"The Voice of the New Due Process Army" ————– Musings on Events in U.S. Immigration Court, Immigration Law, Sports, and Other Random Topics by Retired United States Immigration Judge (Arlington, Virginia) and former Chairman of the Board of Immigration Appeals Paul Wickham Schmidt. To see my complete professional bio, just click on the link below.
NQRFPT = “Not Quite Ready For Prime Time” — Unfortunately, it’s a more than apt descriptor for the Biden Administration’s overall inept and tone-deaf approach to due process and immigrants’ rights in the beyond dysfunctional and unjust “Immigration Courts” under EOIR @ Garalnd’s DOJ.
Mike LaSusa Legal and Natioanl Security Reporter Law369 PHOTO: Twitter
Influx Of Solo Kids Poses Challenge For Immigration Courts
By Mike LaSusa
Law360 (March 31, 2022, 2:44 PM EDT) — Unaccompanied minors arriving in increasing numbers at the southern U.S. border are likely to face a tough time finding legal representation and navigating an overwhelmed immigration court system that has no special procedures for handling their cases.
The number of unaccompanied children encountered by U.S. Customs and Border Protection has risen sharply over the past year, to an average of more than 10,000 per month, according to CBP data. Those kids’ cases often end up in immigration court, where they are subject to the exact same treatment as adults, no matter their age.
“Nobody really thought of this when the laws were enacted,” said retired Immigration Judge Paul Wickham Schmidt, now an adjunct professor at Georgetown Law. “Everything dealing with kids is kind of an add-on,” he said, referring to special dockets for minors and other initiatives that aren’t expressly laid out in the law but have been tried in various courts over the years.
About a third of the immigration court cases started since October involve people under 18, and of those people, 40% are 4 or under, according to recent statistics from the U.S. Department of Justice’s Executive Office for Immigration Review, which operates the courts.
It’s unclear how many of those cases involve unaccompanied children and how many involve kids with adult relatives, and it’s hard to make historical comparisons because of changes in how the EOIR has tracked data on kids’ cases over the years.
But kids’ cases are indeed making up an increasing share of immigration court dockets, according to Jennifer Podkul, vice president of policy and advocacy for Kids in Need of Defense, or KIND, one of the main providers of legal services for migrant kids in the U.S.
“The cases are taking a lot longer because the backlog has increased so much,” Podkul said. Amid the crush of cases, attorneys can be hard to find.
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The immigration courts should consider “getting some real juvenile judges who actually understand asylum law and have real special training, not just a few hours of canned training, to deal with kids,” said Schmidt, the former immigration judge.
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Those with Law360 access can read Mike’s complete article at the link.
For what seems to be the millionth time with Garland, it’s not “rocket science.”🚀 He should have brought in Jen Podkul, her “boss,” Wendy Young of KIND, or a similar qualified leader from outside Government, to kick tail, roll some heads, clean out the deadwood, and set up a “Juvenile Division” of the Immigration Court staffed with well-qualified “real” judges, experts in asylum law, SIJ status, U & T visas, PD, and due process for vulnerable populations.
Such judicial talent is out there. But, that’s the problem with Garland! The judicial and leadership talent remain largely “out there” while lesser qualified individuals continue to botch cases and screw up the justice system on a regular basis! Actions have consequences; so do inactions and failure to act decisively and courageously.
And, of course, Garland should have replaced the BIA with real judges — progressive practical scholars who wouldn’t tolerate some of the garbage inflicted on kids by the current out of control, undisciplined, “enforcement biased,” anti-immigrant EOIR system.
Instead, Garland employs Miller “restrictionist enforcement guru” Tracy Short as his “Chief Immigration Judge” and another “Miller holdover” David Wetmore as BIA Chair. No immigration expert in America would deem either of these guys capable or qualified to insure due process for kids (or, for that matter anyone else) in Immgration Court.
