"The Voice of the New Due Process Army" ————– Musings on Events in U.S. Immigration Court, Immigration Law, Sports, and Other Random Topics by Retired United States Immigration Judge (Arlington, Virginia) and former Chairman of the Board of Immigration Appeals Paul Wickham Schmidt. To see my complete professional bio, just click on the link below.
Being An Immigration Judge Was Their Dream. Under Trump, It Became Untenable.
“It has become so emotionally brutal and exhausting that many people I know are leaving or talking about finding an exit strategy,” said one immigration judge. “Morale has never, ever been lower.”
Former immigration judge Rebecca Jamil in Fremont, California, on Dec. 28, 2018.
SAN FRANCISCO — Rebecca Jamil was sitting in a nondescript hotel ballroom in suburban Virginia when she realized that her dream job — being an immigration judge — was no longer tenable. It was June 11, 2018, and then–attorney general Jeff Sessions, her boss, was speaking to a room packed with immigration judges, running through his list of usual complaints over what was, in his estimation, a broken asylum system.
Toward the end of the speech, Sessions let slip some big news: He had decided whether domestic abuse and gang victims could be granted asylum in the US. Advocates, attorneys, and judges had been waiting months to see what Sessions, who in his role as attorney general had the power to review cases, would do. After all, it would determine the fate of thousands of asylum-seekers, many fleeing dangerous situations in Central America.
Sessions didn’t reveal to the room the details of his ruling but Jamil, based in San Francisco since she was appointed in 2016, learned later that day that the attorney general had decided to dramatically restrict asylum protections for domestic abuse victims.
“I’d seen the faces of these families,” the 43-year-old judge said. “They weren’t abstractions to me.”
Eric Risberg / AP
Hundreds of people overflow onto the sidewalk in a line snaking around the block outside a US immigration office with numerous courtrooms in San Francisco.
Jamil, a mother of two young daughters, had been shaken by the images and sounds that came as a result of the Trump administration’s policy to separate families at the border. As a judge who oversaw primarily cases of women and children fleeing abuse and dangers abroad, this was the last straw.
Soon after, she stepped down from the court.
“I can’t do this anymore,” she told friends. “I felt that I couldn’t be ‘Rebecca Jamil, representative of the attorney general’ while these things were going on.”
In many ways, her resignation underscores the tenuous position of immigration judges, who are overseen by the attorney general and susceptible to the shifting winds of each administration. To avoid potential conflicts, the union that represents the judges has long called for its court to be an independent body, separate from the Department of Justice.
The Trump administration has undertaken a monumental overhaul of the way immigration judges, which total around 400 across the country, work: placing quotas on the number of cases they should complete every year, ending their ability to indefinitely suspend certain cases, restricting when asylum can be granted, and pouring thousands of previously closed cases back into court dockets.
In the meantime, the case backlog has jumped to more than 800,000 under the administration and wait times have continued to skyrocket to hundreds of days.
The quotas in particular have made judges feel as if they were cogs in a deportation machine, as opposed to neutral arbiters given time to thoughtfully analyze the merits of each case.
“The job has become exceedingly more difficult as the court has veered even farther away from being administered as a court rather than a law enforcement bureaucracy,” said Ashley Tabaddor, an immigration judge who heads the National Association of Immigration Judges, a union representing around 350 judges.
And it’s not just Jamil who has departed because of the massive changes to the court undertaken by the Trump administration, according to observers within the Department of Justice and those on the outside. While some, like Jamil, have resigned, others have retired early in large part because of the policies instituted under Trump, they said.
For those remaining at the immigration court, the mood is bleak.
Justin Sullivan / Getty Images
Attorney General Jeff Sessions speaks during a news conference on Oct. 16, 2018.
“It has become so emotionally brutal and exhausting that many people I know are leaving or talking about finding an exit strategy,” said one immigration judge who declined to be named. “Morale has never, ever been lower.”
Another Justice Department official, who was not authorized to speak on the record, told BuzzFeed News, “It is exhausting when you feel undervalued by the people at the top of your organization, especially when they are motivated by partisanship and have not spent their careers doing the job that you do.”
Tabaddor, the head of the union, said that her group has noticed a higher rate of retirements and resignations than in the past because of the way judges have been treated under Trump.
Some have been bold in their timing. John Richardson, a former immigration judge in Phoenix, stepped down on Sep. 30, 2018 — the day before the administration instituted a quota for the number of cases to be completed by judges.
“The timing of my retirement was a direct result of the draconian policies of the Administration, the relegation of [judges] to the status of ‘action officers’ who deport as many people as possible as soon as possible with only token due process, and blaming [judges] for the immigration crisis caused by decades of neglect and under funding of the Immigration Courts,” he said in a statement to BuzzFeed News.
Another judge who resigned from the bench in September told staff members in a goodbye email, “I know things are getting difficult for you at [the Executive Office for Immigration Review], but I believe all you will ‘ride through the storm’ and ‘come out with a smile.’”
There have long been work challenges for immigration judges, including heavy caseloads and assignments, leading to comparatively high burnout rates. Justice Department officials told BuzzFeed News that concerns over retirements were nothing new.
“In 2015, 2013, and 2011, the National Association of IJs [immigration judges] raised the same concerns. In 2011, the NAIJ said that ‘stress on judges has reached unbearable levels … a large contributing factor to retirement at the earliest possible opportunity,’” said Steven Stafford, a Justice Department spokesperson. “What is actually new is that we are hiring more and more IJs and doing so faster than ever before. Today we have 68.9 percent more IJs than we did in 2010, and that number is only rising.”
According to the agency, from the beginning of fiscal year 2014 through Feb. 12, 2019, 94 immigration judges have retired, separated, or died. More than a third of those judges, 32, have left since Oct. 1, 2017. The agency does not track why judges leave their positions.
To those within the court and others who have recently retired, the situation has worsened to an unprecedented level. Richardson, the former judge in Phoenix, said he would have continued presiding over immigration cases if the status quo had remained.
“Yes, I was 75 years old with over 50 years of honorable federal service with the Department of Defense and the Department of Justice, but had no plans for retirement as long as I was treated with respect, appreciated, and provided adequate support,” he said. “I had 28 years as an IJ and very much enjoyed my job, even with the poor funding and lack of support by Congress and the White House during that 28 years.”
Jeff Chase, a former immigration judge who stepped down years ago and who speaks regularly with others who’ve left the bench, was blunt in his characterization.
“The fastest growth industry is former immigration judges,” Chase said. Those still on the bench have told him, “It’s horrible. Whatever you think it is, it is much, much worse.”
In the meantime, the Trump administration has hired more than 100 judges to not only fill the vacancies of those who’ve retired but to add numbers to the bench. It’s a rehauling of the courts that could “have a drastic impact,” according to Chase.
Many of the judges retiring in recent months are experienced jurists, hired by the Clinton administration in the mid to late ’90s, he said. These judges, Chase said, were more willing to push back on claims made in court by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement or to allow immigrants extended time to make their cases in what could otherwise be a rushed procedure.
In their place, Chase said, are judges hired by the new administration with case completion quotas, a two-year probation period, and a mandate to avoid showing sympathy for the people appearing before them.
“Even if it doesn’t show up on the sheet, just the level of humanity, that makes a huge difference — that’s what this administration is trying to remove from the immigration judge corps,” he said.
Constanza Hevia for BuzzFeed News
Rebecca Jamil holds her immigration judge certificate.
For her part, Jamil wanted to become an immigration judge from the earliest moments of her legal career. After working as a staff attorney at the 9th Circuit US Court of Appeals, she joined the government as a prosecutor with ICE in 2011, where she was able to use discretion to focus deportation efforts on those with serious criminal backgrounds. Under the Trump administration, ICE attorneys have been told that nearly all undocumented immigrants are priorities for deportation.
In 2014, Jamil took a chance to fulfill her dream: She applied to become an immigration judge. It was a 17-month process, full of drawn-out interviews in Washington, DC, but finally, in 2015 she received a phone call informing her that she got the job.
“I thought, and I must have told most people I know, that this is the last job that I would ever have. It’s all I wanted to do,” she said.
Jamil dedicated herself to the exhausting career. She oversaw a docket made up primarily of families and regularly heard cases in which women and children applied for asylum based on abuse that they had experienced by partners and family members abroad.
Day in and day out, Jamil heard intense testimony of physical and sexual violence against women and children.
“You’re sitting in a windowless room and people tell you the very worst parts of their life and you have to decide if it is enough to stay in the US,” she said. “That is very tiring day after day to be the person who makes that decision.”
Then, under the Trump administration, things started to change. In 2018, Sessions instituted a new policy, severely limiting when judges could suspend certain cases. Suddenly, her docket expanded and she wasn’t allowed to decide which cases deserved to remain in court and which didn’t.
Jamil and fellow immigration judges were in attendance at the Virginia conference where Sessions spoke for annual trainings on courtroom procedure. The year before, jurists heard substantive legal updates and trainings on bias in the courtroom.
This version of the training, however, felt different.
“The entire conference was profoundly disturbing. Do things as fast as possible. There was an overarching theme of disbelieving aliens and their claims and how to remove people faster,” Jamil said. “That is not what I saw my job as an immigration judge to be. I was not trained to do that.”
Soon after she returned home, Jamil put in her resignation. Her colleagues fretted, probing her about whether she had considered the type of judge that could fill her spot on the bench and the impact that could have.
She didn’t have an answer, but she knew that she couldn’t do it any longer.
“Family separations; Sessions making his own case law on asylum; when we could continue cases — I could no longer sit below the seal of the Department of Justice and represent the Department of Justice at that point,” Jamil said. “They just chipped away at our authority on a daily basis. It felt like we weren’t really judges. It was frustrating and demoralizing.”
A former colleague, Laura Ramirez, worked for years as an immigration judge in San Francisco. In December, she retired at the earliest date possible, five days after she turned 60.
