"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.
1) The process would work much better if EOIR consulted the stakeholders for their ideas before issuing any memo.
2) In the absence of a real e-filing system, the assignment of trial dates without consulting counsel as to their availability is likely to generate lots of motions for different dates.
3) In a system with 1.3 million cases, why not ask how much time counsel needs for prep and filing rather than setting arbitrary dates? “Live (or even TV) Masters” give the IJ and the parties an opportunity to “negotiate” mutually agreeable, realistic hearing dates. That, in turn, minimizes the number of motions to continue or reset and maximizes the chance of actually getting the case heard on the first scheduled Individual (Merits) Hearing date (barring more Aimless Docket Reshuffling from EOIR “management,” which is a continuing problem).
4) Given how messed up the EOIR dockets are, what’s the point of pushing for 30 day filings when the merits hearing might not be for years?
5) How do you encourage stipulations with precedents that make them worthless when the AG or BIA or IJ can choose to ignore them to deny? Stipulations seem to bind only one party: the respondent. Can’t imagine a much clearer indication of systemic bias or lack of due process and impartiality.
6) To me, this looks like just another gimmick to allow EOIR to “deny and deport” for failure to meet arbitrary filing deadlines, without EOIR committing to any reasonable limits on its own scheduling of merits hearings. The R has to “race or lose;” but, EOIR can (and does) take forever with no accountability.
7) What’s the empirical basis for all EOIR’s assumptions as to what best and most efficient practices are? How would an agency renowned for “malicious incompetence” know? Best and most efficient for whom? Falls Church bureaucrats? Politicos on the 5th Floor of the DOJ?
8) I completed lots of cases at Master, besides in absentias. In some situations, I suggested areas for stipulation or agreement, or invited joint motions to transfer to my “short calendar” if certain conditions were met. I’m not convinced that “interactive” Masters serve no purpose. I’d be interested in whether the private bar sees these procedures as an improvement. Amazing what you can actually accomplish when you have the parties and counsel in your actual presence as an IJ. Amazing what an IJ can actually teach and communicate from the bench during a “live” master.
9) To some degree, this ham-handed attempt at micromanagement “from afar and on high” looks like a restoration of the paper heavy and labor intensive chaos that existed in the system before EOIR was created in 1983 and the late Chief Judge William R. Robie “invented” Master Calendar as an essential scheduling tool that brought order from that chaos. If EOIR ever got competent court administration and created a functioning e-filing system (like almost every other tribunal in the U.S.), the private bar and actual sitting IJs could undoubtedly suggest some helpful “tune-ups” to the Master Calendar process to take advantage of efficiencies made possible through e-filling.
10) This memo also violates one of the key principles of effective judicial administration — that docket management and scheduling of cases should be left to local judges in conjunction with the private bar and the local DHS Chief Counsel. They, not bureaucrats in Falls Church or DOJ policies, are in the best position to develop the most reasonable and efficient docketing and scheduling procedures coordinator that particular court. The major contribution that “EOIR Headquarters” could make would be a functioning e-filing system — an area where they have an inexcusable two decade history of abject failure, wasted effort, and squandered public resources.
10) To me, this looks like another “designed to fail” edict from the purveyors of disaster, disorder, and injustice!
11) Other than that, it’s great!
Those wanting to contribute to an organized response to this latest “gut punch” might want to contact Michelle Mendez, Director of Defending Vulnerable Populations at CLINIC, or retired Judge Sue Roy (NJ Bar, AILA, Round Table).
On April 7, after you have attended the EOIR session, you might want to “tune in” to our panel for the Hispanic National Bar Association entitled“Who’s Judge Is It Anyway?” We’ll discuss ideas on how attorneys, particularly those from under-represented groups, can go about forcing change to the institutionalized racism, grotesque disorder, and systemic abuses of due processes, best practices, and human dignity still going on in our Immigration Courts even as the Biden Administration claims to be focusing on racial justice in America!
Let’s find ways to force Judge Garland out of his “ivory tower funk” and to make him start paying attention to the Constitutional mockery, amateurish jurisprudence, defiance of common sense, and racist dehumanization of “the other” going on in “his” wholly owned and beyond incompetently operated “courts!”
GW Law Immigration Clinic Director Professor Alberto Benítez & Co-Director Paulina Vera
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Thanks to Professors Benitezand Vera for the great work for the NDPA that they are doing and the values they are instilling in their students. Just think what due process could look like in the Immigration Courts if all judges, trial and appellate, reflected those same values!
