captive Star Chamber” Run By EOIR, For Their “Partner” Reaper
Image: Hernan Fednan, Creative Commons License

As stated at the end of Dilawar’s article: Asylum-seekers are wrongfully denied asylum, and justice is not served.” Duh!

🇺🇸🗽⚖️Due Process Forever! End the EOIR Clown Show!🤡🦹🏿‍♂️🎪☠️

PWS

03-02-21

WOMEN’S REFUGEE COMMISSION BIDS FOND FAREWELL TO NDPA 🌟 SUPERSTAR MICHELLE BRANÉ AS SHE TAKES KEY POSITION WITH BIDEN ADMINISTRATION! — “We can’t imagine a better person at the helm of the family separation task force. It’s a smart move by the Biden administration, and a massive win for the nation and for separated families.“

 

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Dear Paul,

I am extremely proud to let you know that Michelle Brané, long-time director of the Women’s Refugee Commission’s Migrant Rights and Justice program, is headed to the Biden administration—effective immediately—to serve as executive director of the newly formed Interagency Task Force on the Reunification of Families. The task force is charged with identifying and reuniting families that were cruelly separated under the Trump administration.

In Michelle’s 14 years at WRC, she built our Migrant Rights and Justice program from the ground up. She and her team have been trailblazers in the work to protect the rights of women and girls seeking asylum in the United States.

READ OUR STATEMENT
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Copyright © 2021 Women’s Refugee Commission, All rights reserved.

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Donations are deductible to the full extent allowable under IRS regulations.

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Here’s the link to the full WRC press release:

https://www.womensrefugeecommission.org/press-releases/michelle-brane-tapped-for-biden-administration/

An truly inspired and very encouraging choice by the the Biden Administration! The only “downside” — I had Michelle on my “shortlist” for key judicial or executive positions at the “New EOIR,” as well as for an Article III judicial appointment! But, that still could and should happen when her a work at the Interagency Task Force is done! 

Michelle is a prime example of the “new generation” of due-process-oriented leaders that the NDPA produces! Brilliant, tough-minded, battle-hardened, “practical scholars,” experts, and innovative managers who will see the battle for social justice through to success, no matter how long it takes. Her background, starting at the BIA, also demonstrates how Judge Garland could and must remake EOIR into a “model judiciary” that attracts, trains, and exports the “best and the brightest” for high level judicial and policy positions.

But, it’s not going to happen unless the current awful mess at EOIR is replaced with “Michelle caliber experts” from the NDPA.

Congrats again, Michelle. You make us all proud!

🇺🇸5🗽⚖️Due Process Forever!

PWS

03-01-21