The changes put in place by the Trump administration, especially the case quotas, and the politicization of her job, became too much to handle.
The loss of judges like Jamil and others could be immeasurable to both immigrants and Department of Homeland Security attorneys, Ramirez said.
“For the system of justice, there’s these highly qualified, fair, thoughtful people who are being squeezed out of the system for political reasons, basically,” she said. “If people like her are squeezed out, it’s a loss to people who appear before her. The system can’t be fair if good people like her are pushed out.”
***********************************************
Forcing the “best, brightest, and fairest” out. Reinforcing “worst practices.” Enabling judges with well-established records of anti-asylum, nationality-based, and misogynistic bias. Attacking those private attorneys who steadfastly defended legal and Constitutional rights that were being systematically undermined by the Administration. Blaming others for his own incompetence and lack of scholarship. That’s what the “Sessions program” was all about.
The only good news: folks like Judge Jamil, Judge Ramirez, Judge Richardson, and Judge Chase are now part of the ever-growing “Our Gang” of retired Immigraton Judges helping others to fight the injustices and destruction of Due Process being pushed by the Trump Administration and a DOJ that has abandoned its mission in favor of a White Nationalist political agenda. Our voices are being heard in support of the efforts of the “New Due Process Army.”
And, while I doubt that anyone outside of Trump and Miller can match the viscous lies, racism, and knowingly false narratives of Sessions, I wouldn’t expect much improvement under Barr. Barr thought Sessions was “the greatest thing since sliced bread.” That, more than the Mueller investigation, should have caused all Democrats to vote against his confirmation. He’ll just “lose” some of the overtly racist and inflammatory lingo of the White Nationalist restrictionists and attack immigrants on the basis of bogus “strict enforcement” platitudes.
Every American who believes in our Constitution and thinks that America is different from the “Banana Republics” we often criticize will be threatened by this development. Malicious harm to the most vulnerable among us is harm to all; and the collapse of one of the “building blocks” at the “retail level” of the American justice system will adversely affect everybody’s ability to get justice with fairness and impartiality.
Many of us don’t think we will need fair, independent, and impartial courts until we do. Once the Trump Administration destroys them, they won’t easily be rebuilt.
Who will defend your rights when the time comes if you stand by and watch the rights of others being trampled?
Feb 10 Wait in Mexico Policy, Access to Counsel, & Crime
A February 1, 2019 article in the L.A. Timesreported that two American attorneys who work for the immigrant rights organization Al Otro Lado, which has sent attorneys to Tijuana to offer advice to Central American refugees seeking to apply for asylum in the U.S., were stopped by Mexican immigration officials while attempting to enter that country. The attorneys were detained and questioned, and eventually denied entry because their passports had been “flagged.” One of the lawyers was actually traveling to Mexico on a family vacation, and was separated from her husband and 7-year-old daughter at the airport and taken to a separate room where she was interrogated. Her crying daughter was eventually allowed to join her; the two were held for 9 hours and forced to sleep on a cold floor without food or water before being sent back to the U.S. Two journalists who had been covering the issue of refugees seeking asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border suffered the same experience. The Mexican government denied responsibility for the “flagging;” one of the journalists was told “the Americans” were responsible.
One of my first reactionsto the remain in Mexico policy was the impact it would have on access to counsel. I have heard disturbing first-hand reports from individuals who have traveled to Tijuana to provide legal assistance to refugees there. When crossing back to the U.S., American citizens identified by Customs and Border Patrol officers as “activists” have been harassed by being sent to secondary inspection, where they have been questioned and, remarkably, have had the contents of their electronic devices accessed by DHS agents. A means of avoiding such treatment was to fly directly to Mexico. However, the reported policy of flagging the passports of attorneys engaged in such work has undermined that route as well. Thus, attorneys are being treated like criminals for the “crime” of doing their job of providing legal assistance to asylum seekers.
While DHS focuses on such imaginary “crime,” it willfully ignores the actual crime to which those asylum seekers forced to wait in Mexico are exposed. In a letterto DHS Secretary Kirsjen M. Nielsen, the American Immigration Council, American Immigration Lawyers Association, and Catholic Legal Immigration Network reported that 90.3% of asylum seekers surveyed said that do not feel safe in Mexico; 46% stated that either themself or their child had suffered harm in Mexico, and 38.1% reported mistreatment at the hands of the Mexican police. Female asylum seekers accompanied by their minor children reported suffering crimes in Mexico including rape, sexual assault, kidnaping, extortion, and death threats.
Keep in mind that the Administration has shamelessly named its wait-in-Mexico policy the “Migrant Protection Protocols.” Instead, the policy exposes asylum seekers (including vulnerable unaccompanied children and families) to crime and police harassment, while restricting their access to counsel.
Access to counsel is increasingly critical to Central American asylum seekers, many of whose claims require proving that their fear is on account of their membership in a particular social group. Where fear is of non-governmental persecutors, applicants must further establish that the government is unable or unwilling to control such actors, and that internal relocation to another part of the country was not reasonable. Meeting these criteria requires an applicant to offer complex legal theories, and to support such claims with affidavits, reports, and articles from one or more experts. Without legal assistance, this is a daunting task for refugees (some of whom are families or children) living under difficult conditions (including the above-mentioned exposure to crime and government harassment) on the Mexico side of the border. Under present BIA precedent, an asylum seeker who is just a little off in formulating their particular social group (even if they included one word too many or too few) is stuck with such formulation, and may not amend it should they be fortunate enough to obtain counsel to assist them with their appeal. See Matter of W-Y-C- & H-O-B-, 27 I&N Dec. 189 (BIA 2018).
The Trump Administration’s policies towards Central American asylum seekers has consistently run counter to our country’s international treaty obligations. The Administration has tried to argue that those fleeing to our country are not truly refugees, falsely painting them (in the words of a Human Rights First release) as “frauds, security threats, and dangerous criminals.”
By undertaking efforts on so many fronts to make it increasingly more difficult for such claimants to succeed in their asylum applications, the Administration seeks to paint the resulting drop in grant rates as “proof” that such claims are “fraudulent.” In criminally prosecuting those who eventually try to cross the border when they are no longer to endure the conditions under which refugees are forced to wait in Mexico, the Administration cites such convictions as “proof” that the refugees are “criminals.” The Administration seems to view the flight to the U.S. as a choice, and believes that its deterrence policies might convince refugees to simply return to their home countries.
Such view is at odds with reality. This December articleby Prof. Karen Musalo in the Yale Journal of Law & Feminismadds further corroboration to the many reports detailing the horrible violence Central American refugees are fleeing. And the World Migration Project at the Columbia Univ. School of Journalism continues to track those who have suffered harm (including death) following their deportation from the U.S.; its findings also counter the Administration’s position that those fleeing are not truly refugees, and that repatriation is a viable option.
As the late Arthur Helton wrote more than 25 years ago, “A basic measure of a civilized society is the way it treats strangers.” Similarly, Jorge Ramosrecently wrote in Timemagazine that “countries are judged by the way they treat the most vulnerable, not the rich and powerful.” Our government’s policies towards asylum seekers (including its most recent efforts to interfere with that population’s ability to retain counsel), and its willingness to expose such a vulnerable population to harm (including murder and rape) shames us all.
Copyright 2019 Jeffrey S. Chase. All rights reserved.
Jeffrey S. Chase is an immigration lawyer in New York City. Jeffrey is a former Immigration Judge, senior legal advisor at the Board of Immigration Appeals, and volunteer staff attorney at Human Rights First. He is a past recipient of AILA’s annual Pro Bono Award, and previously chaired AILA’s Asylum Reform Task Force.
As Jeffrey and I have pointed out a number of times before, a “bona fide Administration” could resolve the “self-created non-crisis” at the Southern Border simply by:
Following existing asylum laws;
Generously granting asylum in accordance with the Refugee Act of 1980, the Supreme Court’s decision in INS v. Cardoza-Fonseca, the BIA’s precedent in Matter of Mogharrabi, and the Handbook;
Working with NGOs, pro bono groups, bar associations, “Big Law,” the religious community, and affected states and localities to provide easy access to counsel and achieve universal representation of asylum seekers, which, in turn:
has a proven strong correlation to court appearances;
makes most detention unnecessary, and most important,
safeguards Due Process and the rule of law.
Clearly, these measures could be accomplished more quickly and for far less than the $5.7 billion that Trump so desperately wants to waste on his Wall. And, other than perhaps a few “tweaks” to allow some U.S. Government funding of pro bono and “low bono” representation projects, they would not require a major rewrite of current statues.
By sharply reducing unnecessary and wasteful “civil immigration detention” (a/k/a the “New American Gulag” or “NAG”) and the many legal challenges it generates, the money and litigation time, on both sides, could be redirected at actually solving the problems, rather than making them worse.
On Friday, officials from the Trump administration said it would require too much effort to reunite the thousands of families it separated before implementing its “zero-tolerance” policy in April, according to a declaration filed as part of an ongoing lawsuit between the American Civil Liberties Union and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Last month, the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services released a report stating that “thousands” more immigrant families had been separated than the government had previously disclosed. In the declaration submitted Friday, HHS officials said they don’t know the exact number of children who were taken from their parents before “zero tolerance” and that finding them would be too much of a “burden” since there was no formal tracking system in place.
“The Trump administration’s response is a shocking concession that it can’t easily find thousands of children it ripped from parents and doesn’t even think it’s worth the time to locate each of them,” said Lee Gelernt, the lead lawyer in the ACLU’s ongoing lawsuit against ICE, in a statement. “The administration also doesn’t dispute that separations are ongoing in significant numbers.”
HHS did not respond to HuffPost’s request for comment.
The deputy director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, Jallyn Sualog, said that 100 ORR analysts would have to work eight hours each day for between seven and 15 months to “even begin reconciling” data on separated families. “In my judgment, ORR does not have the requisite staff for such a project,” Sualog wrote in the declaration.
