"The Voice of the New Due Process Army" ————– Musings on Events in U.S. Immigration Court, Immigration Law, Sports, Music, Politics, and Other Random Topics by Retired United States Immigration Judge (Arlington, Virginia) and former Chairman of the Board of Immigration Appeals Paul Wickham Schmidt and Dr. Alicia Triche, expert brief writer, practical scholar, emeritus Editor-in-Chief of The Green Card (FBA), and 2022 Federal Bar Association Immigration Section Lawyer of the Year. She is a/k/a “Delta Ondine,” a blues-based alt-rock singer-songwriter, who performs regularly in Memphis, where she hosts her own Blues Brunch series, and will soon be recording her first full, professional album. Stay tuned! 🎶 To see our complete professional bios, just click on the link below.
Bonnie Washuk reports for the Portland press Herald:
In the lobby of Portland’s Baxter Academy for Technology and Science, a chess board is on prominent display – for good reason.
Earlier this month, the school’s chess team – which didn’t even exist a few months ago – won the Maine State Scholastic Chess Championship against 15 of the state’s best teams, including Kennebunk High School.
Going into the championship, facing established high school chess teams, Baxter was not expected to win.
The player who clinched the big win for school’s six-member team is freshman João Vuvu-Nkanu Maviditi, a teen from Angola who last year was living at the Portland Expo when it served as temporary shelter for asylum seekers.
João Vuvu-Nkanu Maviditi, left, and Abdallah Ali ponder their next moves while playing a game of chess in class at Baxter Academy on March 12. The school’s chess team won the state championship last weekend for the first time. Gregory Rec/Staff Photographer Reprinted under license
. . . .
For Baxter to grab the championship win “is hugely impressive,” Cimato said in an email. “Baxter’s team held up extremely well under pressure and in sharp tactical positions. Their patience and calculation in those two end games were the difference.”
Baxter’s other chess team players are Jacob Kaiser, Abdallah Ali, Gibson Holloway and Sean Glass.
The team’s coach is Majur Juac, an internationally known chess master who once was one of the “Lost Boys” of Sudan who fled the civil war in their country and undertook long and dangerous treks to safety, spending years in refugee camps and eventually resettling in the United States.
Juac now lives in Falmouth and is on the faculty at Baxter, where he teaches chess.
. . . .
Baxter offered chess play after school, not just for its students but for other young people, including those who attend the downtown Boys and Girls Club.
When the games first started, “a few of those kids didn’t know how the pieces moved,” she said. “But Juac soon changed that.”
The school held tournaments in the summer, fall and winter. It’s hosting another next month and inviting in other schools.
In the fall, Baxter also launched a chess class taught by Juac, and 16 academy students signed up right away, Klein-Christie said.
She said the chess students are “really into it” and put their phones down and talk to one another as they play.
With a limited budget, it’s a stretch for a charter school to expand programs, Klein-Christie said.
“But it’s has been a worthwhile investment. Chess is a way of teaching them strategic planning, math skills. And it’s lovely for them to be building community.”
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Read Bonnie’s complete article at the link!
Immigrants get it done for their communities in ways big and small! The reality of migration is quite different from the cowardly bombast of Abbott, DeSantis, and other White Nationalists!
Folks like Abbott and the Feds are wasting incredible (and immoral) sums of money on misguided, cruel, counterproductive, dehumanizing, and ultimately futile enforcement, militarization, and imprisonment. They should be investing in a timely, fair, well-run asylum system, planned reception and resettlement, and community integration that would maximize the benefits for both the migrants and the U.S. communities they seek to enrich and help with their presence.
If only politicos of both parties would get beyond the racist myths, pandering to fear, encouraging “worst instincts,” and instead lead the way to a better future for America! 🇺🇸
Many Americans today worry that our nation is losing its national identity. Yet the core of that identity is not the whiteness of our skin or our religion or our ethnicity.
It is the ideals we share, the good we hold in common.
That common good is a set of shared commitments. To the rule of law. To democracy. To tolerance of our differences. To equal political rights and equal opportunity. To participating in our civic life. To sacrificing for the ideals we hold in common. To upholding the truth.
We cannot have a functioning society without these shared commitments. Without a shared sense of common good, there can be no “we” to begin with.
If we are losing our national identity, it is because we are losing our sense of the common good. This is what must be restored.
As I’ve argued in these essays, recovering our common good depends on several things:
It depends on establishing a new ethic of leadership based on trusteeship. Leaders must be judged not by whether they score a “win” for their side, but whether they strengthen democratic institutions and increase public trust.
It depends on honoring those who have invested in the common good, and holding accountable those who have exploited it for their own selfish ends.
It requires that we understand — and educate our children about — what we owe one another as members of the same society. Instead of focusing solely on the rights of citizenship, we need also to focus on the duties of citizenship.
And it requires a renewed commitment to truth.
Some of you may feel such a quest to be hopeless. The era we are living in offers too many illustrations of greed, narcissism, brutality, and hatefulness.
I, however, firmly believe this quest is not hopeless.
Almost every day, I witness or hear of the compassion and generosity of ordinary Americans. Their actions rarely make headlines, but they constitute much of our daily life together.
The challenge is to turn all this into a new public spiritedness extending to the highest reaches in the land — a public morality that strengthens our democracy, makes our economy work for everyone, and revives trust in the major institutions of the nation.
The moral fiber of our society has been weakened but it has not been destroyed.
We can recover the rule of law and preserve our democratic institutions by taking a more active role in politics.
We can fight against all forms of bigotry. We can strengthen the bonds that connect us to one another by reaching out to one another. We can help resurrect civility by acting more civilly toward those with whom we disagree.
We can protect the truth by using facts and logic to combat lies.
We can help restore the common good by striving for it and showing others it’s worth the effort.
We have never been a perfect union. Our finest moments have been when we sought to live up to our shared ideals.
I worked for Robert F. Kennedy a half-century ago when the common good was better understood. Resurrecting it may take another half-century, or more.
But as the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr once said, “Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history.”
Thank you for joining me on this journey. I hope you’ve found these essays useful and even on occasion inspiring. I hope you’ll join me in carrying forward the fight for the common good.
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Kelly Bouchard Staff Writer Portland Press Herald PHOTO: Linkedin
Despite the uncertainty, resettlement agencies in Maine are pushing ahead, preparing to welcome as many refugees as possible. To increase their chances of finding affordable apartments, they’re building a network of landlords willing to rent to newcomers and expanding resettlement efforts beyond Greater Portland, Lewiston-Auburn and Augusta-Waterville to Bangor and Brunswick, Ouattara said.
“We can settle people within 100 miles of Lewiston-Auburn,” said Rilwan Osman, executive director of Maine Immigrant & Refugee Services in Lewiston. “We have settled some families in Augusta, and we are exploring other communities.”
The State Refugee Advisory Council held four quarterly meetings last year to connect and support various community representatives in government, public safety, schools, social services and health care, Ouattara said.
“There are resources that are available from the federal government to assist communities that accept refugees,” he said.
At least half of the new arrivals last year had family ties in Maine, Ouattara said, while the other half were “free cases” that could be resettled more widely in the state but would require more support from agency staff. Transportation continues to be a challenge for many newcomers.
“The public transit system in Maine is still in development, so that can be isolating in some communities,” he said.
Helping refugees find jobs is a top priority for resettlement agencies, which provide financial assistance and case management support for up to 90 days after arrival and limited case management and employment services for up to 60 months.
“All the refugees that are coming have permission to work as soon as they are able,” Osman said. “Some have English skills, some don’t. If they have the necessary language skills, they can at least start entry-level work within 90 days.”
One refugee who is eager to get to work is Ahmed, a recent arrival from Somalia who also declined to give his last name. Ahmed, 58, attended a cultural orientation session Wednesday at the JCA. Through an interpreter, Ahmed said he has been reunited with his wife and six children after being separated from them for 21 years.
He also said he wants to be a good citizen and a taxpayer.
“I’m so grateful to be here,” he said. “My dream is to settle in and get work at a job in my skill range. I am a welder and I would like to work in the same industry.”
Staff Photographer Brianna Soukup contributed to this report.
“America is a beautiful country and has a lot to offer the world and the people who come here, and so does Portland,” said Ali, who came to the United States from Ghana more than two decades ago.
Portland’s five mayoral candidates may be more aligned on this issue than any other. They all fundamentally see asylum seekers as an asset to the city, and they all want to see the wait time before they can work made much shorter. They all also feel a little bit helpless.
For years, Portland has welcomed these immigrants, who often undertake dangerous journeys to get here and then go through an arduous, sometimes yearslong process to get visas and work authorization.
. . . .
Zarro said that if it should turn out to be too big a legal risk to offer asylum seekers paid work before they got federal work authorization, he would like to build a more robust job training program so they would be ready to start work in local businesses as soon as their work authorization comes though.
“We have people who are coming here to better their lives and to better their communities. Maine stands to benefit significantly,” he said.
All the candidates also are keenly aware that Portland is in need of more young workers.
“We’re an aging state without enough people to fill the workforce,” Costa said.
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Austin Kocher, Ph.D. Research Assistant Professor TRAC-Syracuse PHOTO: Syracuse U.