The concepts are actually very straightforward.
The Attorney General is a litigant before the Immigration Court. He or she can insert themselves in the process if they choose, to represent the Government as a litigant. But, the Attorney General should be treated as any other litigant — at arm’s length.
Individuals appearing before the Immigration Court are entitled to a fair and impartial independent adjudicator. As long as the Attorney General exercises control over the selection of judges, evaluates their performance, and can review and arbitrarily change their decisions, on his or her own whim, the system will remain unconstitutional and fundamentally unfair.
Interesting that law students see so clearly, recognize, and can articulate what Federal Judges, all the way up to the Supremes, legislators, and our Attorney General all fail to acknowledge and act upon. Hope for the future! But without better-qualified legislators, judges, and Executive Branch officials, will our justice system survive long enough to get to the future? Not without some very fundamental changes!
Every day, individuals have their constitutional, statutory, and human rights stomped upon, mocked, and abused by the broken Immigration Courts. Sometimes, Circuit Courts intervene to provide some semblance of justice in individual cases; other times they turn a blind eye to injustice and fundamentally unfair decision-making in the totally dysfunctional Immgration Courts.
But, nobody, but nobody, except members of the NDPA appears to be willing to recognize and act on the overall glaring constitutional and operational defects in the current Immigration “Courts” — that don’t resemble “courts” at all. That’s something that should concern and outrage every American committed to racial justice, equal justice for all, fundamental fairness, and constitutional due process!
EOIR and the U.S. Immigration Courts are an ongoing national disgrace — a festering sore upon democracy!🤮 Every day, they inflict unnecessary pain and suffering on those humans being abused by their fundamental unfairness and institutionalized chaos.!
How many ruined human lives ⚰️ and futures ☠️is it going to take for someone in the “power structure” to wake up and take notice!
A few “takeaways” from one of America’s leading “practical scholars:”
Think about a new start with a “clean slate;”
Deportation is “state violence;”
Immigration Courts are constructed to provide Gov. with an unfair advantage;
No rules, no due process, no justice;
Kudos to the NDPA & the Round Table;
Trump Administration spent inordinate effort improperly skewing the law to insure everything is denied and remove equible discretion from IJs;
Good provisions that provided discretion in the past to alleviate hardship and injustice have been eliminated by Congress: suspension of deportation, JRAD, 212(c), 245(i), registry (not repealed but now virtually useless b/c of 1972 cutoff date).
With the U.S. “on pace to encounter more individuals on the southwest border than we have in the last 20 years,” as Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said in a statement March 16, immigration at the U.S.-Mexico border has emerged as one of the toughest challenges facing the Biden Administration. Last week, President Biden put Vice President Kamala Harris in charge of “stemming” the flow of migrants, Biden was questioned about the immigration situation at his first official press conference, immigrant detention centers began to fill up once again, and lawmakers from both sides of the aisle made trips to the border to publicize the issue and propose solutions.
Biden’s attempts to address immigration may be new, but the issue is one that has dogged his predecessors for decades. Since the 1970s, Republicans and Democrats alike have tried to address undocumented immigration by constructing ever more draconian policies of border control, deportation and detention—border theater that grabs headlines and sometimes leads to short-term change, but never actually solves the problem.
There’s a reason why the U.S. government has failed for so many years to “control” the border: none of these policies have addressed the real reasons for migration itself. In migration studies, these are known as “push” and “pull” factors, the causes that drive migrants from one country to another.
Today, the countries sending the most migrants to the U.S.-Mexico border–especially the Central American countries of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador–are experiencing a combination of push factors that include poverty and inequality, political instability, and violence. And while the current situation may be unique, it is also deeply rooted in history.
Many countries in Central America have struggled with poverty since the time of independence from Spain in the early 19th century. While they are beautiful countries that are rich in culture and history, that colonial past has meant they have historically been home to large, landless, poor, rural populations, including many indigenous people of Mayan descent. In the years after Spanish control, they were typically ruled by small oligarchies that disproportionately held wealth, land and power, and their economies were primary export-dependent, which brought great riches to landowners but also exacerbated and perpetuated inequality and the poverty of the majority. Those dynamics have carried forward to today. More recently, climate change–in particular, drought and massivestorms–has forced the vulnerable rural poor out of the countryside.
. . . .