Immigration advocates are appalled by the fact that the government didn’t bother to properly track separated families and that it is now shirking its responsibility to reunite parents and children.
“They are saying they just don’t care,” said Michelle Brané, the director of the Migrant Rights and Justice Program at the Women’s Refugee Commission. “It’s shocking frivolous om a human rights perspective for a government to behave this way.”
“I think the policy of taking the children away in the first place was cruel,” said Gelernt, the ACLU lawyer, “but to not even have a system to return the parents to the children just increases the magnitude of the cruelty.”
The government also failed to properly track the roughly 2,800 children that it separated from their parents under the “zero-tolerance” policy between April and June. The administration was required to reunite families as part of an ACLU lawsuit, an ongoing process that has at times required immigration advocates to search for deported parents on foot in remote, crime-ridden areas of Central America.
According to the inspector general’s report, 159 children who were separated under “zero tolerance” are still in ORR care, most of whose parents were deported and decided to keep their kids in the U.S. due to dangerous situations back home. If the government doesn’t allow those parents to re-apply for asylum in the U.S., families may remain permanently separated. Gelernt worries that before “zero tolerance” the government could have deported hundreds more parents who might not have had a say in their children’s futures.
In the declaration, Jonathan White, a commander with the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, said that most unaccompanied children are released to family sponsors and that in addition to logistical challenges, trying to reunite separated kids with their parents could be destabilizing and “would present grave child welfare concerns.”
But Gelernt says the government should not be making decisions on behalf of mothers and fathers. “[The administration] had no right to just give these kids away unless the parent was making an informed decision,” he said. “This is not a situation where the parents put the child up for adoption. This is a situation where the child was forcibly taken from the parents.”
On Feb. 21, Gelernt will argue in front of a federal judge in California that all families separated before “zero tolerance” should be part of the ACLU’s ongoing lawsuit and that the government has a responsibility to reunify these parents with their children. He is disappointed that the administration failed to act humanely towards immigrant families in its declaration.
“The [government] is saying it’s not legally required for them to [reunite families] and therefore they won’t do it,” he said. “But why not do it because it’s the right thing to do?”
*******************************
Isn’t it time for the U.S. District Judge to start holding ICE and ORR officials in contempt of court? What about former AG Jeff “Gonzo Apocalypto” Sessions who “masterminded” this cruel fiasco?
Can there be justice without any morality or accountability?
As immigration policy hangs over the ongoing conflict over whether the government is going to remain open, there’s something missing from this discussion, something so fundamental that it’s quite remarkable that we all seem to have forgotten to even ask about it. The president is demanding his border wall, Democrats are fighting against him, and occasionally we bring up issues like the fate of the Dreamers and those here under Temporary Protected Status.
But what nobody asks is this: What kind of immigration system do we actually want?
Not what might happen in the next negotiation or what each side would be willing to give up, but what does each side see as the ultimate goal they’re working toward? If they could look forward ten or twenty years and say “This is where we should get to,” what would that look like?
It’s a vital question, because whatever we’re doing at the moment should be guided by our long-term goals. Once we understand what those goals are, we can think more clearly about where we should go after we get this whole shutdown ridiculousness behind us. And we all ought to be able to agree that there is some future we’re trying to arrive at, a point at which we have a system that works to our satisfaction and immigration isn’t something we’re constantly at each other’s throats about.
That may not be possible, but I’ll start with what liberals would like to see. There are certainly disagreements not just on the left generally but among immigration advocates as well, but there is a basic vision one can identify.
The first thing they want, of course, is to take the 11 million or so undocumented immigrants who are in the country now and give them a path to citizenship. That’s something even some Republicans agree with, and if you put requirements like learning English and paying back taxes on it, support becomes nearly universal.
Second, liberals would like to see an expansion of the legal immigration system, which is a consistent source of frustration and a driver of illegal immigration. When it can take decades to get approved to move to the United States, of course many people are going to opt for the illegal route, even if it can be dangerous and uncertain. If the legal immigration works, people will go through it and not around it.
And if you have a well-functioning legal system, you can make illegal immigration less attractive, with things like an E-Verify process that makes it harder to find work if you’re undocumented. There may always be some kind of black market for workers, but if you’re simultaneously offering people a legal path — both toward permanent residency and with temporary work visas for people who are looking only to make some money and then return to their home countries — it will be much smaller problem.
So in the liberal vision, we might end up with about the same number of immigrants coming into the country as we have now, it’s just that the overwhelming majority would be coming legally. We’d have security at the border, but we wouldn’t need ICE breaking down doors and tearing parents from their children’s arms. We’d have a robust system to evaluate asylum claims so we wouldn’t have to be throwing people in cages. We certainly wouldn’t pretend that one day there will be no more demand in the labor market for immigrant workers.
There are many Republicans who could be okay with that future, even if it wasn’t exactly what they wanted. But the conservative vision is complicated. For years, we heard Republican politicians say, “I’m for legal immigration. I’m against illegal immigration.” They may not usually have been advocating significant increases in legal immigration, but it’s important to remember that the current venomous hostility toward immigrants was not always the standard Republican position. Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush were both far friendlier toward immigrants than Donald Trump is.
Conservatives might disagree with this characterization, but as I see it, their ultimate goal is a system in which coming into the country illegally is utterly impossible, but levels of legal immigration don’t change much. In other words, we still have immigration, but the flow slows to a trickle. And the Trump administration is making attempts to drastically reduce legal immigration. With the president’s enthusiastic support, domestic policy adviser Stephen Miller is driving a nationalist agenda that seeks to drastically reduce the inflow of immigrants to the country and even looks for every possible means to deport both legal and undocumented immigrants, even if they’ve been living here for years or decades.
That’s a somewhat extreme position even within the Republican Party, but it does reflect a discomfort with immigration that is common on the right. It’s the cultural problem, the fact that many people just don’t like having contact with people who don’t look like them or don’t speak the same language they do or eat the same foods they do. Trump very skillfully played to that discomfort by essentially telling voters he could wind back the clock to the time when they were young, before all this disconcerting change happened. His targets were the people who say “I don’t recognize my country anymore,” and when he said he would make America great again, “great again” meant “like things were when you were young.”
That’s a demand that can never be satisfied, even if it’s only a portion of the Republican electorate that really dreams of an America where there are almost no new immigrants and most of those who are already here just disappear. Unfortunately, that portion currently not only controls the White House but exercises a veto over any attempt at comprehensive immigration reform, because the rest of the GOP is so terrified of them.
Which is why it’s highly unlikely that we’ll achieve such reform, even reform most Republicans could live with, without both houses of Congress and the White House in Democratic hands. But that will happen sooner or later. Then we’ll see if we can get closer to a solution that everyone can live with over the long run.
****************************************
Right on, Paul! You “nailed” it! Pretty much what I’ve been saying on “Courtside” all along!
However, the unlikelihood of achieving “comprehensive immigration reform” in the “Age of Trump” shouldn’t prevent the parties from working together in a bipartisan manner on “smaller fixes” such as that relating to child marriage suggested by Nolan Rappaport, posted earlier this week. See https://wp.me/p8eeJm-3Hu
But they were willing to do whatever it took. Going back to Guatemala was simply not an option, they said. Monterroso explained that in October, their family was forced to flee after a gang threatened to murder the children if they didn’t pay an exorbitant bribe, five months’ worth of profits from their tiny juice stall. The family hid for a day and a half in their house and then sneaked away before dawn. “There is nobody that can protect us there,” Monterroso said. “We have seen in the other cases, they kill the people and kill their children.” Her voice caught. “The first thing is to have security for them,” she said of her kids, “that nothing bad happens to them.”
All told, more than 159,000 migrants filed for asylum in the U.S. in fiscal year 2018, a 274% increase over 2008. Meanwhile, the total number of apprehensions along the southern border has decreased substantially—nearly 70% since fiscal year 2000. President Donald Trump has labeled the southern border a national crisis. He refused to sign any bill funding the federal government that did not include money for construction of a wall along the frontier, triggering the longest shutdown in American history, and when Democrats refused to budge, he threatened to formally invoke emergency powers. The President says the barrier, which was the centerpiece of his election campaign, is needed to thwart a dangerous “invasion” of undocumented foreigners.
But the situation on the southern border, however the political battle in Washington plays out, will continue to frustrate this U.S. President, and likely his successors too, and not just because of continuing caravans making their way to the desert southwest. Months of reporting by TIME correspondents around the world reveal a stubborn reality: we are living today in a global society increasingly roiled by challenges that can be neither defined nor contained by physical barriers. That goes for climate change, terrorism, pandemics, nascent technologies and cyber-attacks. It also applies to one of the most significant global developments of the past quarter-century: the unprecedented explosion of global migration.
. . . .
They abandoned their homes for different reasons: tens of millions went in search of better jobs or better education or medical care, and tens of millions more had no choice. More than 5.6 million fled the war in Syria, and a million more were Rohingya, chased from their villages in Myanmar. Hundreds of thousands fled their neighborhoods in Central America and villages in sub-Saharan Africa, driven by poverty and violence. Others were displaced by catastrophic weather linked to climate change.
Taken one at a time, each is an individual, a mixture of strengths and weaknesses, hope and despair. But collectively, they represent something greater than the sum of their parts. The forces that pushed them from their homes have combined with a series of global factors that pulled them abroad: the long peace that followed the Cold War in the developed world, the accompanying expansion of international travel, liberalized policies for refugees and the relative wealth of developed countries, especially in Europe and the U.S., the No. 1 destination for migrants. The force is tidal and has not been reversed by walls, by separating children from their parents or by deploying troops. Were the world’s total population of international migrants in 2018 gathered from the places where they have sought new lives and placed under one flag, they would be its fifth largest country.