Abstract of Austin Kocher, PhD’s article “Welcoming the stranger in Trump’s America: Notes on the everyday processes of constructing and enduring sanctuary:”
Geographers have begun to explore the concept of ‘immigrant welcome’ as a framework for understanding the tension between spontaneous social support for immigrants and refugees and their subsequent restriction and criminalization by states. Overlooked in the emerging discourse on immigrant welcome is the rich literature in feminist geography that views the everyday practices of endurance, care and social reproduction as essential to, but often hidden within, more traditional, political and economic analyses of power. By focusing on the everyday practices of welcome within sanctuary church activism, I argue for more attention to the energy-intense work that is often excluded from official media and academic accounts, yet which is essential to understanding what makes welcome function or fail. I draw upon one in-depth case study of a sanctuary church in Ohio, where a woman has been living for a year and a half in public defiance of her deportation order. In addition to contextualizing this specific case within the broader policy and immigrant rights landscape, I focus on the spatial, material and relational processes that participants implemented to construct a ‘welcoming’ environment as well as observe the ways in which welcome fails to live up to its imagined potential. The case study provides important grounded insights into the material, relational and emotional processes of enduring sanctuary as a form of resistance to the US deportation regime and enduring sanctuary itself as an intensive socio-spatial form of existence.
Read more about each of these inspiring efforts at the respective links above.
Compare what could be if folks put aside hate and worked together to solve human problems with the pathetic, totally selfish, inept, inane, yet existentially dangerous, “Clown Show” 🤡 in the GOP House Conference egged on by their “leader” — congenital liar, bully, insurrectionist buffoon, and criminal defendant Donald Trump.🤮
What’s missing is more dynamic, courageous, truth-based national leadership on immigration and human rights issues from Dems (although, to be fair, the bipartisan Maine delegation — and many Maine Republicans — appear to “get it”)! But, fortunately, that void hasn’t stopped members of the NDPA from “soldiering on” for the commn good and a better America!
A life saved is a life saved! Sometimes, we just have to focus on the daily victories we can achieve!
Beth Barkley thought she was attending a ceremony for International Day of the Girl on Wednesday. The high school English teacher stood in the library at Cardozo Education Campus as the city’s mayor explained the importance of attaining “educational equity across genders.”
But, in a ceremony focused mostly on her, Barkley learned that she had been named D.C’s 2024 Teacher of the Year.
“This year we have a teacher of the year who serves as a role model not only for her students, but for other teachers across the District,” said D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D). “She has gone above and beyond her normal teaching duties to uplift student voices and inspire her students.”
Each year, educators across the city vie for the top honor, which comes with a $7,500 check and the chance to compete for National Teacher of the Year in a contest run by the Council of Chief State School Officers. Barkley, who teaches English and other classes to students who are new to the United States, was met with applause and sparkling pompoms wielded by students.
“This is a huge honor,” she said to the room of teachers, staff members and several of her students. “I have students that are changemakers. My students are leaders. … This is really for and because of them.”
Children catch bubbles Aug. 17 at a free barbecue organized by the Lewiston School Department to mark the end of its summer outreach program that provided numerous services for students and families. It also gave the School Department the opportunity to connect with students and parents, hand out schedules, sign students up and make connections before the start of school. Russ Dillingham/Sun Journal
With just a week to go before the first day of school, staff from Freeport schools headed to a local hotel to meet their newest students.
The 67 students, all from asylum-seeking families, had just moved to the Casco Bay Inn from the Portland Expo, where nearly 200 people had been staying in the temporary shelter before it closed. The families all decided to send their kids to Freeport schools instead of busing them to Portland to attend classes, said Jean Skorapa, superintendent of Regional School Unit 5 in Freeport.
“Our first goal is to get them enrolled and in a class,” she said. “That piece is done. Now we look at how to best serve their needs.”
The scramble to welcome new students and connect them with the services they need is becoming a familiar challenge in Freeport and other Maine communities where the families are settling.
For the past several years, school districts in southern Maine have had to make quick adjustments as they enroll dozens of students from asylum-seeking families, many of whom come from African countries and speak little or no English when they arrive. To meet their needs, they’ve had to hire more teachers for English learners, add social workers and support staff, and make sure translation services are in place to communicate with parents.
“For us, this is a new experience,” said Steve Bussiere, assistant superintendent in Sanford, where 38 students enrolled in May when their families arrived in the city. There will be 55 students from asylum-seeking families in Sanford schools this year, he said.
School leaders say the work can be challenging and puts a significant strain on resources, but it’s also a privilege to welcome new students into the community.
“We’ve had new Mainers with us over the past year and a half. They’ve made us a more well-rounded, diverse district,” Skorapa said. “They’re a wonderful addition to our school community and we welcome them with open arms and are thrilled to have them with us.”
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Read the complete article at the link.
Congrats to educational and political leaders in Maine for making the system work as it should! Immigrants becoming Mainers and settling down there is making a positive difference! Seems like the Feds, not to mention other states and localities, could use some of this same positive approach and enlightened, courageous leadership.
The Portland’s Press Herald’s Editorial Board echoed this view in an editorial published yesterday:
Our View: To invest in immigrant pupils is to invest in the future
A big effort by Maine schools to accommodate English language learners will have a big return for their communities.
A new experience.
That’s how Steve Bussiere, assistant superintendent in Sanford, described Sanford schools’ addressing the needs of 55 new students from asylum-seeking families this coming school year.
It’s a new experience for the kids, too, and thanks to thoughtful, time-intensive efforts by Bussiere’s colleagues and other schools around Maine – hiring additional teachers to teach English to English language learners, hiring more social workers and more support staff and refining translation services so that school staff and administrators can communicate with new pupils’ parents – it can be a good experience.
The focus on multilingual learners requires a serious effort and will make a serious difference to our state.
Thankfully, the Maine Legislature expressed its understanding of that fact in July, including $3.5 million for the support of English language learners – via the English Language Learner Hardship Fund – in the special supplemental budget.
This valuable funding becomes available to schools at the end of October. Portland’s public schools will receive more than $784,000; Lewiston, $631,000; South Portland, $302,000; Biddeford, $192,000, Brunswick, $150,000; Saco, $110,000; Freeport, $109,000, and Westbrook, $93,000.
In Freeport, arrangements have been made for 67 new students who recently moved with their families from the temporary shelter at the Portland Expo to the Casco Bay Inn. Jean Skorapa, superintendent of Regional School Unit 5 in Freeport, struck a crystal-clear and exceedingly warm note earlier this week – sounding like many other Maine educators on the same subject in recent years.
“We’ve had new Mainers with us over the past year and a half. They’ve made us a more well-rounded, diverse district,” Skorapa said. “They’re a wonderful addition to our school community and we welcome them with open arms and are thrilled to have them with us.”
In other school districts, efforts such as these have been up and running for a while. According to our reporting Monday, Lewiston schools work with students who speak a total of 38 languages. The school district there has a multilingual center that works with families and offers vital help with paperwork and orientation. Portland has been supporting new students from asylum-seeking families for years; in July, we reported that one-third of the district’s roughly 6,500 students were multilingual.
The numbers make it clear as day: The downside risk of underfunding English language learning is now way too steep for these parts of Maine to run. Yes, there’s a moral imperative here; it is also a legal requirement of our public schools. We trust that, on the strength of existing work in this realm, the practice of funding multilingual learning education becomes just that – a practice. Rep. Michael Brennan, D-Portland, House chair of the Education and Cultural Affairs Committee, expressed his commitment to continue funding the program “in the coming years.”
Appropriate investment in these students fosters a sense of belonging, reduces the risk of pernicious, hard-to-close learning gaps and, as students find themselves better and better equipped to support their families locally, has wide-reaching benefits. To say nothing of what it means for school graduates of the future. On top of that, successive studies have shown that the teaching techniques that assist English language learners assist all students.
That’s not to say there won’t be hurdles to overcome. In recent days, tense and ugly anti-immigrant rallies in Manhattan, Staten Island and Woburn, Massachusetts, laid bare the style of racist, isolationist thinking that continues to oppose even the most commonsense steps towards integration and inclusion.
Our schools need more support, and they need it to be specific. The calls for increased attention to the new members of the student body need to be sustained in their volume and their clarity. It makes sense, at every level, to seize this opportunity to enrich our classrooms and our communities.
Kids are our future. It’s definitely worth the effort!
A Helping Hand.jpg Image depicts a child coming to the aid of another in need. Once we have climbed it is essential for the sake of humanity that we help others do the same. It is knowing that we all could use, and have used, a helping hand. Safiyyah Scoggins – PVisions1111 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 White Nationalist Xenophobes like Trump, DeSantis, Abbott, & Ducey have abandoned Traditional Judeo-Christian values in favor of neo-fascism. But, the rest of us should hold true to our “better angels.”
Commentary: During turbulent times, Maine invests in its people
During the latest legislative session, much was done to ensure that prosperity is within reach of all Maine citizens and residents.
BY LUISA S. DEPREZ AND LISA MILLER SPECIAL TO THE PRESS HERALD
The times in which we live are, and have been, difficult. Turbulence confronts us at every corner, upon every turn. Around us things are constantly changing – economically, politically, medically, socially. There is too often too little upon which to rely to attain and maintain a degree of certainty in one’s life.
