DANAE KING – immigrationcourtside.com

🤮 ALLEGATIONS OF RACISM IN OHIO LATEST SLAM AGAINST MERRICK GARLAND’S FAILED “COURTS!” — “(People) need to know how these courts are just a mockery and that they’re really harming people,” says one Ohio advocate! — Lack of due process, poor performance, systemic racial injustice make Garland’s “courts” a “millstone around the neck” for American Justice and Dems!☠️

“Lady Injustice” has found a home at Garland’s dysfunctional EOIR! Black Mauritanians and other asylum seekers of color find that the scales of justice are systemically weighted against them when on trial for their lives in AG Garland’s “courts!”
Public Realm

Danae King
Faith & Values & Immigration Reporter
Columbus Dispatch

https://apple.news/AgFzMWECESo-_Tr_S7-sMDg

DANAE KING | USA TODAY NETWORK:

. . . .

In 2020, asylum seekers from Sub-Saharan Africa were deemed not credible in 8.5% of interviews, over 37% more often than, on average, for all nationalities that year, according to an August 2022 U.S. Shadow Report to the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, submitted by several advocacy organizations.

“This data further confirms concerns raised about implicit racial and other bias in credibility determinations in US asylum adjudications,” the report states.

The report notes that Black asylum seekers face different treatment in the immigration system than others, including longer than average detention times, trouble finding accurate and adequate interpreters, different treatment in court, lack of access to counsel, purposefully rushed proceedings, biased judges, wrongful denial of asylum and more.

Lynn Tramonte has seen all those scenarios happen in Ohio.

“In immigration court, it’s almost like you’re guilty until proven innocent and they would rather err on the side of deporting a refugee who was tortured than granting asylum to someone who might be lying,” said Tramonte, director of the Ohio Immigrant Alliance, a group of Ohio immigrants and citizens who work to protect the dignity and rights of all through activism.

Nemecek has also seen judges and government attorneys “team up on (immigrants) and ask all kinds of questions and find them not credible.”

From 2002 to 2022, 713 Mauritanians went before immigration judges in Cleveland, and 443 were denied asylum. Another 28 had another form of relief, such as withholding of removal, and 242 were granted asylum, according to TRAC.

The United States Department of State considers Mauritania so dangerous that it recommends U.S. citizens don’t travel there due to crime and terrorism.

Tramonte wishes judges would do more research on the nations where asylum seekers are coming from.

“They have zero knowledge of documents from other countries or even what it’s like to be tortured,” she said.

A spokesperson for the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) disputed those claims.

. . . .

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Read Danae’s full article at the link!

“Courtside” and others have been raising these issues for a long time! Yet, Garland has neither spoken out nor taken action to “clean up” courts that every expert would say are “broken” and need major changes, including better-qualified judges who have true expertise in asylum and human rights!

Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Kristen Clarke is totally “MIA” on this serious issue and on the racially-driven travesties in DOJ’s “wholly-owned” court system, in immigration detention centers, and at the Southern Border! Associate AG Vanita Gupta, once a civil rights icon, has “vaporized” on perhaps the biggest, potentially solvable, civil rights/racial justice issue facing America! What’s happening here?

I spent years doing Mauritanian asylum cases on the EOIR Ohio Docket (and, to a lesser extent, in the “Legacy” Arlington Immigration Court). Most were clear grants of asylum! Few were appealed by ICE! Almost none were reversed by the BIA! I doubt that conditions have improved materially since then.

Unfortunately, mistreatment of Black Mauritanian asylum seekers by EOIR is nothing new. It has a long and disreputable history going back decades.

In the late 1990’s, my now Round Table colleague Judge Lory Diana Rosenberg and I frequently dissented from wrong-headed denials of Mauritanian asylum claims by our BIA colleagues. See, e.g., Matter of M-D-, 23 I&N Dec. 1180, 1185, 1189 (Schmidt, Chairman, Rosenberg, Board Member dissenting), rev’d sub nom, Diallo v. INS, 232 F.3d 279 (2d Cir. 2000). There, the Circuit, in a decision written by Chief Judge Walker, agreed with many of the points raised by Judge Rosenberg and me in our respective dissents: “[T]he BIA failed to: (1) rule explicitly on the credibility of Diallo’s testimony; (2) explain why it was reasonable in this case to expect additional corroboration; or (3) assess the sufficiency of Diallo’s explanations for the absence of corroborating evidence.”

Judge Rosenberg and I were later “rewarded” by AG John Ashcroft by being “purged” from the BIA, along with a minority of other colleagues who had the temerity to stand up for the legal and human rights of migrants! Folks at EOIR “got the message” that standing up for immigrants’ rights and due process could be “career threatening!”

That, in turn, unleashed a crescendo of sloppy, anti-migrant, dehumanizing decisions emanating from EOIR. Things got so bad so fast that subsequent Bush II AGs Gonzalez and Mukasey were finally forced, under extreme pressure from the Article IIIs, to intervene and put a stop to the most glaring abuses.