The mass movement of people has changed the world both for better and for worse. Migrants tend to be productive. Though worldwide they make up about 3% of the population, in 2015 they generated about 9% of global GDP, according to the U.N. Much of that money is wired home—$480 billion in 2017, also according to the U.N.—where the cash has immense impact. Some will pay for the passage of the next migrant, and the smartphone he or she will keep close at hand. The technology not only makes the journey more efficient and safer—smugglers identify their clients by photos on instant-messaging—but, upon arrival, allows those who left to keep in constant contact with those who remain behind, across oceans and time zones.
Yet attention of late is mostly focused on the impact on host countries. There, national leaders have grappled with a powerful irony: the ways in which they react to new migrants—tactically, politically, culturally—shape them as much as the migrants themselves do. In some countries, migrants have been welcomed by crowds at train stations. In others, images of migrants moving in miles-long caravans through Central America or spilling out of boats on Mediterranean shores were wielded to persuade native-born citizens to lock down borders, narrow social safety nets and jettison long-standing humanitarian commitments to those in need.
. . . .
The U.S., though founded by Europeans fleeing persecution, now largely reflects the will of its Chief Executive: subverting decades of asylum law and imposing a policy that separated migrant toddlers from their parents and placed children behind cyclone fencing. Trump floated the possibility of revoking birthright citizenship, characterized migrants as “stone cold criminals” and ordered 5,800 active-duty U.S. troops to reinforce the southern border. Italy refused to allow ships carrying rescued migrants to dock at its ports. Hungary passed laws to criminalize the act of helping undocumented people. Anti-immigrant leaders saw their political power grow in the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Sweden, Germany, Finland, Italy and Hungary, and migration continued to be a factor in the Brexit debate in the U.K.
These political reactions fail to grapple with a hard truth: in the long run, new migration is nearly always a boon to host countries. In acting as entrepreneurs and innovators, and by providing inexpensive labor, immigrants overwhelmingly repay in long-term economic contributions what they use in short-term social services, studies show. But to maximize that future good, governments must act -rationally to establish humane policies and adequately fund an immigration system equipped to handle an influx of newcomers.
. . . .
But protocols and treaties can, at best, hope to respond to the human emotions and hard realities that drive migration. No wall, sheriff or headscarf law would have prevented Monterroso and Calderón, or Yaquelin and Albertina Contreras, or Sami Baladi and Mirey Darwich from leaving their homes. Migrants will continue to flee bombs, look for better-paying jobs and accept extraordinary risks as the price of providing a better life for their children.
The question now is whether the world can come to define the enormous population of international migrants as an opportunity. No matter when that happens, Eman Albadawi, a teacher from Syria who arrived in Anröchte, Germany, in 2015, will continue to make a habit of reading German-language children’s books to her three Syrian-born kids at night. Their German is better than hers, and they make fun of her pronunciation, but she doesn’t mind. She is proud of them. At a time when anti-immigrant rhetoric is on the rise, she tells them, “We must be brave, but we must also be successful and strong.” —With reporting by Aryn Baker/Anröchte, Germany; Melissa Chan, Julia Lull, Gina Martinez, Thea Traff/New York; Ioan Grillo/Tijuana; Abby Vesoulis/Murfreesboro, Tenn.; and Vivienne Walt/Paris •
***********************************************
I strongly encourage everyone to read Haley’s outstanding article at the link. It is one of the best and most easily understandable explanations of a complex phenomenon that I have seen recently. As I always say, “lots of moving parts.” But Haley and her colleagues have distilled the fundamental truths concealed by this complexity. Congrats and appreciation to Haley and everyone who worked on this masterpiece!
Haley debunks and eviscerates the restrictionist, racist “fear and loathing” baloney that Trump and his White Nationalist gang peddle. The simple truth always has been and continues to be that America needs more immigration.
The only real question is whether we are going to be smart and funnel it into expanded legal and humanitarian channels or dumb like Trump and push the inevitable migration into an extra-legal system. The latter best serves neither our country nor the humans pushed into an underground existence where they can be exploited and are artificially prevented from achieving their full potential for themselves and for us. Right now, we have a mix skewed toward forcing far, far too many good folks to use the extra-legal system.
We’ll only be able to improve the situation by pushing the mix toward the legal and the humanitarian, rather than the extra-legal. That’s why it’s virtually impossible to have a rational immigration debate with folks like Trump who start with the racist-inspired fiction that migrants are a “threat” who can be deterred, punished, and diminished.
Contrary to Trump and the White Nationalists, the real immigration problems facing America are 1) how can we best integrate the millions of law-abiding and productive undocumented individuals already residing here into our society, and 2) how can we most fairly and efficiently insure that in the future individuals like them can be properly screened and come to our country through expanded humanitarian and legal channels. Until we resolve these, American will continue to founder with immigration and fail to maximize its many benefits. That’s bad for us, for migrants, and for the future of our nation.
As a reminder, in the context of Congressional negotiations on border security, I recently put together a list of “practical fixes” to the immigration system which would address border security, humanitarian relief, and improved compliance with Constitutional Due process without major legislative changes — mostly “tweaks” and other common sense amendments that would make outsized improvements and certainly would be an improvement on squandering $5.7 billion and getting nothing but a largely symbolic “instant white elephant” border wall in return. So, here it is again in all its hypothetical glory: “THE SMARTS ACT OF 2019:
SECURITY, MIGRATION ASSISTANCE RENEWAL, & TECHNICAL SYSTEMS ACT (“SMARTS ACT”) OF 2019
Federal Employees
Restart the Government
Retroactive pay raise
Enhanced Border Security
Fund half of “Trump’s Wall”
Triple the number of USCIS Asylum Officers
Double the number of U.S. Immigration Judges and Court Staff
Additional Port of Entry (“POE”) Inspectors
Improvements in POE infrastructure, technology, and technology between POEs
Additional Intelligence, Anti-Smuggling, and Undercover Agents for DHS
Anything else that both parties agree upon
Humanitarian Assistance
Road to citizenship for a Dreamers & TPSers
Prohibit family separation
Funding for alternatives to detention
Grants to NGOs for assisting arriving asylum applicants with temporary housing and resettlement issues
Require re-establishment of U.S. Refugee Program in the Northern Triangle
Asylum Process
Require Asylum Offices to consider in the first instance all asylum applications including those generated by the “credible fear” process as well as all so-called “defensive applications”
Immigration Court Improvements
Grants and requirements that DHS & EOIR work with NGOs and the private bar with a goal of achieving 100% representation of asylum applicants
Money to expand and encourage the training and certification of more non-attorneys as “accredited representatives” to represent asylum seekers pro bono before the Asylum Offices and the Immigration Courts on behalf of approved NGOs
Vacate Matter of A-B-and reinstate Matter of A-R-C-G-as the rule for domestic violence asylum applications
Vacate Matter of Castro-Tum and reinstate Matter of Avetisyan to allow Immigration Judges to control dockets by administratively closing certain “low priority” cases
Eliminate Attorney General’s authority to interfere in Immigration Court proceedings through “certification”
Re-establish weighing of interests of both parties consistent with Due Process as the standard for Immigration Court continuances
Bar AG & EOIR Director from promulgating substantive or procedural rules for Immigration Courts — grant authority to BIA to promulgate procedural rules for Immigration Courts
Authorize Immigration Courts to consider all Constitutional issues in proceedings
Authorize DHS to appeal rulings of the BIA to Circuit Courts of Appeal
Require EOIR to implement the statutory contempt authority of Immigration Judges, applicable equally to all parties before the courts, within 180 days
Bar “performance quotas” and “performance work plans” for Immigration Judges and BIA Members
Authorize the Immigration Court to set bonds in all cases coming within their jurisdiction
Fund and require EOIR to implement a nationwide electronic filing system within one year
Eliminate the annual 4,000 numerical cap on grants of “cancellation of removal” based on “exceptional and extremely unusual hardship”
Require the Asylum Office to adjudicate cancellation of removal applications with renewal in Immigration Court for those denied
Require EOIR to establish a credible, transparent judicial discipline and continued tenure system within one year that must include: opportunity for participation by the complainant (whether Government or private) and the Immigration Judge; representation permitted for both parties; peer input; public input; DHS input; referral to an impartial decision maker for final decision; a transparent and consistent system of sanctions incorporating principles of rehabilitation and progressive discipline; appeal rights to the MSPB
International Cooperation
Fund and require efforts to work with the UNHCR, Mexico, and other countries in the Hemisphere to improve asylum systems and encourage asylum seekers to exercise options besides the U.S.
Fund efforts to improve conditions and the rule of law in the Northern Triangle
**********************************************
No, it wouldn’t solve all problems overnight. But, everything beyond “Trump’s Wall” would make a substantial improvement over our current situation that would benefit enforcement, border security, human rights, Due Process, humanitarian assistance, and America. Not a bad “deal” in my view!
SAN FRANCISCO — Central American migrants seeking asylum at the US–Mexico border will be forced to remain in Mexico while their cases in the US are being processed, the Trump administration said Thursday.
The unprecedented policy change will take effect on Friday with the return of the first group of migrants at the border crossing between San Diego and Tijuana, Mexico, according to Vox.
The policy, titled the Migrant Protection Protocols, is the latest attempt by the Trump administration to discourage migrants, including asylum-seekers, from trying to enter the United States. Previous attempts, such as banning asylum for those who crossed without authorization, were blocked by the courts, and this effort also is likely to face a challenge in court.
Under the policy, certain migrants at the border will receive a “notice to appear” in US immigration court and will be returned to Mexico until their hearing, according to a Department of Homeland Security fact sheet. The Mexican government, according to the agency, has provided the ability for those individuals to stay in the country until their court dates in the US. On the day of their hearing, migrants will be taken to US immigration courts for their cases to be heard.
Unaccompanied children will be excluded from the policy and those from “vulnerable populations” may be excluded on a case-by-case basis.