As we emerge from the COVID pandemic, we find its effects lingering in large workforce and societal shifts: lost jobs, lost day care, essential care workers leaving the workforce, older workers retiring early or moving into part-time work to stay afloat, small businesses closing, women leaving jobs to care for young, sick and elderly family members, people moving to and from communities, and rents and housing prices skyrocketing. These effects persist; regaining some degree of stability will take time.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Luisa S. Deprez is professor emerita of sociology and the Edmund S. Muskie School of Public Service at the University of Southern Maine. Lisa Miller is a former legislator who served on the Health and Human Services and Appropriations and Financial Affairs committees. They are members of the Maine chapter of the national Scholars Strategy Network, which brings together scholars across the country to address public challenges and their policy implications.
Yet we now see a glimmer of hope, a light at the end of the tunnel. Definite improvements in the overall economy are emerging: unemployment rates are at a historic low, housing starts are increasing, the manufacturing sector has seen an increase in orders for the past few months, consumer confidence has risen dramatically, and inflationary pressures are subsiding.
Maine’s policymakers are now tasked with ensuring that Mainers share in that rebound – that families and communities can build new pathways to prosperity and well-being. Enhancing and promoting prosperity must be the primary concern of policymakers and elected officials.
Classic views of “prosperity” usually refer to economic success and building wealth. But broader definitions of prosperity include becoming or remaining strong and healthy and flourishing. In other words, thriving. Yes, individual initiative and responsibility is critical to building prosperity, but the assurance to do so is rarely achievable in the absence of government support. Nor is success sustained without such support.
Policymakers and state officials know this well, as seen in recent bills and initiatives that emerged from this past legislative session:
• Workers can take paid family leave to combat illness or care for a loved one.
• New child tax credits provide additional support to low-income families.
• Older Mainers will receive financial support for medical costs and property tax bills.
• Child care gets a boost through improved wages and broader subsidies.
• More affordable-housing initiatives were funded.
• A new business incentive program was created.
• A workforce training tax credit will help employers grow the skill level of Maine workers.
• Additional support for emergency food and shelter was funded.
These achievements should be celebrated as they will certainly contribute greatly to the rebound necessary for individuals, communities, and the state to regain some of the losses.
But there was much left undone to build prosperity for everyone. The Wabanaki nations are still denied rights and protections; immigrants continue to be denied access to MaineCare; health care costs are even more burdensome for an increasing number of Mainers; pay disparities by gender and race remain; agricultural workers continue to be exempt from basic labor laws; workers with low salaries remain ineligible for overtime, and corporate loopholes and tax-avoidance prevail, leaving communities to carry the load for citizen and community investments.
During this legislative session, many organizations and individuals lobbied tirelessly to ensure that prosperity is within reach of all Maine citizens and residents. Both Gov. Janet Mills and the Legislature responded with investment of tax dollars to help everyday people stay in their jobs or seek new ones, become healthier, and be more productive.
Political and moral philosopher J.S. Mill would argue that “societies tend to flourish when individuals have a wide scope for directing the course of their own lives.” Many of the bills passed by the Maine Legislature do just that. But more needs to come. We are not done.
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Governance for the common good is what it’s supposed to be all about!
Maine Voices: No walls are high enough to keep out people desperate for a safe place
Instead of wasting precious time trying to shut today’s refugees out, we can prepare for them in a way that could benefit all of us.
BY DAN KOLBERTSPECIAL TO THE PRESS HERALD
A young girl jumps rope inside the Portland Expo, home to several hundred asylum seekers. Much of the world’s population will be on the move, trying to survive, as sea levels and temperatures rise. Brianna Soukup/Staff Photographer
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dan Kolbert has lived in Portland’s West End since 1988. He is a building contractor and an author.
In Central America, where corn was first cultivated over millennia and is still the home of many important seed bases, a drought is entering its second decade. It is possible that agriculture will soon be impossible there, along with many parts of Africa and Asia. Rising sea levels will mean many low-lying islands will disappear, and coastal cities will be forced to retreat or be swamped.
All of this means that much of the world’s population will be on the move, searching for a way to survive. Estimates top 1 billion people by mid-century. Here in Portland, we are already seeing previously unimaginable levels of immigration, with hundreds of recent arrivals sleeping in a sports arena, and housing shortages and rising rents forcing many new and established Mainers into the many homeless encampments dotting the city. And we are just getting started.
There are no walls high enough to keep out people desperate for a safe place for them and their families. So we can either spend the precious time that remains on a futile, and cruel, effort to keep people out, or we can prepare for them in a humane way that could have enormous benefits for all of us, new and old Mainers alike.
The first step is housing, and plenty of it. Multi-family housing in Maine has undergone a sea change in recent years. We can build healthy, functional housing with very low heating and cooling loads for much less than all the mediocre, drafty single-family houses we currently build. Greater Portland is home to much of the most expensive real estate in the state, but imagine if we could have planned development surrounding some other cities, like Bangor or Lewiston. Or even smaller population centers like Skowhegan, Farmington or Rumford. We are a sparsely populated state with an aging population – immigrant families could revitalize many parts of the state. In addition to the workforce we desperately need, they would bring children to boost shrinking school enrollments, new cultures and foods, and new outlooks. And of course it would be a big boost to the economies of parts of the state that haven’t always shared in the boom.
Next is finding work for people. We have already seen many immigrants going into health care, and our aging U.S.-born population will only need more services. Some Africans have taken up farming, helping revitalize that economy. In southern Maine, Central Americans are increasingly showing up in construction, where a 20-year-long labor shortage has created enormous demand. And many people show up with important professional skills, needing only some help with language and certifications to resume careers as doctors, engineers, teachers, administrators, etc. Of course we need to reform the work rules, to allow people to find employment much sooner.
It was disappointing to read of the events in Unity. Imagine using this existing, underutilized infrastructure for temporary housing! How many of these new arrivals might see central Maine as a safe, friendly place to establish their new lives?
I am a new Mainer myself, having only lived here for 35 of my 59 years, but my kids can trace their lineage in Maine and Quebec for over 300 years on their mother’s side. As the son of a refugee from the Nazis, I am perhaps more sympathetic to the plight of today’s refugees than others are, but I hope that we can see this as an opportunity to invest in our state, and to demonstrate basic humanity toward people who just want to live.
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You can listen to the audio version at the link!
Dan definitely has the right idea! Seems like what’s needed is 1) leadership, 2) organization to match people and skills to local needs, and 3) some “seed money” to get an affordable housing program going.
Haley Sweatband Edwards Nation Editor Time Magazine PHOTO: Pulitzer
The U.S., though founded by Europeans fleeing persecution, now largely reflects the will of its Chief Executive: subverting decades of asylum law and imposing a policy that separated migrant toddlers from their parents and placed children behind cyclone fencing. Trump floated the possibility of revoking birthright citizenship, characterized migrants as “stone cold criminals” and ordered 5,800 active-duty U.S. troops to reinforce the southern border. Italy refused to allow ships carrying rescued migrants to dock at its ports. Hungary passed laws to criminalize the act of helping undocumented people. Anti-immigrant leaders saw their political power grow in the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Sweden, Germany, Finland, Italy and Hungary, and migration continued to be a factor in the Brexit debate in the U.K.
These political reactions fail to grapple with a hard truth: in the long run, new migration is nearly always a boon to host countries. In acting as entrepreneurs and innovators, and by providing inexpensive labor, immigrants overwhelmingly repay in long-term economic contributions what they use in short-term social services, studies show. But to maximize that future good, governments must act -rationally to establish humane policies and adequately fund an immigration system equipped to handle an influx of newcomers.
The unmitigated human rights and racial justice disasters of the Trump years and the troubling difficulty the Biden Administration has had getting beyond that debacle reinforce the accuracy and inevitability of what Haley and Dan are saying.
The future will belong to those nations that learn how to welcome migrants, treat them humanely, screen and accept many of them in a timely, orderly, minimally bureaucratic manner, and utilize their energy, determination, ingenuity, and life skills to build a better future for all.
The open question is whether the U.S. will be among those successful future powers. Or, will the cruel, unrealistic, racially-driven, restrictionist nativism of the GOP right drive us to continue to waste inordinate resources fruitlessly trying to deny, deter, and prevent the inevitable, thus ultimately forcing us down to second or even third tier status. TBD.
In the meantime, here’s another great article from the PPH about how Mainers have led the fight to protect individual rights and freedoms while advancing American progressive values in contravention of the authoritarian neo-fascism sweeping over some so-called “red” states.
Maine has tacked left as nation lurches right in culture wars
Embracing the state motto – ‘I lead’ – Maine lawmakers led in a different direction, safeguarding and expanding access to abortion and gender-affirming care.
Ron DeSantis Dave Grandlund PoliticalCartoons.com Republished under license Ron DeSantis and Donald Trump are “campaigning” on an agenda of racism, hate, and White Supremacist grievance not seen since the late Gov. George Wallace. Yet, mainstream media has largely “normalized” that which would have been unacceptable and unthinkable only a few years ago!