Yet, more than a year into the Biden Administration, there they are! It’s almost as if Stephen Miller just moved over to DOJ to join his buddy Gene Hamilton in abusing immigrants in Immigration Court. (Technically, Hamilton is gone, but it would be hard to tell from the way Garland and his equally tone-deaf lieutenants have messed up EOIR. Currently, he and Miller are officers of “America First Legal” a neo-fascist group engaged in “aiming to reinstate Trump-era policies that bar unaccompanied migrant children from entering the United States,” according to Wikipedia.)
Meanwhile, the folks with the expertise to solve problems and get the Immigration Courts back on track, like Jen & Wendy, are giving interviews and trying to fix Garland’s ungodly mess from the outside! What’s wrong with this picture? What’s wrong with this Administration?
We’re about to find out! Big time, as Garland’s broken, due-process denying “court” system continues it’s “death spiral,” ☠️ taking lots of kids and other human lives down with it!
Prior to this year, I had never been on a college spring break trip. I had never experienced the stereotypical American “Cancun trip” full of debauchery, innocentfun and the fantasy MTV sold me in the early 2000s. Part of this was due to financial considerations, the other part was that I always had some kind of commitment whenever this season came upon me. This year, I finally got to go on a spring break trip with some of my law school peers. But the Mexico I saw was far from a carefree oasis for the inebriated and the carefree.
This past March, I along with my Asylum clinic professor and four New York Law School classmates volunteered in Tijuana for a week at an organization called Al Otro Lado, Spanish for “On the Other Side.” Al Otro Lado (“or AOL”) is a not for profit organization run almost exclusively by volunteers. AOL provides free legal and medical services to migrants both in Tijuana and San Diego and is currently in the process of suing the U.S. government for its recently adopted border policies. AOL is composed of volunteers from all walks of life. Some are attorneys, others doctors or nurse practitioners. Most, though, are concerned U.S. citizens who wanted to see for themselves the humanitarian crisis occurring in our country. They come from all walks of life, ages, races and socioeconomic backgrounds. But for that week, our collective problems and biases were set aside due to the more pressing concerns facing the people we were seeking to assist.
During my week volunteering with AOL in Tijuana, my classmates and I utilized our studies in immigration and asylum law to educate asylum seekers as to the process that awaits them. I met with over a dozen migrants, one-on-one, and heard their stories of plight and fear. I didn’t tell them what to say, instead I explained to them that asylum is a narrowly applied form of relief. That in order to be granted asylum in the U.S. that they had to essentially prove 1. They have suffered a harm or credible fear of harm. 2. This fear or harm is based on an immutable trait (such as race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership to a particular social group) 3. They cannot relocate to another area of their country because their government either cannot or refuses to help them. 4. They tried to go to the police or couldn’t due to inefficacy or corruption. Many of the folks I spoke with had no idea what asylum was or what exactly were its requirements. At times, I would find out that the family I was speaking to was crossing that same day meaning that I had 5 minutes to explain to them what a “credible fear interview” was.
My favorite part of my week though, was when I got to conduct the Charla slang for “a talk.” The Charla is a know your rights workshop where AOL explains the asylum procedure, the illegal “list” number system currently being conducted by the U.S. and Mexican government, and what possibilities await them after their credible fear interviews. Currently, if you arrive in Tijuana and want to plead for asylum in the U.S. you can’t just go and present yourself to U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials. The Mexican government has security keeping you from being able to speak to U.S. CBP. Mexican officials, though, do not want to take on this responsibility either, so the idea somehow came about of having the migrants themselves keep a list or a queue amongst themselves. The way it works is that every morning at El Chaparral, one of the ports of entry between Tijuana and San Diego, a table with a composition notebook is set up. In that notebook is a list usually somewhere in the several thousands. For each number, up to ten people can be listed and in order to sign up and receive a number you have to show some form of identification. Once you have a number, the average wait time is about 4-5 weeks. Sometimes families and people disappear as their persecutors come to Tijuana and seek them out. Every morning at El ChaparralI would see families lined up either to receive a number or to hopefully hear their number be called. Best of all, right next to the migrants who would be managing “the list” would be Grupo Betas, a Mexican “humanitarian” agency who aids in the siphoning of migrants to the U.S.