“We have implemented an unprecedented action that will address the ongoing humanitarian and security crisis at our Southern border,” said Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen. “For far too long, our immigration system has been exploited by smugglers, traffickers, and those who have no legal right to remain in the United States. The Migrant Protection Protocols represent a methodical commonsense approach to exercising our statutory authority to require certain individuals to await their court proceedings in Mexico.”
A US official close to the process who is critical of the policy told BuzzFeed News it would lead migrants to “revert to sneaking in rather than going to ports of entry” and cause “more deaths in the desert.”
The Trump administration informed the Mexican government that it was going to be enacting the policy based on a statute stating that certain individuals can be sent back to the contiguous country they arrived from.
BuzzFeed News first reported that the administration was considering such a policy back in November.
Trump administration officials have accused asylum-seekers of gaming the US system, requesting asylum that they know they won’t qualify for so that they can remain in the country for months or years while immigration courts hear their cases.
Rep. Zoe Lofgren, a California Democrat, said the policy was a circumvention of the country’s immigration laws.
“Today’s announcement creates more questions than answers. Even putting aside the unlawfulness of this action, we do not know where these asylum-seekers will be held, who will be responsible for their safety, how and where their hearings will take place, or how access to counsel will be handled,” she said in a statement Thursday.
Jeff Chase, a former immigration judge, said the move was outrageous.
“We should be allowing asylum-seekers to enter and pursue their claims according to the international legal norms,” he said. “It will obviously be much more difficult for asylum-seekers to obtain counsel and to meaningfully participate in increasingly complex legal claims from outside the country.”
************************
Right on, Jeffrey! Thanks for expressing our outrage in the dishonest, deceitful, inhumane, and counterproductive actions of shallow Trump sycophant Nielsen. Another mess is sure to follow. Despite her claims, and Nielsen is an established liar, everything I’ve read indicates that Mexico is unready to implement this if it involves more than a few hundred individuals. And, if the program were that small, it wouldn’t be worth doing. The Trump Administration of incompetents has yet to carry out any major new program without screwups.
What if Trump, Nielsen, DOJ, and EOIR just did their jobs by generously and efficiently granting asylum as mandated by the Refugee Act, the Supremes in Cardoza–Fonseca, and, ironically, the BIA’s own well-established but seldom enforced precedent Mogharrabi?
What if we took 50,000 refugees directly from the Northern Triangle, as we easily could and should do?
What if the Administration worked with, rather than against, pro bono groups and NGOs so that asylum seekers could fairly and efficiently move through the system consistent with Due Process?
What if DHS enforcement actually concentrated on potential “bad guys” rather than getting sidetracked by treating refugee families like criminals?
What if Trump treated refugees like the deserving and productive human beings that they have been throughout our history and welcomed and integrated them into our society?
What if he stopped using false narratives and restrictionist White Nationalist racist lies to make policy?
What if he cut the often illegal, always “built to fail,” and grossly fiscally wasteful gimmicks, smoke, mirrors, and job avoidance and just got the job done?
We’d actually be on the way to making America great again. Too bad that neither the Trump Administration nor the GOP seems interested in doing the real work of making government function within the law and advancing the real general public interests!
Washington (CNN)Federal Judge Emmet Sullivan on Friday rejected a Justice Department request to stay his earlier ruling blocking the Trump administration’s policy that makes it difficult for victims fleeing domestic and gang violence to qualify for asylum in the United States.
Last month, Sullivan agreed with a group of women and children who said the policy imposed a heightened standard in reviewing their claims, concluding that the administration must stop deporting migrants currently in the US “without first providing credible fear determinations consistent with the immigration laws.”
Friday, he wrote: “The government now requests a stay, pending appeal of the Court’s Order, to enable the unlawful policies to continue to apply in all expedited removal cases, except the plaintiffs. … Defendants’ motion for stay is DENIED.”
The attorney general has full authority over the immigration courts — a separate court system which operates under the Justice Department.
*********************************
We have an Administration without shame, human decency, or, obviously, the will and skill to govern. And, a DOJ where lawyers act not as legal guardians of the people’s rights, but continue to defend the indefensible, ill serves the American people.
WaPo: In addition to its immigration provisions, the package — which McConnell could move to advance as early as Tuesday, although a Thursday vote appears more likely — would reopen all parts of the government that are closed. It also would provide emergency funding for U.S. areas hit by hurricanes, floods and other natural disasters.
TRAC: Since the beginning of the federal government shutdown, most Immigration Court hearings have been cancelled. As of January 11, the estimated number of cancellations reached 42,726. Each week the shutdown continues, cancelled hearings will likely grow by another 20,000. As many as 100,000 individuals awaiting their day in court may be impacted if the shutdown continues through the end of January. See also: These states’ immigration courts are most impacted by the government shutdown.
USAToday: Of the 60,000 employees at Customs and Border Patrol, nine of 10 must report to work, checking passports and manning pieces of the border wall that have already been built. But they’re not being paid.
Vox: Refugee admissions have plummeted, while rejections of asylum applications have increased. Arrests of immigrants without criminal records have returned to the levels of the first term of the Obama administration, while Trump works to make hundreds of thousands more immigrants vulnerable to deportation, by stripping them of protections under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program or Temporary Protected Status. And the travel ban quietly churns on.
CMS: The US undocumented population from Mexico fell by almost 400,000 in 2017. In 2017, for the first time, the population from Mexico constituted less than one half of the total undocumented population.
WaPo: Speaking Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” the vice president quoted from King’s “I Have a Dream” speech as he defended Trump’s latest pitch to secure funding for a barrier along the United States’ southern border.
WaPo: Richard Kessler, an immigration lawyer in Grand Rapids, Mich., said he was surprised when a woman he had worked with called to tell him that her son, a 27-year-old Marine veteran with mental-health issues, was being held in an immigration facility, apparently awaiting a possible deportation.
CNN: With Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand entering the 2020 presidential race on Tuesday, her dramatic shift on the issue of immigration over the past decade will likely be one of the central questions about her candidacy as she seeks to take on President Donald Trump.
DailyNews: In what could be its biggest campaign, the New York Immigration Coalition, the state’s largest immigration advocacy group, plans to spend at least $1 million on TV, radio and targeted social and digital media ads as well as billboards.
CBS: When U.S. consumers are calling about a hotel reservation or an airline flight, there’s a good chance a deportee in El Salvador is on the other end of the line.
NBC: Trump administration officials weighed speeding up the deportation of migrant children by denying them their legal right to asylum hearings after separating them from their parents, according to comments on a late 2017 draft of what became the administration’s family separation policy obtained by NBC News. The draft also shows officials wanted to specifically target parents in migrant families for increased prosecutions, contradicting the administration’s previous statements.
WaPo: The report issued by the inspector general for the Department of Health and Human Services says no one systematically kept count of separated children until a lawsuit last spring triggered by the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy, under which the government tried to criminally prosecute all parents who crossed the border illegally, taking their children from them in the process. See also As One ‘Tent City’ for Immigrant Children Closes in Texas, Another Opens in Florida.
Al Jazeera: Last year, around 2,297 migrants died or went missing in the Mediterranean while 116,959 people reached Europe by sea. According to the IOM, sea arrivals to Europe in the first 16 days of 2019 totalled 4,216, compared with 2,365 in the same period of 2018.
NPR: U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman ordered the administration to stop its plans to include the controversial question on forms for the upcoming national head count “without curing the legal defects” the judge identified in his 277-page opinion released on Tuesday.
USCIS: Generally, conditional permanent residents who file a Form I-751 must appear for an interview. However, USCIS officers may consider waiving an interview.
EOIR released guidance on Grace v. Whitaker, stating that for all credible fear review hearings conducted on or after 12/19/18, IJs may not rely on several aspects of Matter of A-B- as a basis for affirming a negative credible fear determination. Guidance obtained from CGRS and ACLU.
USCIS issued policy guidance in the USCIS Policy Manual to address the policies and procedures related to secure documents, including how USCIS delivers and tracks these documents and how requestors should request a replacement or reissuance. Comments are due by 1/30/19. Policy is effective 1/16/19.
CBP Liaison Minutes: If a permanent resident, who has a pending application for naturalization in which a Notice of Intent to Deny was issued challenging whether the individual had been eligible for adjustment of status at the time that application was filed, travels abroad and presents his green card upon his return, will he be admitted as a permanent resident? Are such cases flagged in some way? If there has only been a NOID and no action has been taken on the N-400, the individual will be admitted as an LPR. If the N-400 was denied and the individual was issued an NTA under Section 237 (but has not been served), CBP will re-issue the NTA under Section 212. If an NTA was issued and served under Section 237, the individual will be admitted as an LPR in proceedings.
2019 National Day of Action: On Thursday, April 11, 2019, AILA members and their clients are invited to meet with their legislators on Capitol Hill to discuss immigration policy changes and the impact it has on their state and district.
Upwardly Global’s mission is to eliminate employment barriers for skilled immigrants and refugees, and integrate this population into the professional U.S. workforce.
Trump offers to limit his border wall to strategic locations
BY NOLAN RAPPAPORT, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR — 01/20/19 07:00 AM EST 945
THE VIEWS EXPRESSED BY CONTRIBUTORS ARE THEIR OWN AND NOT THE VIEW OF THE HILL
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) should give serious consideration to the settlement proposal that President Donald Trump made in his televised address from the White House.
Her objection all along has been to building a wall across the entire length of the Mexican border, and Trump no longer intends to erect “a concrete structure from sea to sea.”
He has acknowledged that much of the border is already protected by natural barriers, such as mountains and water. He wants the $5.7 billion he has requested for a strategic deployment of steel barriers at high priority locations.
The border already has many miles of barriers, including 115 miles that are being built or are under contract. He just plans to add another 230 miles this year at locations where they are most urgently needed.
These barriers would not make illegal crossings impossible, but they would make illegal crossings more difficult and make it easier for the Border Patrol to apprehend crossers.