Maine Voices: ‘Woke’ should not be a four-letter word
Being aware of how we have treated and still treat other people in our society is so important to our society’s evolving that it should be honored, not vilified.
It is frustrating to see the continuous redefining of words and terms by the extremist conservative element in our society and government. One of these terms is “woke.” According to Merriam-Webster, the definition is “aware of and actively attentive to important societal facts and issues.” I will add in the qualification as well: “especially issues of ABOUT THE AUTHOR
For my entire life I have strived to embrace this philosophy, trying to listen to and understand other opinions, beliefs and religions, whether they agreed with mine or not, understanding that one cannot fully comprehend a point of view without appreciating the counterpoint. This certainly requires personal evolution and maturity. Being aware of the true history of our country, of how we have treated and still treat other people in our society, is so important to our society’s evolving that it should be honored, not vilified.
The term “woke” has now been unjustly transformed into a negative term. Let that sink in: Attention to important facts and issues, the truth, is something to avoid and discredit. Somehow, this makes sense to a significant number of our political leaders and fellow Americans. It appears that what is most troubling for those who would see “woke” as a vile four-letter word is the qualification above, that it applies to “issues of racial and social justice.”
One of the tag lines for objecting to this thought is that it may cause someone to feel uncomfortable or criticized by being confronted with these historical facts. Personally, I strongly desire to know the truth. I am delighted – admittedly, shocked sometimes – by learning about the history we were never taught, which was suppressed to a large extent for so many years by those who perpetrated many injustices. The historical truth has never made me feel bad about myself. In fact, it is enlightening. It expands my understanding of how and why we have come to this place in our evolution. It shows me how to be better and more empathetic, and it suggests the path forward.
I believe I do understand why this can be so threatening and discomforting to so many. I believe that the truth is like a mirror to them. They see their own racist views, their distrust of anyone they perceive as being “different” as a significant threat. I feel so sad for them, since in my life, through being open to other races, ethnicities, religions and thoughts, I have learned so much and have been blessed with a much more beautiful world, life and friends.
It is extremely troubling to see elected officials, the leaders of our political parties, and fellow Americans embracing and endorsing this philosophy of derision, division and hateful rhetoric that has its roots in the cesspool of white supremacist thought. They are leading us into the abyss of an authoritarian kakistocracy, or government by the worst of us. We must all, every rational one of us, stand and reject this thinking. We must only, and always, embrace truth, the actual facts. These people should not be leading our wonderful country.
Don Bessey is an Air Force veteran of the Vietnam War and a resident of Old Orchard Beach.
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Well said, Don! Thanks for speaking out so forcefully!
Don’s views echo several previous postings from Courtside:
Walter Rhein: “When people say they are ‘anti-woke,’ I interrupt them and say ‘You mean ‘anti-black.’ They become enraged and act like they’re the victims (like racists always do).”https://wp.me/p8eeJm-8tJ
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As [Villanova University President] Father [Peter M.] Donohue said at yesterday’s celebration, “‘Woke’ means social justice!” https://wp.me/p8eeJm-8vF
Joshua Mutshaila slept in a shelter when he first arrived in Portland. Now he is studying political science at the University of Southern Maine.
Claudette Ndayininahaze could only get a cleaning job during her first years in Maine, despite extensive work experience and a degree in business administration. Now she runs a nonprofit to try to smooth the transition for other immigrant women and families.
Apphia Kamanda was one of the first students at Common Threads of Maine, a nonprofit that teaches skills needed for textile jobs. Now she leads the sewing school and teaches classes in multiple languages.
David Ngandu worked as a doctor in the Democratic Republic of Congo. He’s trying to be one again here.
They are among thousands of African immigrants who – often at great personal risk – fled perils they knew all too well at home for an uncertain future in this country. They settled in Maine, a state with a population that is 94% white and the nation’s oldest, and where businesses are increasingly struggling to find workers. They got multiple jobs, but their skills were still underutilized. Slowly and painstakingly, they built new lives, while often looking for ways to help others who came after them. In turn, they brought new life to their communities.
The Press Herald talked to a diverse group of people who came here from Africa about how they see their futures in Maine – and Maine’s future with more immigrants in it.
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Read Megan’s complete article (last in a series) at the link.
Immigrants are a key part of Maine’s present and America’s future. There is a really great, positive, uplifting story out here to be told. Too bad that Biden Administration has such little interest in leading, promoting, and leveraging immigrant (asylum seeker) success and contributions. Huge “missed opportunity” for Dems!
On April 4, 1968, I was a senior in high school when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered in Memphis, Tennessee. That weekend I had been attending a planning meeting in Richmond, Virginia, for mobilizing white teens from suburban churches to serve in inner-city projects in the District of Columbia and Baltimore.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Irv Williams is a native of Baltimore, with family roots in the Northern Neck of Virginia. He moved to Maine in 1973 and is a resident of Peaks Island.
Driving home on Sunday afternoon I arrived at the Baltimore city line, about five miles from my house, to find National Guard troops and tanks blocking off access to the city. I was allowed to pass only on the condition that I drive directly home.
Today I know the real reason I was allowed to pass by those armed soldiers was that my face was white, not Black. Dr. King was only 39 years old when he was murdered.
William Page was only 25 years of age when he was lynched in August 1917 in Lilian, Virginia. My mother would have been a toddler sleeping in her crib at home, just a mile away from the schoolyard in which he was hanged. Newspaper reports state that a mob of about 500 men assembled to commit the murder.
William Page would be the last Black man to be lynched in my mother’s home county of Northumberland, but the lynchings would continue on for another seven years, claiming the lives of nine additional Black men across Virginia.
I am now just a bit older than my mother was when she died. At 72, I look back over a lifetime of witnessing racial injustice through the segregation of schools and other public and private facilities. The false doctrine of “separate but equal” was then in full force throughout Virginia, where both of my parents were born and raised.
I carry childhood memories of seeing “White” and “Colored” water fountains in the county courthouse. Of visiting the family doctor whose small brick office behind his house had separate waiting rooms. Hearing my grandmother talk about “the colored” schools that a neighboring county closed for five full years rather than integrate, meanwhile taking public funds to open white academies. Knowing that nearby was a “colored beach” that was a small sliver of sand allotted to Black children. And knowing that there would never be any Black worshippers or preachers at the church revival meetings where my grandmother played piano.
Looking back at all of those memories, I know full well that the privilege to pass by those National Guard tanks in 1968 had come at the expense of others, sometimes in deadly ways.
In his 1964 book “Why We Can’t Wait,” Dr. King wrote: “Armies of officials are clothed in uniform, invested with authority, armed with the instruments of violence and death and conditioned to believe that they can intimidate, maim or kill Negroes with the same recklessness that once motivated the slaveowner.”
Now, nearly 60 years later, we see that Dr. King is still being proven right with the brutal beating death of Tyre Nichols in Memphis. It wasn’t a rope like they used on William Page, or a bullet like the one that felled Dr. King, but the stun gun, pepper spray, fists and boots of police officers who have been charged with murder in an incident that equals the terror of the August night when 500 men watched William Page die.
Must we wait for another hundred years to pass for this senseless killing to stop? The simple answer is, no, we can’t wait.
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The work of achieving due process and equal justice for all persons in America, as required by our Constitution, remains urgent and unfinished!
Indeed, under the “New Jim Crow” GOP and it’s noxious, intellectually dishonest, morally challenged “leaders,” our nation has actually regressed from some of the key achievements that Dr. King championed.
James “Jim” Crow Symbol of American Racism. If YOU don’t share the GOP White Nationalist insurrectionist “vision” of an American wracked with hate, exclusion, dehumanization, inequality, bias, bogus myths, and return to a “whitewashed history that never was,” YOU must stand against the “21st Century Jim Crow Mob” that seeks to seize control over YOUR country.
It’s particularly critical for the next generations to decide whether they want to live in a better, fairer, more tolerant world, or be forever captive in a White Supremacist, misogynist, fearful past, beholden to a “whitewashed” version of history that never was!
Federal and state lawmakers are renewing efforts to shorten the amount of time asylum seekers must wait before they can work and become self-sufficient.
Local officials in communities such as Portland, a destination for waves of people seeking asylum, have called on federal officials for years to reduce the waiting period for work permits, which is a minimum of six months and often much longer. They argue speeding up the process is a way to address workforce shortages as well as reduce the costs of providing financial assistance to asylum seekers who aren’t allowed to support themselves.
But every effort dating to at least to 2015, when Sen. Angus King of Maine submitted a bill to shorten the wait period to 30 days, has failed to gain traction in Congress because the appeals have been caught up in partisan and regional conflicts over immigration reform and border security.
Republican Sen. Susan Collins and Rep. Chellie Pingree, D-1st District, have proposed similar bills in recent years. And both are doing so again this session, while King, an independent, is signing on as a co-sponsor.
. . . .
Despite national polarization over the issue, calls for allowing asylum seekers to work and become self-sufficient are widely supported in Maine by Republicans, Democrats and independents. The fact that Maine has more jobs available than there are workers to fill them is a key reason for the broad support.