But, in fact, the EOIR system never recovered from that debacle. From then on, the BIA has been largely a “captain may I rubber stamp” (credit “Sir Jeffrey” Chase) for DHS Enforcement and each Administration’s political agenda. It’s been a continuous downward spiral, with subsequent AGs either actively encouraging abuses of asylum seekers and other migrants or being “willfully indifferent” to the ongoing legal and human rights disasters on their watches.

It’s interesting how when the “powers that be” ignore abuses, they don’t go away. They just fester and get worse. Garland’s “what me worry” stewardship over EOIR is a classic example.

As for EOIR’s claim that they are providing IJs with “robust” asylum training, in the words of my friend, Kansas City attorney (and former Arlington intern) Andrea Martinez, “I call BS!” The proof is in the results!

My friend and Round Table colleague Judge “Sir Jeffrey” Chase puts it more elegantly:

In stating that the program is “robust” (i.e. fine as is), who among EOIR’s upper-level leadership is enough of an expert in the topic to make that determination? There are actually recent IJ hires with a great deal of expertise in asylum and CAT, but to my knowledge, they are not the ones creating or presenting the trainings.

EOIR’s asylum and CAT training remains insufficient, and the evidence of this can be found in the deluge of Circuit Court reversals, or even from simply reviewing hearing transcripts. Just compare the USCIS Asylum Officer training program with EOIR’s IJ training materials. A particular problem is the failure to properly train new IJs in the case law of the specific circuit in which they sit. Immigration Judges are largely left to their own devices to learn the law properly.

As the article states, these issues concerning Ohio have been raised before! See, e.g., https://immigrationcourtside.com/2022/10/07/🏴☠%EF%B8%8F🤮-halls-of-injustice-allegations-of-racism-misogyny-islamophobia-other-bias-have-been-swirling-around-garlands-dysfunctional-eoir/ Yet, there is no response from Garland. If the DOJ has done an investigation, the results should be made public. If not, the public deserves to know why prima facia credible allegations of systemic racism in his Immigration Courts have been ignored or deemed not credible.

Another example of superior asylum training available “on the market” is that developed by Professor Michele Pistone (a true asylum expert who has taught and inspired generations of attorneys now serving in and out of government) at VIISTA Villanova. I am sure that EOIR could have arranged with Professor Pistone to create a “world class” asylum training program for both new and experienced IJs. Indeed, she would have been a logical choice for Garland to have recruited for a senior position at EOIR.

The talent to fix EOIR exists on the open market. However, EOIR can’t be fixed with the senior management team Garland has put, or in some cases left, in place.

In the meantime, the stunningly poor quality, blatant racial insensitivity, and inept judicial administration Garland tolerates at EOIR will continue to be a millstone around the neck of American Justice and the Democratic Party. To what depths Garland will drag both remains to be seen.

Millstone — Garland’s dysfunctional and systemically biased Immigration “Courts” are a millstone around the neck for American Justice and Dems!
Creative Commons license

Finally, where are progressive human and civil rights stalwarts like Sen. Corey Booker (D-NJ) on this issue? Why haven’t they demanded some accountability from Garland? And, whatever happened to our first African-American Veep Kamala Harris? Does she still exist? What’s more important than racial justice in “life or death courts” wholly controlled by her Dem Administration?

🇺🇸 Due Process Forever!

PWS

07-18-23

MALICIOUS INCOMPETENCE: SESSIONS & BARR ERADICATED DUE PROCESS WHILE DOUBLING THE IMMIGRATION COURT BACKLOG: “[S]uch backlogs result when ‘the government focuses concern on immigrants and puts enforcement ahead of due process and civil rights.'” – Complicit Article III Appellate Courts Are Likely To End Up With The Absolute Disaster They Enabled!

https://apple.news/AbprF_RZWSBmtsn5WT35I_w

By DANAE KING, THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH

Immigration court backlog has nearly doubled under Trump

November 25, 2019 05:00 PM EST

The nation’s backlog of active immigration court cases has surpassed the 1 million mark and has nearly doubled since President Donald Trump took office, a new analysis shows. In Ohio, 12,851 cases are pending in Cleveland’s immigration court, which includes Columbus-area cases. That’s up from 3,295 in 2009.

While most people might look a few weeks into the future when scheduling appointments for work, Amy Bittner has put court dates on her calendar for 2022.

The Columbus-based immigration lawyer already knows she’ll have to make the 280-mile round trip to Cleveland to represent a client at a hearing in three years.

“The backlog is a victim of this administration’s priorities. There did not used to be this backlog,” Bittner said.

Nationwide, the backlog has almost doubled, from 542,411 pending cases when President Donald Trump took office in January 2017 to just over 1 million as of Sept. 30, according to an October report by TRAC, a Syracuse Universityclearinghouse that gathers and analyzes immigration data from government agencies.

In Ohio, 12,851 cases are pending in Cleveland Immigration Court, the state’s only such court. That is up significantly from 3,295 in 2009. It’s also double the 6,184 in 2016.

Hearings are scheduled in the Cleveland court through Dec. 30, 2022.

Trump administration policies have not helped temper the rise in the country’s immigration court backlog, the TRAC report says.