His request includes $800 million for humanitarian assistance; $805 million for drug detection technology; 2,750 more border agents and law enforcement officers; and 75 more immigration judges.
In what he describes as an effort to build trust and goodwill, the legislation he is offering to implement his proposal also would extend the status of 700,000 DACA participants for three years.
This is just a temporary measure, but the outcome of the litigation over the DACA program is uncertain, and the participants will be extremely vulnerable if the program is terminated. DACA participation is sufficient in itself to establish deportability, and they can’t apply for asylum. There is a one-year time limit on filing asylum applications and they all have been here for more than a year.
The legislation also would extend the status of 300,000 current Temporary Protected Status recipients for three years.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has promised Trump that his bill will be brought to the floor of the Senate this week.
Trump also mentions the immigration court backlog crisis in his address. He says that it is not possible to provide an asylum hearing for every illegal crosser who sets one foot on American soil.
The asylum provisions state that aliens who are physically present in the United States may apply for asylum irrespective of their immigration status, unless one of the stated exceptions applies.
In my opinion, the sheer number of illegal crossers is the real border crisis. It has overwhelmed our immigration courts, making it virtually impossible to enforce immigration laws..
. . . .
*****************************************
Read Nolan’s complete article over on TheHill at the link.
At the time Nolan released this, he didn’t have the complete Trump proposal. I initially thought like Nolan that there might be the seeds for agreement in there.
But, Trump misrepresented what he was offering. In reality, it was yet another bogus 1000 page anti-asylum travesty drafted by White Nationalist in Residence Stephen Miller. Clearly intended to be a non-starter. Actually, it’s much like the dishonest tactics Trump used during the “Dreamer Debacle” that he engineered for no particular reason I can think of. And, that was when the GOP actually was in control.
Also, Nolan didn’t have the benefit of the Supreme Court action leaving DACA in effect for the indefinite future.
I’ve posted lots recently on what real border security and humanitarian assistance might look like. And, the Dems appear to be at work on something along those lines; a robust $5.7 billion but more constructive border security package that provides more resources for the Asylum Office, EOIR, technology, and inspections, but doesn’t undermine fundamental asylum law, negate Wilberforce protections for unaccompanied minors, or trash our international protection obligations.
Ultimately, once the Government reopens, that approach, plus permanent status for the Dreamers, with some wall or other physical barriers for Trump still seems to be the most likely way of ”getting to yes.” Then again, there might be no way of getting to yes with Trump.
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration plans to begin turning asylum-seekers back across the southern border on Friday to wait in Mexico under a new policy designed to crack down on immigration by Central American families, according to three Department of Homeland Security officials familiar with the matter.
Customs and Border Protection officers will begin returning asylum-seekers trying to enter at the San Ysidro port of entry in California from Tijuana, Mexico, where thousands of migrants from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador are already waiting in poor conditions.
The Trump administration has blamed that court decision, known as the Flores settlement, for being a magnet that is driving record numbers of immigrant families to apply for asylum at the southern border. Last summer under the “zero tolerance” policy, DHS separated asylum-seeking parents from their children at the border, sparking international outcry.
Overall numbers of undocumented immigrants apprehended or stopped from legally entering the United States are lower than the historic highs reached in the early 2000s.
Children who travel without a guardian, immigrants who appear ill as well as other “vulnerable populations” will be exempt from the policy and allowed to wait in the U.S. for an immigration hearing.
Immigrant and civil rights organizations have threatened to sue the Trump administration over the policy, known as Migration Protection Policy, which Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen announced was coming in her congressional testimony in December.
The policy is a unilateral move by the U.S. and not part of an agreement with Mexico, two officials said, though Mexico has agreed to care for immigrants who are waiting to apply. The Lopez Obrador administration in Mexico has been vocal about its opposition to the policy in the past.
Beginning Friday, the asylum-seekers who come to the San Ysidro port of entry will be sent back to Tijuana with a notice to appear in court in San Diego. On their court dates, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement will provide transportation from the port of entry to immigration court. Asylum-seekers will also be given a 24-hour hotline to call for the status of their asylum cases.
SHUTDOWN HAS FURLOUGHED IMMIGRATION COURT JUDGES
Due to a backlog in U.S. immigration courts of more than 800,000 cases, asylum-seekers currently have to wait months or even years to see a judge. DHS has asked the Justice Department to expedite the cases of immigrants waiting in Mexico, and two officials said they expect the asylum-seekers affected by the new policy to wait no more than a year.
The partial government shutdown over President Donald Trump’s plan for a border wall has furloughed immigration judges, however, so the backlog of cases is expected to rise.I
Conditions for Central Americans waiting in Tijuana are already poor. CBP officers on the U.S. side are practicing “metering” where they let in somewhere from 40 to 100 immigrants per day. Shelters for families and children in Tijuana are overcrowded and many are struggling to meet migrants’ basic needs.
They also face backlash from Tijuana residents who do not want their city overrun with Central Americans. Two boys were lured out of a camp and murdered late last year.
Human rights organizations have warned that turning back the small number of immigrants who are allowed to cross into the U.S. to claim asylum will only worsen the problem and force asylum-seekers to either wait in poor conditions or resort to dangerous routes to cross illegally.
Two children died in the custody of U.S. Border Protection in December after traveling with their parents through rough terrain in remote areas.
******************************
With the Trump Administration, what they say is seldom what you get. Remember sycophant and “frequent liar” Nielsen falsely claiming that there was “no family separation policy.”
So, I would be surprised if officials on either side of the border actually are prepared to carry this out without major problems. Indeed, almost every major restrictionist immigration initiative announced by the Trump Administration has proved to be 1) wholly illegal; 2) partially illegal; and/or 3) incompetently administered, as well as dumb and in many cases intentionally cruel. An Administration of Clowns doesn’t turn into a troupe of trapeze artists overnight. The question really isn’t whether DHS will screw this up, but rather how.
First, it’s not clear what provisions have been made for attorney access. And, of course processing all cases at a few ports of entry, rather than distributing them across the U.S., could limit the pool of available, mostly pro bono, attorneys.
On the flip side, concentrating cases at a limited number of ports of entry might make it more possible for NGOs and pro bono organizations to concentrate resources and create representation programs. Still, a real asylum project carried out by a Government legitimately interested in complying with the law and Due Process would not be implemented without working with pro bono groups in advance to set up a representation and access system. Clearly, the failure to do that shows bad faith on the part of the Administration. Because individuals are entitled to representation (but not appointed counsel) in removal proceedings that, in and of itself, ought to be a reason for enjoining the program on statutory and Due Process grounds until there is a realistic plan for giving reasonable access to counsel.
The second thing that jumps out at me as unlikely is the promise that ICE will “taxi” individuals from the border to their hearings and back. One might wonder why a supposed law enforcement agency is operating a “taxi service.” Beyond that, my experience on the detained docket in Immigration Court was that ICE sometimes struggled to get detainees to court on time when they were residing in the same facility as the courtroom. It seems unlikely that ICE will be able to produce individuals from the Mexican border in a timely manner for their court hearings. And remember folks, these are the clowns who don’t even know how many children they have in their custody and where they all are!
Third, if these cases are “prioritized” by the toadies at EOIR, at the demand of DHS, it will lead to yet another round of “Aimless Docket Reshuffling” and arbitrary delays in the captive and already failed Immigration Court System which the Trump Administration essentially has destroyed and ground into the dirt.
Fourth, since the Administration has already had detainees die in the U.S., and has also allowed individuals to die in Mexico while awaiting intentionally delayed interviews, I hope that advocacy groups are preparing civil suits to hold Nielsen and other officials personally liable for very predictable unconstitutional harm inflicted on individual asylum applicants.
A major recurring problem with running a White Nationalist regime is that policy is built upon false narratives, outright lies, and racist-inspired myths. So instead of working with folks with real expertise to solve problems, they waste our taxpayer money on endless gimmicks and illegal schemes. All are “built to fail” and many are proven failures. But, that’s what a Kakistocracy does.
At some point, Nielsen’s disgraceful record of dishonesty, sycophancy, and incompetence is likely to come back to haunt her. She truly is a “Child of the Kakistocracy.”
I understand the Dems reluctance to enable Trump’s “hostage taking” strategy. But, I doubt they can solve that with Trump and the GOP controlling two of the three political arms of Government.
Indeed, a better idea would be for Speaker Pelosi and Majority Leader McConnell to get together “when the smoke clears” and see what they can do jointly to take back and fix the bipartisan Congressional budget process and protect it from overreach by Executives of both parties. For two of the major legislative “gurus” of our age in the twilight of their careers, that would be a great “bipartisan legacy.”
But, for the time being, folks are suffering, and lives are in danger: Government employees, those that depend on Government, asylum applicants, Dreamers, TPSers, those in Immigration Court, and the families of all of the foregoing. So, I think the Dems should make a “robust” counterproposal that gives Trump at least part of his “Wall,” but also includes other important reforms and improvements that will diminish the impact of border migration issues in the future. Most important, almost everything in this proposal would save or improve some human lives and benefit America in the short and long run.