Even former Gov. Paul LePage, who opposed efforts to help asylum seekers during his eight years in office, revised his position during the gubernatorial campaign last fall, saying at a debate in Portland that “if asylum seekers are here, and (President) Joe Biden is not going to enforce federal law on immigration … I want to put them to work.”
Collins started pushing for the reform in 2019 and announced on Friday that she introduced a bill with Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, an Arizona independent and former Democrat, that would reduce the waiting period from six months to 30 days for asylum seekers who have gone through preliminary screening. And Pingree plans to reintroduce her bill in the House in the coming weeks.
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Read the full article at the link.
Gosh, when even former GOP right-wing Gov. Paul LePage is on board, seems like it should be a “no-brainer” for Congress. But, that isn’t the way things work (or don’t) on the Hill these days.
As to requesting a “waiver” of the current 180 day statutory “lock out” provision, there currently doesn’t appear to be any process for that. The statute does state that:“An applicant for asylum is not entitled to employment authorization, but such authorization may be provided under regulation by the Attorney General.”
Therefore, it appears that the Biden Administration could establish a waiver process by regulation if it chose to. I’m not aware of any plans by the Administration to propose such a regulation.
The Administration has addressed immediate work authorization in their recently announced parole program for certain nationals of Venezuela, Nicaragua, Haiti, and Cuba. Individuals approved for this program abroad will be “paroled” into the U.S. for two years with work authorization.
The relief for states like Maine under this parole program is limited, because 1) only nationals of the four specified countries can apply; 2) the program applies prospectively only; 3) it’s uncertain what will happen to parolees after two years (one can imagine that any future GOP Administration would terminate the program, given that GOP politicos are now suing to halt it); and 4) the is no clear path to a green card for these paroled individuals.
To date, the Administration has not “leveraged” other potential legal mechanisms to expedite employment authorization.
One option would be to greatly expand use of the new regulatory authority for USCIS Asylum Officers to grant asylum status to applicants arriving at the border. This would result in immediate admission in an orderly, work-authorized asylum legal status and avoid the current 2.1 million Immigration Court backlog. It also would trigger a statutory process for asylees to apply for green cards after being physically present in the U.S. for one year. Additionally, granting asylum expeditiously at the AO would be available to all asylum applicants, not just those from the four specified nations.
Another option, that could be used in conjunction with the first one, would be to ramp up much more robust and inclusive refugee programs outside the U.S. This could be in the countries in crisis or in third countries. Like asylees, refugees enter the U.S. in a legal status that authorizes them to work immediately. Like asylees, they have access to a statutory provision for obtaining a green card after being physically present in the U.S. for one year. Refugee status is potentially available to refugees from any country where the President finds a “special humanitarian concern” following “consultation” with Congress.
Unfortunately, in my view, the Biden Administration has shown little interest in, nor aptitude for, maximizing the mechanisms available to legally admit refugees, from abroad or as asylum seekers. As pointed out above, doing so also would address the issues in Maine and other states who have welcomed refugees and asylum seekers.
Instead, the Administration has relied on a mishmash of:
Trump-era, nativist, deterrence policies, many with questionable legal basis;
A series of ever-changing, ad hoc, subjective, discretionary “exceptions” to those policies administered without any transparency or accountability;
An ad hoc, nationality specific, parole program divorced from the statutory “refugee” definition, having a much more tenuous legal basis than using the established refugee and asylum admission provisions now in the INA, and certainly leaving the future fate of those “paroled” thereunder “up in the air” and subject to maximum political gamesmanship.
The sum total is to leave too many refugees and asylees, and the individuals and communities in the U.S. trying to help them, “dangling in the air” without the necessary support and humanitarian leadership from the Administration.
Caught in the crossfire: Mainers aid in medical rescue of Afghan boy
Fawad, then 6 years old, was hit by a bullet as his family tried to flee Afghanistan during the U.S. withdrawal. A network that included Maine residents came together to bring him to safety.
Zohra would later recall that she felt the wind of a bullet graze her skin as she ran toward the airport gate, clutching her oldest child in her arms.
Only when she sat her son on a chair inside Kabul’s airport did she realize the bullet had torn through Fawad’s face. He was just 6 years old. Zohra fainted.
Fawad was caught in the crossfire in August 2021, as thousands tried to flee Afghanistan in the final days of U.S. withdrawal.
In the year that followed, a network of Americans, including family members in Portland and their immigration lawyer in Damariscotta, would fight to get Fawad, his parents and his younger brother to the U.S. for reconstructive surgery.
Fawad’s condition was too severe for any hospital in Afghanistan, where he received only basic medical care and faced a lifetime of chronic illness and persecution because of his injuries and disability.
Last October, Fawad and his family arrived at Nemours Children’s Hospital in Wilmington, Delaware, where he has successfully undergone two reconstructive surgeries and will need several more. The team overseeing Fawad’s care includes an Army communications specialist with expertise in getting people out of life-threatening situations and a world-renowned surgeon who specializes in facial reconstruction after bullet and bomb blasts.
17-year-old Marwa listens to her mother speak about her cousin Fawad, who was shot while trying to evacuate Afghanistan. Shawn Patrick Ouellette/Staff Photographer
Foremost among the Mainers who worked to rescue Fawad is his cousin Marwa, a senior at Casco Bay High School. Her calm, determination and skill as an interpreter and advocate for her family are credited with making Fawad’s life-changing surgeries possible.
“Marwa was on speed dial for us,” said Jennifer Atkinson, the Damariscotta attorney. “The whole time I’m dealing with this amazing 16-year-old girl who is a lifeline for this traumatized family in Afghanistan.”
Now 17, Marwa spoke no English when she arrived in the U.S. six years ago. The Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram decided not to use family members’ last names because of their fear that the Taliban could punish or even kill relatives still in Afghanistan.
During and immediately after the U.S. evacuation, Atkinson worked to help more than 20 families try to get out of Afghanistan. Almost all of the 160 or so people had ties to Afghans now living in Maine.
“The response to helping Fawad was very different,” she said. “Doors opened for him that weren’t opening for other Afghans, probably because he was a child who suffered this awful trauma and survived. But also because he had this amazing cousin in the States, Marwa, to help us advocate for him.”
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Read the complete article at the link.
Lots of heroes here, starting with 17-year-old Marwa who was determined to save her brother!
Jennifer Atkinson, Esquire Damariscotta, ME PHOTO: Law firm
Also, to crib from my friend Dan Kowalski over at LexisNexis, “hats way way off” to life-saving NDPA superstar lawyer Jennifer Atkinson of Damariscotta, Maine. I have previously featured Jennifer’s humanitarian exploits. https://wp.me/p8eeJm-70K
Additionally, I appreciate PPH staff writer Kelly Bouchard for her outstanding coverage of then “human side” of refugee resettlement in Maine.
The Maine Council of Churches and The BTS Center are hosting an online reading of the “Letter from Birmingham Jail” at 12:15 p.m. on Jan. 16.
The event is free and open to the public. Those who register to attend are invited to donate to the Maine Initiatives Outdoor Equity Fund, which will make grants to organizations led by people of color that work to improve outdoor equity and access to nature-based learning. More information about the fund is available at maineinitiatives.org.
Those interested in attending can register at thebtscenter.org/committed-to-listen-mlk-day-2023. The reading will also be streamed on the Facebook pages for the Maine Council of Churches and The BTS Center.
On April 16, 1963, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote a letter.
He had been arrested four days earlier for disobeying a court order that prohibited protests in Birmingham, Alabama. From his jail cell, he wrote to eight white religious leaders who had publicly condemned ongoing civil rights demonstrations. He decried the silence of white moderates and argued that racial violence demanded a more urgent response than those clergymen had counseled.
Sixty years have passed, but that message still rings true for the Rev. Allen Ewing-Merrill. He is the executive director of The BTS Center, a Maine nonprofit that offers theological programs. He rereads the letter every year on Martin Luther King Jr. Day and reflects on its call to be more courageous than cautious.
“We like to think that racism is that awful thing that other people do, the blatant white supremacist brand of violence,” he said. “But in the letter, Dr. King really pulls out the nuance of that and reminds us that racism is the violence of silence.”
This year, the Maine Council of Churches and The BTS Center chose the Letter from Birmingham Jail for an online reading to mark the holiday. King’s words will be read by eight people from Maine’s faith and social justice communities. For the Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram, four of the readers reflected on passages they will recite during Monday’s event and the letter’s relevance to the modern world. Those passages and the readers’ comments are shown here.