If and when your number is called, you’re shuttled off to U.S. CBP officials who will likely put you inLa Hieleras or “The Iceboxes.” Migrants named them as such because they are purposely cold rooms where migrants are kept for days or weeks until their credible fear interviews. Here, families can be separated either due to gender or for no reason given at all. Migrants who had been to La Hieleras would tell me that they were given those aluminum-like, thermal blankets marathon runners often get. They state how they are stripped down to their layer of clothing closest to the skin and crammed into a jail like cell with no windows and lights perpetually on. After La Hieleras, a U.S. immigration official will conduct a credible fear interview. The purpose of this interview is for the U.S. to see if this permission has a credible asylum claim. If you fail this interview your chances of being granted asylum become slim to none. If you pass three possibilities await you. First, you might be released to someone in the U.S. who can sponsor you, so long as that person has legal status and can afford to pay for your transport. The second, and newest, is that you might be rereleased and told to wait for your court date in Tijuana. And the last is indefinite detention somewhere within the U.S.
As I would inform families of the future that awaited them, I felt embarrassed of my country. I felt anger at the fact that we are telling folks who are fleeing cartel, gang and military violence to grab a number and wait in line for four to five weeks. That I had to help mothers and fathers write their information on their babies in case they were separated. It broke my heart to have to tell a mother that her pain and suffering just couldn’t be pigeon holed into “race, religion, nationality, political opinion or a particular social group.” Thank you, try again. I feel like after this trip I have more questions than answers. That the work volunteer work I was doing was more triage than anything else. That even if I graduate law school and become an attorney at most I would be putting a band aid on a gunshot wound and never really addressing the disease.
It’s easy to feel defeated. It’s much more difficult to work towards a solution. I’m not an expert on any of these subjects. But I know that xenophobia and racism have no place in international police or immigration practices. I know that the folks I encountered during my time at the border were families fleeing not criminals scheming. I know that I may not have all the solutions but we should begin by instilling empathy, humanity and altruism into how we speak of asylum seekers and immigrants in general. That not much separates me, an American citizen, from the people I met in Tijuana. I may not have the answers to the turmoil I saw at the border but I’m determined to giving the rest of my life to figuring it out.
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Thanks, Amín!
He is one of the students of NY Law School Clinical Professor Claire Thomas who went to the border to “fight for the New Due Process Army” following the Asylum and Immigration Law Conference at New York Law School. Putting knowledge into practice! Saving lives!
Two really important points to remember from Amín’s moving account. First, because of BIA and AG interpretations intentionally skewed against asylum seekers from Latin America, many of whom should fit squarely within the “refugee” definition if properly interpreted, many refugees from the Northern Triangle intentionally are “left out in the cold.” That, plus lack of representation and intentionally poor treatment by DHS meant to discourage or coerce individuals results in unrealistically “depressed” asylum grant rates. Many who have been to the border report that a majority of those arriving should fit within asylum law if fairly and properly interpreted.
Second, many of those who don’t fit the asylum definition are both highly credible and have a very legitimate fear of deadly harm upon return. They merely fail to fit one of the “legal pigeon holes” known as “nexus” in bureaucratic terms. The BIA and this Administration have gone to great lengths to pervert the normal laws of causation and the legal concept of “mixed motive” to use “nexus” as an often highly contrived means to deny asylum to those genuinely in danger. A better and more humane Administration might devise some type of prosecutorial discretion or temporary humanitarian relief as an alternative to knowingly and intentionally sending endangered individuals and their families back into “danger zones.”
What clearly is bogus is the disingenuous narrative from Kirstjen Nielsen and other Administration officials that these are “frivolous” applications. What is frivolous is our Government’s cavalier and often illegal and inhumane treatment of forced migrants who seek nothing more than a fair chance to save their lives and those of their loved ones.
Whether they “fit” our arcane and intentionally overly restrictive interpretations, they are not criminals and they are not threats to our security. They deserve fair and humane treatment in accordance with our laws on protection and Due Process under our Constitution. What they are finding is something quite different: a rich and powerful (even if diminishing before our eyes) country that mocks its own laws and bullies, dehumanizes, and mistreats those in need.