So, here’s my outline of the “SECURITY, MIGRATION ASSISTANCE RENEWAL, & TECHNICAL SYSTEMS ACT (“SMARTS ACT”) OF 2019”
SECURITY, MIGRATION ASSISTANCE RENEWAL, & TECHNICAL SYSTEMS ACT (“SMARTS ACT”) OF 2019
Federal Employees
Restart the Government
Retroactive pay raise
Enhanced Border Security
Fund half of “Trump’s Wall”
Triple the number of USCIS Asylum Officers
Double the number of U.S. Immigration Judges and Court Staff
Additional Port of Entry (“POE”) Inspectors
Improvements in POE infrastructure, technology, and technology between POEs
Additional Intelligence, Anti-Smuggling, and Undercover Agents for DHS
Anything else in the Senate Bill that both parties agree upon
Humanitarian Assistance
Road to citizenship for a Dreamers & TPSers
Prohibit family separation
Funding for alternatives to detention
Grants to NGOs for assisting arriving asylum applicants with temporary housing and resettlement issues
Require re-establishment of U.S. Refugee Program in the Northern Triangle
Asylum Process
Require Asylum Offices to consider in the first instance all asylum applications including those generated by the “credible fear” process as well as all so-called “defensive applications”
Immigration Court Improvements
Grants and requirements that DHS & EOIR work with NGOs and the private bar with a goal of achieving 100% representation of asylum applicants
Money to expand and encourage the training and certification of more non-attorneys as “accredited representatives” to represent asylum seekers pro bono before the Asylum Offices and the Immigration Courts on behalf of approved NGOs
Vacate Matter of A-B-and reinstate Matter of A-R-C-G-as the rule for domestic violence asylum applications
Vacate Matter of Castro-Tumand reinstate Matter of Avetisyan to allow Immigration Judges to control dockets by administratively closing certain “low priority” cases
Eliminate Attorney General’s authority to interfere in Immigration Court proceedings through “certification”
Re-establish weighing of interests of both parties consistent with Due Process as the standard for Immigration Court continuances
Bar AG & EOIR Director from promulgating substantive or procedural rules for Immigration Courts — grant authority to BIA to promulgate procedural rules for Immigration Courts
Authorize Immigration Courts to consider all Constitutional issues in proceedings
Authorize DHS to appeal rulings of the BIA to Circuit Courts of Appeal
Require EOIR to implement the statutory contempt authority of Immigration Judges, applicable equally to all parties before the courts, within 180 days
Bar “performance quotas” and “performance work plans” for Immigration Judges and BIA Members
Authorize the Immigration Court to set bonds in all cases coming within their jurisdiction
Fund and require EOIR to implement a nationwide electronic filing system within one year
Eliminate the annual 4,000 numerical cap on grants of “cancellation of removal” based on “exceptional and extremely unusual hardship”
Require the Asylum Office to adjudicate cancellation of removal applications with renewal in Immigration Court for those denied
Require EOIR to establish a credible, transparent judicial discipline and continued tenure system within one year that must include: opportunity for participation by the complainant (whether Government or private) and the Immigration Judge; representation permitted for both parties; peer input; public input; DHS input; referral to an impartial decision maker for final decision; a transparent and consistent system of sanctions incorporating principles of rehabilitation and progressive discipline; appeal rights to the MSPB
International Cooperation
Fund and require efforts to work with the UNHCR, Mexico, and other countries in the Hemisphere to improve asylum systems and encourage asylum seekers to exercise options besides the U.S.
Fund efforts to improve conditions and the rule of law in the Northern Triangle
**********************************************
No, it wouldn’t solve all problems overnight. But, everything beyond “Trump’s Wall” would make a substantial improvement over our current situation that would benefit enforcement, border security, human rights, Due Process, humanitarian assistance, and America. Not a bad “deal” in my view!
The Trump administration may have separated thousands of migrant children from their parents at the border for up to a year before family separation was a publicly known practice, according to a stunning government review of the health department’s role in family separation.
A report by the health department’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) published Thursday said officials at the health department estimated “thousands of separated children” were put in health department care before a court order in June 2018 ordered the reunification of 2,600 other children.
“The total number of children separated from a parent or guardian by immigration authorities is unknown,” the report said.
In 2017, officials at the health department’s Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) observed a steep increase in the number of children referred to ORR care who had been separated from their parents or guardians by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), according to the report.
In response to the increase, officials began informally tracking separations. “Thousands of children may have been separated during an influx that began in 2017, before the accounting required by the court, and HHS has faced challenges in identifying separated children,” the report said.
US attorney general Jeff Sessions announced the “zero tolerance” policy that made family separations possible in April 2018, but advocacy groups had been warning for months that family separations were already taking place.
In June 2018, a federal judge ordered 2,600 children to be reunited with their parents, but the health department said in the five months following the order, it was still identifying children who should have been considered separated but were not being clearly tracked in government systems.
At the Berks Family Residential Center, an immigrant detention facility in Leesport, Pennsylvania, advocates and former detainees say it’s normal for children held there to have health problems.
One mother, who asked to use her middle name Arely, told the Guardian that children often had fevers or vomited when she was detained at Berks. She said she watched helplessly as her two-and-a-half-year-old daughter threw up blood for three days.
Another woman – who asked to be referred to only by her middle name Fernanda because she still fears her antagonists in her home country – remembered children with the flu and respiratory illnesses, and how the on-site medical professionals would take their temperatures but never give out medicine. When Fernanda’s own daughter had fever, she had to go to the hospital just to get Tylenol, she said.
Since attorney Jacquelyn Kline began representing immigrant families detained at Berks in the summer of 2014, she said the majority of her clients have gotten sick. Usually, the illnesses have been minor. But sometimes, when common problems have gone ignored or untreated, they have spiraled to become something more.
“In my experience, [the staff] do the bare minimum and they don’t want to do more than that unless it becomes a situation where they have to do it,” Kline said. “Because they don’t address things when there are minor issues, it allows them to become more serious issues.”
One Berks resident wrote to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) in late 2015 that though her son’s skin disease had spread to his genitals and bled when scratched, the clinical team had not provided him with medication.In May 2016, a three-year-old boy who had been suffering from fevers and loss of appetite for months was finally diagnosed with an intestinal parasitism after his mother found a worm in his diaper.
Berks did not respond to a request for comment. Ice’s public affairs officers are out-of-office for the duration of the government shutdown, according to an automated email from the Pennsylvania officer’s account. Ice confirmed that he is currently furloughed.
Relatives cry over the coffin of seven-year old Jakelin Caal, who died in a Texas hospital on 8 December, two days after being taken into custody by US border patrol agents.Photograph: Johan Ordóñez/AFP/Getty Images
The fact that serious medical conditions occur and go untreated for days, weeks or months while immigrant children are under the government’s protection may come as a surprise to many. But advocates who have been on the ground at detention facilities under the purview of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) are well acquainted with stories such as these that point to a wider trend.
“I am surprised that more children or parents have not died while in DHS custody, given the systemic failure on the part of the government to provide medical services,” said Kathryn Shepherd, national advocacy counsel for the Immigration Justice Campaign at the American Immigration Council.
In late 2018, the deaths of two migrant children while in US custody near the southern border made national headlines and refocused attention on immigrant children who are in the country illegally. First, seven-year-old Jakelin Amei Rosmery Caal Maquin died from cardiac arrest associated with dehydration on 8 December after being apprehended by DHS’s Customs and Border Protection (CBP).
Then, on Christmas Eve, eight-year-old Felipe Gómez Alonzo became the second child in a matter of weeks to succumb to illness after being taken into custody by CBP. It was later determined that he had the flu.
At first glance, the deaths appeared an exceptional phenomenon. Homeland security secretary Kirstjen M Nielsen has said that before last December, an immigrant child had not died in CBP custody in more than a decade.
But for those familiar with the ways in which DHS holds immigrant families beyond the border through Ice, the deaths felt part of a long medical history of neglect, misdiagnoses and close calls associated with undocumented children. This history dates to at least 2014, when the department ramped up mass incarceration of immigrant families under President Barack Obama.
“I don’t think that this is a new problem,” said Shepherd. “I think that this is something that’s been a problem for a long time.”
Before accepting her current post, Shepherd served as managing attorney for a pro-bono project representing asylum-seeking families at the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas. Women and children detained there have beenairlifted or rushed to a hospital in an ambulance on a number of occasions, she said. Last summer, Vice News reported that a toddler had died six weeks after leaving the Ice detention center, where she contracted what started as a common cold but evolved into a deadly virus.
Eight-year-old Felipe Gómez Alonzo died on Christmas Eve after being taken into custody by DHS’s Customs and Border Protection.Photograph: Catarina Gomez/AP
Brad Berman, a clinical professor of pediatrics at the University of California- San Francisco and fellow of the American Academy of Pediatrics, said the DHS facilities he is aware of that hold immigrant families crossing through the US’s southern border appear to be “providing inadequate or substandard medical care”.
“They are violating their own standards – federal standards, as well as state standards, as well as ethical standards,” he said.
Vincent Picard, deputy assistant director to Ice public affairs, said that Ice spends more that $250m annually on healthcare for their charges. He cited the June 2017 DHS inspector general’s report that found the agency’s family residential centers to be “clean, well-organized and efficiently run”.
“Ice takes very seriously the health, safety and welfare of those in our care,” Picard said in a statement. “Ice is committed to ensuring the welfare of all those in the agency’s custody, including providing access to necessary and appropriate medical care. Comprehensive medical care is provided to all individuals in Ice custody.”
An independent medical evaluation Berman did tells a different story. He found that “the standards of pediatric medical care and mental health evaluations and care” for one immigrant child “were breached during her stay” at Berks, the Ice family detention center in Pennsylvania, in 2016. The girl, whose mother Maria requested she be referred to by her middle name Beatriz, was bedwetting after traveling to the US from El Salvador. She was nine years old.
Soon after arriving at Berks, Beatriz had several appointments with Michael Mosko, a psychologist provided by the facility. In his notes from one of the sessions, Mosko wrote that after conferring with an interpreter , he was under the impression that the bedwetting “was related to nothing more than laziness”.
After Beatriz was released from Berks, she visited a pediatric urologist and nephrologist who diagnosed her with chronic renal failure – or loss of kidney function. Though the condition was likely associated with Beatriz’s premature birth, it was exacerbated by a misdiagnosis during her time in detention, Berman said.
Now, Beatriz takes pills every night for her illness, which Maria said can’t be cured.
“She looked good when we were in El Salvador,” Maria said. “It was when she came here that she got sick.”