Professor Philip G. Schrag Georgetown Law Co-Director, CALS Asylum ClinicProfessor from Practice; Director, Human Rights Institute; Director, Center for Applied Legal Studies PHOTO: GeorgetownLawProfessor Jaya Ramji-Nogales, Associate Dean for Academic Affairs I. Herman Stern Research Professor Temple Law PHOTO: Temple Law
Here’s the abstract of the latest “practical scholarship” from the RR3:Professors Phil Schrag, Andy Schoenholtz, and Jaya Ramji-Nogles, “The New Border Asylum Adjudication System: Speed, Fairness, and the Representation Problem,” which will appear in the Howard Law Journal:
The New Border Asylum Adjudication System: Speed, Fairness, and the Representation Problem
In 2022, the Biden administration implemented what the New York Times has described as potentially “the most sweeping change to the asylum process in a quarter-century.” This new adjudication system creates unrealistically short deadlines for asylum seekers who arrive over the southern border, the vast majority of whom are people of color. Rather than providing a fair opportunity for those seeking safety to explain and corroborate their persecution claims, the new system imposes unreasonably speedy time frames to enable swift adjudications. Asylum seekers must obtain representation very quickly even though the government does not fund counsel and not enough lawyers offer free or low-cost representation. Moreover, the immigration statute requires that asylum seekers must corroborate their claims with extrinsic evidence if the adjudicator thinks that such evidence is available – a nearly impossible task in the time frames provided by the new rule. As a result, the new rule clashes with every state’s Rules of Professional Conduct 1.1 and 1.3, imposing duties of competence and diligence in every case that a lawyer undertakes. It will be extremely difficult for lawyers to provide competent and diligent representation under the new, excessively short deadlines. For immigration lawyers, the new rule exacerbates a challenge that they share with public defenders and other lawyers working within dysfunctional systems: how to provide even the most basic level of procedural due process for their clients, most of whom are people of color.
This article begins by describing the regular asylum process. It then summarizes the history of expedited removal, a screening system that limits access to that process for asylum seekers who arrive at the southern U.S. border without visas. It then explains and assesses the Biden administration’s first and second versions of the new asylum rule, highlighting the major flaw that will make the current version an unfairly formidable hurdle for asylum seekers subject to it. The article concludes by setting out a way for the Biden administration to create a more fair, accurate and efficient border asylum adjudication system and ensure that the U.S. can comply with domestic and international refugee law.
Keywords: Asylum, Asylum adjudication, Asylum process, Expedited removal, Immigration, Legal ethics, Due process, Administrative law
JEL Classification: K39
Suggested Citation:
Schrag, Philip G. and Ramji-Nogales, Jaya and Schoenholtz, Andrew I., The New Border Asylum Adjudication System: Speed, Fairness, and the Representation Problem (September 29, 2022). Howard Law Journal, Vol. 66, No. 3, 2023, Available at SSRN: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4233655
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New regulations pasted on old anti-asylum, anti-lawyer, anti-due-process attitudes and relying on an ever more dysfunctional EOIR, now at war with the asylum bar, won’t cut it! Albrecht Dürer, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
You can download the complete article from SSRN at the above link.
Expect the Biden Administration to “blow off” the suggestions for improvement at the end of the article. They seem to glory in “tuning out” the views of practical experts who know how to fix the broken asylum adjudication system.
As I predicted when these regulations first came out, they were “programmed for failure.”
Due-process-denying, representation-killing, arbitrary time limits imposed from above have been tried by Administration after Administration. They have always failed and will continue to do so. So, why are they a key part of the Administration’s so-called “reforms?”
Compare the article’s discussion of the importance of representation and the practical and ethical problems caused by the new regulations with the reality of the “nutsos” ways EOIR is mis-treating attorneys currently trying to practice before the Immigration Courts!
Additionally, the unwarranted, yet largely self-fulfilling assumption by the Biden Administration that only 15% of asylum applications would be granted at the “Asylum Office stage” show why this program was designed to fail by the wrong officials. For the system to meaningfully address the Immigration Court asylum backlog, the grant rate would have to be multiples of that — probably at least 50%.
That’s a realistic projection, given the well-documented, atrocious human rights conditions in most “sending countries” and the current artificial limitations on grants imposed by bad precedents and flawed, biased, or incompetent adjudications. When I was at the Arlington Immigration Court from 2003-16, a significant majority of the “referrals” from the Asylum Office were granted asylum, withholding of removal, or CAT protection, often with concurrence or only token opposition by ICE. That suggests that there is a huge unrealized potential for many more timely asylum grants at the Asylum Office. But, success will never be achieved with the current “anti-asylum, afraid to correctly and fairly implement refugee law gang” in charge — committed to retaining the bad attitudes and repeating the mistakes of the past!
Hanging over the whole disaster is the “uncomfortable truth” that I’ve been shouting:
The Biden Administration is still operating EOIR and large portions of the immigration bureaucracy at DHS with Trump-era “holdovers” who were improperly “programmed to deny” asylum.
There is a dearth of positive precedents from the BIA on gender-based asylum and other types of common asylum applications at the border that are routinely and wrongfully mishandled and denied.
There are cosmic problems resulting from failure to provide qualified representation of asylum seekers at the border.
Detention continues to be misused as a “deterrent” to legal claims and “punishment” for assertingthem.
Despite “touting” a much larger refugee admissions program beyond the border, the Administration has failed to deliver a robust, realistic, refugee admissions program for Latin America and the Caribbean which would take pressure off the border.
Racism and White Nationalism continue to drive the Administration’s dramatically inconsistent approach to White refugees from Ukraine compared with refugees of color at the Southern Border.
Indeed, this entire “reform effort” is essentially “upside down.” It’s a “designed to fail” attempt to avoid the broken and malfunctioning Immigration Court system without dealing with the REAL problem: EOIR!
Without the necessary progressive personnel and structural reforms at Garland’s EOIR (“clean house” of unqualified, under-qualified, or misplaced administrators and judges from past Administrations), the cultural changes (“out with the anti-asylum, anti-immigrant, racially challenged, too often misogynistic, EOIR culture”) it would bring, and most of all, the substantive changes to align asylum law with due process, best practices, and the generous interpretations that were foreshadowed by the Refugee Act of 1`980 but have been intentionally suppressed by politicos of both parties, there will be neither justice nor stability in our asylum and immigration systems, nor will there be equal justice for all, including racial justice, in America!
Even my esteemed “RR3” friends understate the debilitating effects of the ever-worsening dysfunction at EOIR and Garland’s failure of leadership on due process and human rights!
Perhaps the most telling statement in their article is this: “Asylum officers are more highly trained in asylum adjudication than immigration judges . . . .”Why, on earth, would that be?
Why isn’t the BIA led and comprised of internationally-respected asylum experts like Schrag, Schoenholtz, Ramji-Nogales, and others like them? Why aren’t all Immigration Judges drawn from the ranks of universally-respected “practical scholars” in asylum and human rights?Plenty of them are out here! Why aren’t they on the bench? Why is the Biden Administration running a “D-Team Judiciary” at EOIR rather than “the world’s best administrative tribunals, guaranteeing fairness and due process for all” as EOIR was once envisioned? What’s the excuse for lousy training at EOIR when top-flight “modulated” asylum training is available from expert sources like Professor Michele Pistone’s innovative VIISTA Villanova program? What’s the excuse for the colossal EOIR failure that threatens lives and our democracy on a daily basis? Why aren’t alarm bells going off at the White House about Garland’s failed stewardship at EOIR?
Reforming the asylum system, starting with EOIR, could also potentially have big societal and economic benefits for America. Asylees gain legal status, can work, get in line for green cards, eventually become citizens, and realize their full potential as productive members of our society. Not incidentally, they also become regular taxpayers and can help bolster essential enterprises and infrastructure improvements.
For example, just yesterday the Portland (ME) Press Herald featured an article about the critical, chronic shortage of workers in Maine. https://www.pressherald.com/2022/10/02/how-can-maine-solve-its-workforce-crisis/ Why isn’t the Biden Administration working with Maine authorities, NGOs, and economic development groups to “fast track” asylum approvals for those who might be persuaded to resettle in Maine to take advantage of these economic opportunities, for everyone’s benefit? Mainers also are suffering from a shortage of affordable housing. I’ll bet that with a little “seed money,” there are enterprising, skilled groups of potential asylees who could help build and maintain affordable housing for communities in need, in Maine and elsewhere in the U.S. Why are they instead “rotting at the border” or being aimlessly “orbited” around America by nativist GOP governors trying to score political points with their White Nationalist base?
By adopting the nativists’ dehumanizing mis-characterization of asylum seekers as a “problem” to be measured in “numbers,” deterred, and held at bay, the Administration is missing a golden opportunity to achieve some much-needed “win-wins.” Why run bone-headed “built to fail, haste makes waste” asylum pilot programs in a few cities rather than trying things that might work to everyone’s advantage, as I have described above?
At a time when many in America are finally learning the truth about our disgraceful failure to offer refuge to Jews during the period leading up to the Holocaust from the Ken Burns documentary, we (our at least some Americans) appear to be committed to making the same mistakes again. We should not undervalue the lives and contributions of refugees because of systemic or structural boas against certain groups!
Claiming to “reform” the U.S. refugee and asylum system without dealing with the ongoing, worsening, disasterous dysfunction at EOIR is a fool’s errand. The way to make the system work more efficiently is to grant the large number of deserving asylum cases in a timely, practical, manner driven by due process, best practices, and best interpretations of asylum law. Unless and until those in charge act on this truth, the awful mess at EOIR will continue to be an existential threat to democracy!
Immigrations expert outlines next steps for Martha’s Vineyard migrants
Governor Baker has activated 125 members of the Massachusetts National Guard to assist in relief efforts for the nearly 50 migrants who came here last week.
Those migrants are now staying at Joint Base Cape Cod after they were flown into Martha’s Vineyard on Wednesday.