And while many Central Americans could indeed qualify for asylum based on their experiences of persecution, the previous administration made every effort to limit their ability to obtain it. Now the Biden Administration must decide whether to restore the asylum framework, which has become the only possible path to legal migration (as well as safety and security) for Central Americans and other migrants who—due to these combined push and pull factors—are desperate to come to the United States.
Given the complicated and deep-rooted reasons behind migration, lawmakers cannot control or “solve” the ongoing crisis at the border by simply pouring money and resources into ever more militaristic border theater. It’s no wonder that decades of such policies have done little to change the underlying dynamics.
Instead, if Americans are serious about changing the situation at the border, we need to address the push and pull factors behind Central American migration. We need to acknowledge the reality of the U.S. economy (in particular, that it demands immigrant labor to work low-wage jobs) and work to construct new legal frameworks that reflect that reality. We need to target financial and logistical support to encourage Central American countries to address the poverty and inequality that fuel migration, rather than cutting foreign aid, as the Trump Administration did. We need to do all we can to end the pervasive gang violence that pushes so many migrants out of their homelands. And of course, we must continue to evaluate our own historical and contemporary role in creating the longstanding problems that are pushing Central Americans to migrate.
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Read the rest of Julia’s article at the link. One key truth: many more Central American migrants would qualify for asylum and be legally admitted to our society under a fair application of our asylum laws directed and supervised by real expert judges who scrupulously enforce due process and best practices on a now biased, unfair, and dysfunctional system!
“Stemming the tide” might be neither realistic nor possible at this time. But, controlling it, managing it humanely and legally, and regularizing it, while lessening the “push” factors should be achievable.
It would, however, require bold actions:
Recognizing the primacy of humanitarian protection laws and insisting on due process in implementing them;
Putting experts in humanitarian situations, due process advocates, diplomats, labor economists, and demographers in leadership positions; and
Embracing much larger levels of legal immigration, particularly from Latin America.
Vice President Kamala D. Harris Vice President of the United States (Official Senate Photo)
Unfortunately for Vice President Harris and the rest of us who want humane, realistic immigration policies, there are reasons for our half-century of overall failure on the border.
Bloated government bureaucracies, powerful corporate interests, nativist politicians, and even foreign leaders are heavily invested in expensive and guaranteed to fail “uber enforcement” gimmicks. Failure basically creates a never-ending demand for more: more enforcement agents, “civil prisons,” jailers, deporters, cars, trucks, guns, boats, ammo, walls, fences, technology, courts, judges, prosecutors, lobbyists, “baby jails,” processing centers, foreign aid that goes largely into the pockets of corrupt leaders and their cronies, and a never-ending supply of underground, low-wage, politically neutered workers.
Additionally, we now have an entire political party with an agenda of overt institutionalized racism, dehumanization of the other, and fear-mongering White Nationalist myths driving its bogus populist narrative.
None of these “architects and enablers of border failure and institutionalized racism” are going “quietly into the night.” They will fight tooth and nail to defend their sinecures, profitable empires, and politically useful White Nationalist myths.
The politician who finally breaks the deadly cycle of failure and human misery at our border, while harnessing and realizing the positive power of human migration, will become a hero for future historians and undoubtedly merit a chapter in a new edition of Profiles in Courage.
Sadly, such recognition and adulation is likely to come long after she is gone from the scene. Long term vision and moral courage are not necessarily rewarded with short-term political popularity. Just ask the few Republicans who voted in accordance with the overwhelming, basically uncontested, evidence of Trump’s “high crimes and misdemeanors!”
That’s why it’s a tough challenge even for someone of Vice President Harris’s undoubted intelligence and abilities. It’s up to those of us who believe in a better America to keep her from getting sidetracked and co-opted by the vested interests of failure and White Nationalist myth-makers and purveyors.
BIA Asylum Panel In Action Albrecht Dürer, Public domain, via Wikimedia CommonsWoman Being “Tried By Ordeal” 17th Century Woodcut Public Realm Source: Ancient Origins Website https://www.ancient-origins.net/history/trial-ordeal-life-or-death-method-judgement-004160Woman Being “Tried By Ordeal” 17th Century Woodcut Public Realm Source: Ancient Origins Website https://www.ancient-origins.net/history/trial-ordeal-life-or-death-method-judgement-004160Filipe De La Hoz Investigative Journalist — Immigration PHOTO: Twitter
Filipe De La Hoz in The Baffler:
This has been a bizarre conversation on a number of levels, not least because many interlocutors proceed from the assumption that permitting humanitarian migration is even a choice that the president gets to make. It is not: U.S. law lays out that any “alien . . . who arrives in the United States . . . irrespective of such alien’s status, may apply for asylum.” The statute enumerates certain exceptions, such as adults applying more than one year after entry and the existence of specific “safe third country” agreements (which formed another front in Trump’s efforts to gut asylum).