For Maria and Beatriz – as for many of the families from Central America who have crossed the US-Mexico border in recent years – leaving El Salvador was an attempt at self-preservation. When licensed clinical social worker Kathryn S Miller evaluated Beatriz, her report indicates that Beatriz and Maria shared stories about how the child watched her mother get robbed at knifepoint, experienced a home invasion, and overheard accounts of family friends being murdered by gang members.
Over the course of a year, Miller evaluated a handful of children who were detained at Berks. She said there was no doubt that each of them had been exposed to repeated trauma while in their home countries and had legitimate reasons for requesting asylum.
While families seeking asylum make their case, many of them fall into DHS custody and rely on the medical professionals the department supplies.
“There’s just basic needs that children have,” said Miller. “And if they’re going to be tasked with taking care of vulnerable children, they need to have the training and support to make sure they’re taking good care of them.”
***************************************
The shutdown hasn’t stopped the Administration’s many abuses of migrants and children. Clearly, a Wall is not the answer to forcing the Administration to follow the law.
But more than two weeks later, the new strategy has yet to begin and it remains unclear how the plan would work – or even if Mexico is willing to enforce it.
But Mexican officials who would in theory implement the policy say they have been kept in the dark over the change – and some have explicitly opposed it.
“I had heard rumors, but I was not consulted,” said Tonatiuh Guillén, head of Mexico’s national immigration authority, told the Guardian.
“The US can’t just dump people into Mexico – they have to knock. We’ve asked for more answers, but the US government is shut down, so I guess they’ll answer when they figure that out. It’s all up in the air,” he said.
The number of people – mostly Central Americans – who would be parked in Mexico as a result of the move could be enormous.
“It’s not some small detail. The numbers just aren’t manageable. It will have far-reaching effects on services, employment, everything – the social and political fabric of Tijuana and other border cities,” said Guillén
Confusion over the current state of the plan reigns on both sides of the border: when Nielsen announced the move on 20 December, Mexico’s foreign ministry reluctantly accepted, although within days the foreign minister, Marcelo Ebrard, said he would need more information from US authorities. Guillén said Mexico had not formally accepted the plan.
Meanwhile, US Congress members wrote to the secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, on 2 January requesting the text and details of any agreement.
Hopes for clarity have been further complicated by the shutdown of the US federal government triggered by a funding row over Donald Trump’s demands for a $5bn wall on the southern border.
US border officials are already limiting the number of people who can apply for asylum at a port of entry, creating delays of several months for migrants hoping to get into the US – and overwhelming public services in Mexican border cities.
Activists in Mexico say the “catch and return” policy would push conditions past breaking point.
“Aside from this taking away people’s right to apply for asylum, it would cause Mexico’s northern border cities to nearly collapse,” said Esmeralda Siu Márquez, the executive coordinator of Coalición Pro Defensa Del Migrante, a network of local migrant support organizations.
“This would change Tijuana from being a transit point. Shelters, which are already at capacity, are temporary – we’d need housing, integration programs, school programs, etc. We don’t have the budget.”
Officials in Tijuana have already stretched thin resources, normally focused on Mexican deportees, to deal with the more than 5,000 members of the Central American migrant caravans which started arriving in November.
Cesar Palencia, who handles migrant affairs in Tijuana, says he only heard of the plan on the news. “The city isn’t prepared for this. The [Mexican] federal government does not really understand what this would mean – they have no strategy, no budget for it,” he said.
Mexico’s new president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, cut the country’s migration and refugee budget after he took office 1 December 2018, and has not indicated whether or not that would change in light of the new plan. His administration has also pledged visas and work in Mexico for Central American migrants.
But for many, like Samuel Tabora, a 24-year-old construction worker, the kind of jobs available in Mexico – particularly low-skill factory positions in Tijuana – do not pay enough for them to send much back home to Honduras, where over two-thirds of the country lives in poverty.
Faced with the prospect of staying years in Mexico, he said he would consider jumping the border fence with his partner and four-year-old daughter. “If they deport me, we’ll just turn around and come back. I want to work and make money and to have something to send home to my family,” he said.
Several of the asylum seekers who had heard of the potential policy said they would simply wait it out in Mexico. “Going back, I may as well just tie a noose for myself and hang it from a tree,” said Francisco M, who left Guatemala with his wife and three children due to extortion threats from gangs. “We are here alone and it hurt to leave our roots, but I’d have to have a death wish to go back there. No, we will stay as long as it takes.”
Advocates warn the plan would add formidable new challenges to the already-tortuous asylum process. “The policy essentially dispossesses people of their right to trial. It takes me months to prepare one asylum case. I’ll maybe meet with a person six times. People cannot build cases in the US if they can’t meet with their lawyers. How will they get to their hearings?” said Erika Pinheiro of Al Otro Lado, a legal aid organization in Tijuana.
It would also encourage migrants seeking asylum to take more treacherous routes, she said. “By taking away legal avenues to asylum, you’re basically telling people to jump over the fence.”
A dumb Trump policy followed by an idiotic Trump shutdown with an incompetent DHS thrown in the toxic mix. And the combination of an unhinged and unqualified President with lightweight sycophantic Cabinet Members is a much greater threat to our national security than asylum applicants seeking refuge have ever been or will ever be.
Politico: House Democrats will propose a two-part plan to reopen the federal government once they take power on Thursday, according to multiple Democratic aides. The proposal, however, won’t provide President Donald Trump with his much sought-after border money boost. Their plan would fund the Department of Homeland Security until Feb. 8, and all other closed agencies — such as Transportation, Commerce and Agriculture — for the rest of the fiscal year through Sept. 30. See also Graham floats trading DACA, TPS protections for $5 billion in wall funding to end shutdown.
WaPo: When President Trump tweeted Friday morning that he would shut down the U.S. border with Mexico if Democrats didn’t agree to fund his border wall, the obvious questions were: What would that look like? And can a president just unilaterally close off entry to the country? The very quick, and not particularly helpful, answers are: It’s unclear. And not really.
WaPo: The materials collected by law enforcement agencies, first reported by the New York Daily News, indicate that investigators may be launching a probe into the hiring practices of the president’s golf club. A spokeswoman for New Jersey Attorney General Gurbir Grewal said the office’s policy is “to neither confirm nor deny investigations.” The FBI declined to comment.
WaPo: “We’re still trying to recover from it,” Police Chief Michael Tupper said of the raid. “I think that there’s just a lot of fear that it could happen again. It was a very traumatic experience for our community. Not just for the families and people that were directly impacted, but for our school system, for our local economy, for our community as a whole. It was, in many ways, a devastating experience.”
Intercept: The National Border Patrol Council, the union representing Border Patrol agents across the country, is featured in a new video that includes white nationalists and anti-Muslim extremists. The video, titled “Killing Free Speech,” was endorsed by the union and recently shown by agents at a private screening in San Diego.
Vox: His tenure under Trump began with heading the Department of Homeland Security, where he became the face of the administration’s immigration policies, even as he personally disagreed with Trump’s aggressive stance on the issue. Kelly emphasizes now that he has great “compassion” for immigrant children. “Illegal immigrants, overwhelmingly, are not bad people,” he told the Times, adding that many are exploited by gangs and traffickers.
Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker announced the rescission of 69 guidance documents that are “unnecessary, undated, inconsistent with existing law, or otherwise improper.” Note, no additional information was provided about these individual documents. AILA Doc. No. 18122621
NBC: Judge William F. Kuntz II on Wednesday denied without comment a request by U.S. government lawyers to delay work on a lawsuit against Trump and other defendants. The government had said in court papers that Justice Department attorneys are prohibited from working, “even on a voluntary basis, except in very limited circumstances.” The request was made in a lawsuit accusing the Trump administration of an arbitrary and capricious action and racism for taking away the temporary protected status of 50,000 Haitians after a devastating earthquake that killed tens of thousands of people.
EOIR released a memo to establish standards for receipt of Notices to Appear as filed by DHS. Memo is effective as of 12/21/18. Memo notes that EOIR will reject any NTA in which the time or date of the scheduled hearing is facially incorrect. AILA Doc. No. 18122405
Acting Attorney General Matthew G. Whitaker issued a statement in support of the Trump administration’s “Remain in Mexico” policy. AILA Doc. No. 18122404
EOIR released information on immigration court operating status during a lapse in appropriations, stating that the detained docket cases will proceed as scheduled. Non-detained docket cases will be reset. AILA Doc. No. 18122614
Obtained via FOIA by Hoppock Law Firm, the purpose of this course is to train users of the Automated Nationwide System for Immigration Review (ANSIR) and Board of Appeals Processing (BIAP) to comprehend and properly use the new Case Access System for EOIR (CASE). Special thanks to Matthew Hoppock. AILA Doc. No. 18122672
Looking forward, Elizabeth, to even more reports of Due Process victories for the NDPA and further defeats for this Administration’s scofflaw White Nationalist agenda in 2019. Thanks for all you do to keep us up to date and informed!
More bogus, anti-immigrant, anti-Due Process certification decisions from AG
Pereira mess in scheduling
Cancellation mess; hundreds of thousands eligible for relief; no plans for adjudication
Dockets will continue to be screwed up by failure of responsible enforcement policies by DHS, failure of prosecutorial discretion exercised by virtually all other law enforcement authorities, and mindless, inappropriate “re-docketing” of previously Administratively Closed cases for no particular reason except White Nationalist inspired meanness
Massive returns of asylum and other improperly decided cases to Immigration Courts by Article IIIs
More deaths, illness, abuses resulting from Trump’s cruel, ill-conceived detention and border policies
Mexico and Article IIIs will,”push back” against Administration’s ill-conceived plans to “dump” legitimate asylum seekers over Mexican border
Public Charge Controversy
TPS Termination & Litigation
One of Trump’s dumbest, most unnecessary, & disruptive moves will wreak havoc on the economy and the legal system
Lots of fraud, waste, and abuse at DOJ and DHS will be exposed by House Committees
Will new AG prove to be “Button Down Version of Jeff Sessions?”