“There’s no doubt about the fact that it was a political move, not a move calculated to make the system work or to help people,” said Paul Wickham Schmidt, a retired U.S. Immigration judge and adjunct professor at Georgetown University.
Schmidt says it was surprising to see dozens of migrants dropped off on Martha’s Vineyard last week without any notice.
“With advanced notice, I think they could have done an even better job and probably with more focus on helping the individuals and less focus on what’s happening here,” said Schmidt.
People living on Martha’s Vineyard jumped into action to provide food and shelter for the immigrants from Venezuela, and now this weekend, they’ve been moved to dorms set up at Joint Base Cape Cod, where MEMA is trying to keep families together while providing not only beds and food, but also services from health care to legal support.
“Getting somebody who can take a personal interest and can make sure people can check in where they’re supposed to,” said Schmidt.
Schmidt says now, the migrants will need lawyers to help them check into an ICE office, Immigration court and an asylum office – all of which didn’t exist on Martha’s Vineyard.
Even though the last few days have been confusing, Schmidt believes the migrants will get the help they need as they get closer to Boston.
“This could have some silver linings because I think the people aren’t in Texas, which is sort of an asylum-free zone, where the judges deny almost every asylum case and there’s obviously a hostile local attitude,” said Schmidt.
Schmidt says immigration courts in Massachusetts are more likely to grant asylum cases than in Texas or Florida.
State leaders say they appreciate all the donations and support coming in for the migrants, but at this point they can’t accept any donations at Joint Base Cape Cod.
If you’d like to donate to the relief efforts, you should send an email to the Massachusetts Voluntary Organizations Active in Disasters at MAVOAD@gmail.com.
As the latter article from Paul Waldman @ WashPost points out, the GOP has no answers whatsoever about how to reform the U.S. immigration system. Dems have some proposals, but lack qualified, expert dynamic leadership on the issue.
Even without legislation, there are lots of things the Biden Administration could have done by now to fix the broken asylum and refugee systems and make them functional, using current law! The biggest missed opportunity is painfully obvious to all expert observers: Fix the broken Immigration Courts starting with the Trump holdover BIA which is still a serious and unconscionable drag on our entire legal system!
For example, given the size and importance of the Venezuelan refugee flow, and the mass of available documentation about the truly horrible human rights conditions under the Maduro regime in Venezuela, there should be many BIA precedents guiding practitioners and judges on how to prepare and grant asylum to Venezuelan asylum seekers. This would encourage and facilitate DHS, the private/NGO bar, and Immigration Judges in rapidly moving Venezuelan asylum grants through the system in a timely fashion.
Instead, there are no favorable Venezuelan asylum precedents that I know of. Moreover, almost all the recently BIA precedents on asylum are crabbed, legally deficient, often factually misleading, sometimes anti-historical, “prompts” on how to manipulate the law to improperly deny needed protection. They send grossly improper signals to already under-trained Immigration Judges that “any reason to deny asylum” is the BIA’s “comfort zone.”
There is an old saying that “elections have consequences.” But, apparently, when Dems win and Merrick Garland is the Attorney General, not so much.
Unfortunately, given the disorder and dysfunction promoted by Garland’s Immigration Courts’ biased and defective handling of asylum cases — essentially “working overtime” to manufacture bogus reasons to deny “slam dunk” asylum grants and providing defective guidance — and the disturbing lack of competent leadership on immigration and human rights by the Biden Administration, that’s going to take litigation in the Article IIIs. Getting individuals out of “Asylum Free Zones” operating in violation of sound legal standards for adjudicating asylum cases, primarily in the 5th and 11th Circuits, will be a huge “plus.”
Keep the focus on the “good guys” who need our help! That’s the best way of taking it to the cowardly grandstanders using humans as pawn and “photo ops.” It’s also the best way of dealing with clueless Dems, like Garland, who empower the “DeSantis’s of the world” by failing to fix our failing legal refugee and asylum systems and to vigorously stand up for the legal and human rights of those needing and deservingprotection!
There is a “great story” to tell about the contributions of those granted asylum and other immigrants to America. If Garland and “tone deaf” Dems are afraid to tell it, it’s up to the rest of us to do the work for them!
Report on Boston Asylum Office finds disproportionately low acceptance rates, bias against applicants
The office serving asylum seekers in and around Maine has the second lowest approval rate in the nation, according to a report by Maine immigrant advocacy groups.
The Boston Asylum Office has the second lowest acceptance rate of any office in the nation, and granted asylum to only 11 percent of its applicants in 2021, according to a report by Maine legal aid organizations handling immigration cases and advocates for reform.
The report says the office that serves asylum seekers in and around Maine is plagued by bias and burnout, and that its low grant rate is “driven by a culture of suspicion” toward asylum seekers.
The process of seeking asylum in the United States begins with an application to U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services. Applicants must prove they are fleeing a country in which they previously suffered persecution or were at risk of persecution based on race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group or political opinion.
Applications go through asylum offices first, which can either grant asylum from the outset or refer an application to an immigration court for a judge to consider.
Jennifer Bailey, an attorney for the Immigrant Legal Advocacy Project and one of the report’s authors, said almost all asylum seekers she works with eventually obtain asylum status through immigration court, after failing to be granted asylum at the Boston Asylum Office. But the court process can take years, and, while they’re waiting, applicants aren’t able to access federal student aid, social services or educational opportunities. Even worse, they spend that time away from their families, who can still be at risk.
“It’s not uncommon for people’s (families) left at home to die while they’re waiting, or to be lost within the violence,” Bailey said.
Collaborating with the Immigrant Legal Advocacy Project on the report were the Refugee and Human Rights Clinic at the University of Maine School of Law, the ACLU of Maine and a visiting lecturer at Amherst College in Massachusetts who spent eight years waiting on a decision from the Boston Asylum Office and was ultimately denied in May 2021. Today, he and his family live in Canada.
During its first five years, the Boston office – which opened in 2015 and processes about 5,600 applications a year – granted roughly 15 percent of its asylum applications on average, the report states. Meanwhile, offices in San Francisco and New Orleans were accepting asylum requests at rates that were more than three times higher. Nationally, the acceptance rate from 2015 to 2020 was 28 percent, the report says.
The report acknowledged that asylum officers who approve or refer cases to court face a “complex and essential” list of responsibilities. Being overworked and having less time to consider cases often results in asylum officers sending more referrals to immigration court, said some former officers cited in the report.
Meanwhile, supervising officers play an “outsized” role in the asylum-granting process, according to the report. If an asylum officer recommends granting asylum and the supervisor disagrees, the officer could face retaliation in the form of more work or a negative performance evaluation, the report states.
PRESUMPTION OF FRAUD
The report’s authors contend that their research “strongly suggests” that Boston’s asylum office doesn’t consider applications from a neutral stance, “but rather presumes they must be fraudulent or pose a security threat.” Of 21 trainings for asylum officers mentioned in the report, 14 were focused on fraud detection. Former officers told the report’s authors that constantly hearing concerns about fraud and credibility made them think such problems were more prevalent than they were.
“They’re telling their story, which, no matter what, can involve this unimaginable trauma of torture and violence or sexual violence or death,” Bailey said of asylum seekers. “Put yourself in that position and imagine how hard it is to talk about the worst thing that’s ever happened to you in your life, and having this officer – who has the power to help you and your family – say ‘No, I don’t believe you.’”
According to the report, bias and skepticism in the office extend to certain countries. The Boston Asylum Office granted only 4 percent of asylum applications from the Democratic Republic of Congo from 2015 to 2020, even though the U.S. has acknowledged significant human rights violations in that country, including unlawful killings and torture, the report says. The office granted only 2 percent of its applications from Angola, another country where there is known abuse.
The Newark Asylum Office in New Jersey, which also serves some of New England, granted asylum to 17 percent of its applicants from Angola and 33 percent of its applicants from the Democratic Republic of Congo.
English-speaking applicants are nearly twice as likely to be granted asylum as non-English speakers, who are referred to immigration court 80 percent of the time, the report says. Asylum-seekers who can speak English are referred to immigration court just under 60 percent of the time.
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Read the rest of Emily’s fine article at the link.
I did lots of DRC cases over 13 years on the trial bench! Most had lawyers and were extremely well-documented. Often ICE didn’t oppose grants (prior to Trump).
In Arlington, with agreement from the parties, they were candidates for the “short docket.” Nearly all the DRC cases “referred” from the Arlington Asylum Office were granted upon “de novo” review in Immigration Court.
This is a prime example of how our asylum system seriously regressed under Trump and has not been fixed by Garland and Mayorkas! No wonder our Immigration Courts are hopelessly and unnecessarily backlogged with an astounding 1.6 million pending cases. Bad judging, systemic anti-asylum bias, lack of competence, and gross mismanagement by DOJ and DHS are taking a toll on democracy and humanity!
Pathetically and disingenuously, USCIS tries to blame their malfeasance and lack of competence on “the pandemic.” That drew one of the more perceptive public comments I’ve seen recently:
Pandemic restrictions didn’t create bias in other asylum offices – that’s a totally inadequate excuse.
For sure! Just like it’s a pretext for the elimination of our legal asylum system at the border that Garland disgracefully defends! Think that the “anti-asylum culture” problem ends with USCIS? Guess again?