Austin Kocher, a faculty fellow at TRAC and an Ohio State alumnus , said such backlogs result when “the government focuses concern on immigrants and puts enforcement ahead of due process and civil rights.”

“Very little resources actually go to the immigration court system and judges” compared with enforcement efforts, Kocher said.

Although the judges in northeastern Ohio stay busy, the backlog at Cleveland’s immigration court isn’t the worst in the country. In areas such as New York, Chicago and Philadelphia, immigrants are waiting an average of 1,450 days, or just under four years, to see a judge.

Part of the reason for the backlog, TRAC says, is that then-U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions in May 2018 ordered the nation’s immigration judges to end their practice of removing cases from their dockets without issuing decisions. That resulted in formerly closed cases being reopened, according to TRAC.

“The decision to reopen previously closed cases has single-handedly exacerbated the immigration court crisis, yet it has not received sufficient attention,” the TRAC report states. “This single policy decision has caused a much greater increase in the court’s backlog than have all currently pending cases from families and individuals arrested along the southwest border seeking asylum.”

Others blamed the delays in part on one of Trump’s earliest executive orders, from January 2017, when he made every immigrant who was in the country illegally a priority for deportation. The norm had been to prioritize those who had committed crimes.

“It is a senseless waste of taxpayer money to attempt to remove people who are not criminals and who are well-integrated into our community,” Bittner, the Columbus immigration lawyer, told The Dispatch in an email.

She said U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement should close deportation cases involving long-term U.S. residents who are not dangerous.

The Executive Office for Immigration Review, the Department of Justicebranch that supervises the federal immigration court system, did not respond to requests by The Dispatch for comment.

The backlog has grown despite the Trump administration having given the immigration courts “the greatest amount of resources,” said Judge Ashley Tabaddor, president of the National Association of Immigration Judges, a union.

The nation has 442 immigration judges, according to TRAC. Although about 220 judges have been hired in the past three years, about 100 others have left, Tabaddor said. She said that many of those who have left have expressed feeling like the Trump administration doesn’t allow them to do their jobs properly while adding quotas and micromanaging their work.

Each judge has about 2,000 cases, according to TRAC.

In 2016, when Cleveland’s immigration court had three judges, Bittner went to the court only twice. Now it has six judges, and she goes more than once a month.

Hiring more judges hasn’t fixed the backlog, Bittner said.

“It is very frustrating because justice delayed is justice denied, and while foreign nationals wait years for the adjudication of their cases, they are putting down roots here and having families, which makes removal from the United States even crueler if their case is ultimately denied,” Bittner wrote in the email.

She said some of her clients are grateful for the wait because they have more time to build a life here. Others, however, are frustrated, Bittner said, because they feel that they are constantly in limbo, and once they’ve built a life, it could all come crashing down when their day in court finally arrives.

A few of her clients who had waited years to make their asylum case in the U.S. court left for Canada instead, hoping things would go more smoothly up north.

“It just seems to be getting worse,” Bittner said.

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Actually, this article significantly understates the true scope of the backlog. Because, as noted in the article, in Castro-Tum, Sessions unethically, mindlessly, and unlawfully created a situation that, if not halted by the Congress or the Appellate Courts (note the 4^th Circuit Court of Appeals has “just said no” to Session’s bogus ruling), will require that over 300,000 low priority, properly “administratively closed” cases be restored to the docket. They vast majority of these are (absurdly) themselves backlogged, “awaiting re-docketing” (more than a clerical process in the antiquated, non-automated, paper heavy Immigration Courts). That makes the total backlog well over 1.4 million and still growing every day.” “Aimless Docket Reshuffling” at its worst!

And, because of the almost guaranteed legal and quality control problems with the Regime’s “cutting corners to deny due process” approach, many of these will end up in the Circuit Courts of Appeals in a condition that requires “return to sender.”

It doesn’t take a legal scholar or much of a judge to recognize that today’s Immigration “Courts” being run by biased, maliciously incompetent DOJ prosecutors don’t satisfy the basic requirement for “fair and impartial adjudications” to conform to Fifth Amendment Due Process. Moreover, the incompetent, “bad faith” mis-management of the Immigration Courts basically “throws garbage” into the higher courts and precludes effective, timely judicial review.

The solution: recognize that this travesty is unconstitutional and require a court-approved “special master” to run the Immigration Courts in place of the DOJ until Congress fixes the glaring Due Process and court management problems with an independent Article I U.S. Immigration Court as recommended by almost all experts!

We also must remember the DOJ’s & EOIR’s concerted White Nationalist attacks on foreign nationals and their legal and Due Process rights in the Immigration Courts is also a vicious, unprovoked assault on the courageous attorneys representing the most vulnerable among us and trying, against the odds, to make the system function for everyone’s good. By failing to aid and support “officers of the court” in this dire situation, the Federal Judiciary basically undermines our entire justice system and brings it into disrepute!

Constantly Confront Complicit Courts 4 Change!

Due Process Forever; Complicit Courts Never!

PWS

11-26-19

🇺🇸 Due Process Forever!

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