Former Attorney General Jeff “Gonzo Apocalypto” Sessions was never bashful about sharing his White Nationalist, nativist, xenophobic falsehoods and myths about asylum seekers with his “captive” Immigration Judges. That’s right, for those not “in the know,” amazingly the “courts” that are supposed to provide expert legal precedents on asylum law and give a “fresh look” to those cases not granted by the Asylum Office aren’t “courts” at all as most Americans know them. They are run by the chief law enforcement official of the United States, the Attorney General, even though they are called “Immigration Courts.”
Sessions actually made the following statement, unsupported by any hard evidence, to a group of his wholly owned “judges” on October 12, 2017:
“We also have dirty immigration lawyers who are encouraging their otherwise unlawfully present clients to make false claims of asylum providing them with the magic words needed to trigger the credible fear process.”
At the same time, he announced that he was, on his own motion and over the objection of the DHS and the applicant, “undoing” the leading BIA precedent recognizing gender-based harm as a ground for asylum. For a good measure, he also warned his supposedly, but not really, “fair and impartial judges” that he expected them to strictly apply precedent — HIS precedents, that is. In other words, start cranking out those asylum denials or your career might be in peril!
Some judges chose to resign or retire. Some kept on doing their jobs conscientiously, legitimately “working around” Sessions’s poorly reasoned and factually inaccurate anti-asylum precedents. Many, however, chose to “go along to get along” with the anti-asylum program — some happily (there were reportedly some cheers and applause when Sessions announced his cowardly assault on vulnerable refugee women of color), some not.
So clearly wrong and totally off-base was Sessions’s assault on asylum-seeking women, primarily those of color, that even the otherwise timid and reticent AG Merrick Garland had to reverse it during his first year in office and restore the prior BIA precedent. However, there has been no further guidance from the BIA on properly and generously applying this potentially favorable, life-saving precedent.
President Biden charged Garland and Mayorkas with developing regulations on gender-based claims by October 2021. Obviously, that date has come and gone with the regulations still MIA!
Think that promoting a culture of xenophobia, racism, and overt bias has no effect? During the Trump Administration, although conditions for refugees, and particularly for refugee women, worsened over that time, the Immigration Court asylum grant rate fell precipitously — from more than 50% during the mid-years of the Obama Administration to only 23% during FY 2020, the last full year of the Trump regime.
The Immigration Courts and especially the BIA were “packed” by Sessions and his successor “Billy the Bigot” Barr with questionably qualified “judges” perceived to be willing to do their nativist bidding. Inexplicably, Garland has been unwilling to “unpack” them, despite these being DOJ attorney positions in the “excepted service,” NOT life-tenured Federal Judges.
Consequently, life or death asylum decisions today depend less on the legal merits of an applicant’s case than they do on the particular Immigration Judge assigned, the composition of the BIA “panel” on appeal, the Federal Circuit in which the case arises, and even the composition of the panel of U.S. Circuit Judges who might review the case.
They also depend on whether the applicant is fortunate enough to have a lawyer (not provided by the USG). Any unrepresented, often non-English-speaking asylum seeker has little or no chance of negotiating the intentionally arcane, opaque, unnecessarily hyper technical, and “user unfriendly” asylum system in Immigration “Court” without expert help.
Almost every week, the Circuit Courts of Appeals publish major decisions pointing out elementary legal and factual errors by the BIA’s “deportation railroad.” But, that’s just the tip of the iceberg! The vast majority of life-threatening errors by the Immigration Courts go uncorrected as the applicants are unable to pursue their cases to the Courts of Appeals or are “duressed” by DHS detention in substandard conditions into giving up viable claims.
Check out some of these denial rates by ten of Barr’s BIA appointees who previously served as Immigration Judges. Those judges are listed with their asylum denial rates, according to Syracuse University’s 2021 TRAC Reports:
Michael P. Baird (91.4%),
William A. Cassidy (99%),
V. Stuart Couch (93.3%),
Deborah K. Goodwin (91%),
Stephanie E. Gorman (92%),
Keith Hunsucker (85%),
Sunita Mahtabfar (98.7%),
Philip J. Montante, Jr. (96.3%),
Kevin W. Riley (90.4%),
Earle B. Wilson (98.2%)
Gee, these guys make even the artificially high nationwide asylum denial rates (76%) resulting from Trump’s all-out assault on due process and the rule of law look low by comparison! Gosh, only one of these Dudes was even within 10% (just barely) of that already outrageously high, artificially “reverse engineered” national denial rate.
Yet, inexplicably, these virulently anti-asylum judges continue to serve and negatively shape asylum law under Garland! Even “pre-Trump,” most of them avoided granting any asylum, in the face of precedents supposedly requiring generous application of the law in accordance with U.N. guidance and recognizing gender-based persecution as real.
So, it’s little surprise that no meaningful positive guidance or helpful interpretation has come from Garland’s BIA that might lead to expedited and consistent asylum grants to the many meritorious asylum cases now buried in his burgeoning 1.6 million case Immigration Court backlog! No wonder civil rights, human rights, equal justice, and Constitutional law experts consider Garland to be a failure as AG!
To date, Garland has appointed only one BIA Appellate Judge out of 21! That was to fill an existing vacancy. Judge Andrea Saenz is a superbly qualified asylum expert with scholarly credentials, “real life” experience representing asylum seekers in Immigration Court, clerking experience in those courts, and proven intellectual and practical leadership capabilities.
But, we need a “BIA of Judge Saenzes” — like yesterday! The talent is out there! But, Garland and his lieutenants have been too dilatory, tone deaf, and shockingly indifferent to these glaring due process, expertise, and racial justice issues to bring in the qualified judges and judicial administrators to fix his unjust, unfair, and grotesquely inefficient “courts.” Thus, the dysfunction grows, festers, and eventually destroys, maims, and kills! Is this really an appropriate “legacy” for a Dem Administration?
Today, in a WashPost OpEd, Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, President & CEO of Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, points out:
Why are members of this outrageous “protection deniers’ club” still on Garland’s broken and biased Immigration Court bench? You don’t have to be a human rights scholar or Constitutional law expert to see that there is something seriously wrong here that Garland is sweeping under the rug!
Yes, the best answer is an independent Article I Immigration Court, free from the mismanagement and political shenanigans of the DOJ, with a merit-based selection system for judges. But, that doesn’t absolve Garland from the responsibility to fix the existing system NOW before more lives are lost, futures ruined, and American justice irretrievably degraded!
The current racially discriminatory, scofflaw, patently unjust parody of a “court” system being run by Garland is as unacceptable as it is immoral!
Garland and Mayorkas have allowed this approach to asylum seekers to flourish on their watch. That raises serious questions about their suitability for their current positions! Albrecht Dürer, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
“Interim Regulations” Aren’t The Answer!
Today, the Biden Administration released new “Interim Asylum Regulations” that appear designed to fail. https://public-inspection.federalregister.gov/2022-06148.pdf. That’s because they don’t address the real competency, leadership, and legal problems plaguing the current system!
I won’t claim to have waded through every word of this entire 512-page mishmash of largely impenetrable bureaucratic gobbledygook. But, I can see it’s more tone-deaf micromanagement of the Immigration Court, along with the usual, arbitrary and capricious, unrealistic “off the wall” “time limits” that are guaranteed to make things worse, not better. It’s basically more of Garland’s “Aimless Docket Reshuffling” and his “Treadmill for Immigration Attorneys” that have already helped fuel unprecedented backlogs amidst wildly inconsistent results and a steady stream of life-threatening errors from his dysfunctional “courts.”
As if the answer to a poorly functioning, hopelessly self-backlogged, incompetent, biased, and unfair system is to “speed it up!” Come on, man! That suggests, quite incorrectly, that the primary problems in our asylum system are something other than lack of competence, integrity, expertise, and leadership at DHS and DOJ!
In reality, Garland’s defective “assembly line justice” at EOIR is already cutting so many corners and being so careless and “denial focused” that a steady stream of elementary legal errors show up in the Courts of Appeals every week. How is speeding up an already unfair and error plagued system going to make it better?
The real answer is to move the many grantable asylum cases that pass credible fear through the system correctly, fairly, on a reasonable, timely, predictable basis, with representation. That requires more and better trained Asylum Officers; different, better Immigration Judges who know how to recognize and grant asylum and keep the parties moving through the system; a new BIA of practical scholars who are due-process-oriented human rights experts to set favorable, practical asylum and procedural precedents and to keep IJs, AOs, and counsel for both sides in line; and close cooperation and advance coordination with the private bar and NGOs to insure representation of all asylum seekers.
This “interim regulation” avoids and obfuscates the necessary personnel replacement, attitude adjustment, and changes to the “culture of denial and deterrence” required in the Executive Branch for our asylum system to work! I predict colossal failure!
Get ready to litigate, NDPA! This is an “in your face,” largely unilateral, insulting approach. Rather than respecting your expertise, dedication, abilities, and counsel in fundamentally changing this system, Mayorkas and Garland intend arrogantly to “shove it down your throats and the throats of asylum seekers” with their inferior personnel, a toxic culture of denial, bad attitudes, and poor lawyering! Accept the challenge to resist!`