There are no exceptions, however, pertaining to considerations of the domestic political climate, or whether accommodating asylum seekers is deemed just too hard or, god forbid, conducive to others subsequently seeking help. Internationally, the principle of “non-refoulement” (literally non-return) holds that a state cannot “expel or return a refugee in any manner whatsoever to the frontiers of territories where his [or her] life or freedom would be threatened,” as obligated by the United Nations’ 1967 protocol on refugees, of which the United States is a signatory. While the refugee definition itself is woefully outdated, the requirement to verify whether people fit the rubric before sending them away is absolute. These aren’t open questions, no matter how assertively they’re raised by political strategy hucksters and TV news hosts.
Read the complete article, which makes many other valid points and corrects the daily errors and myths about asylum spewed forth by politicos and the “mainstream” media at the link.
Filipe gets it! But, Judge Garland apparently doesn’t! What’s wrong with this picture? Pretty much everything!
Is this how the DC Circuit Court of Appeals functioned when Judge Garland was on the bench. Is this what “due process” means in America? If not, why is Garland looking the other way as injustice rolls off his “judicial assembly line” in Falls Church?
For Judge Garland to be credible on any racial justice issue, and for EOIR to provide due process, we need radical, not incremental, change! It’s interesting that Biden is getting well-deserved kudos for nominating a very diverse progressive slate of Article III judicial nominees.
Yet, to date, EOIR, with more judges than Biden could appoint in four years, remains staffed and operating as if Jeff Sessions and Stephen Miller were still in charge. And, non-diverse, anti-progressive would be an understatement for today’s Immigration “Courts.” For heaven’s sake, we still have an anti-due-process BIA churning out nativist precedents!
There is nary a “win” for an individual in the last four years of BIA/AG precedents. The BIA and the AG inevitably reject reasonable constructions of statutes presented by respondents in favor of inferior — even nonsensical — ones presented by DHS.
Sometimes, the BIA runs over clear statutory language, circuit precedents, regulatory requirements, or their own past precedents in the “race to remove.” Yet, in the “real” Federal Courts, even with a much more aggressively conservative composition, and their own often dismissive approach to immigrants’ rights, individuals prevail in published decisions almost every day! How outrageous is that!
I’ll believe that Judge Garland is serious about racial justice in America on the day that he 1) vacates every Trump-era AG precedent, and 2) removes the entire BIA and replaces them with a diverse group of progressive judges with human rights expertise and an unswerving commitment to due process. Appoint the “best and the brightest” as President Biden says!
Until then, I remain a skeptic and a strong critic of the just plain dumb, biased, and ill-informed approach to EOIR that has plagued past Dem Administrations.
It won’t be long until, predictably, the fallout from the so-called “border crisis” — unnecessarily hyped by the press and the GOP, but also stoked by the Biden Administration’s lack of expertise, preparation, and “Amateur Night @ the Bijou PR” — hits EOIR.
It’s not rocket science! But, it does require a much much much more courageous and informed approach, along with common sense and some human decency. And, the “next gen” folks who could make it happen, are still “on the outside looking in.”
Meanwhile, the idiocy continues from the Garland SG’s Office. Handed a golden opportunity to abandon a totally boneheaded position on adjustment of status for TPS holders who qualify to immigrate legally, the Garland DOJ continues to press an irrational and illegal Trump interpretation; one that not only defies the plain language of the statute, but reaches a beyond stupid policy result that keeps hard-working folks who meet the qualifications for green card status in perpetual limbo — for no legal or rational reason whatsoever!
Sure, the tone-deaf Supremes’ GOP majority might buy it, since it furthers a culture of bias and de-humanization. But, that’s no excuse for what was supposed to be a smarter, more ethical, more humane Administration.
The case is Sanchez v. Mayorkas, and the lack of insight, common sense, and humanity with which Judge Garland has approached the most important topics in current American law — immigration/human rights/racial justice/social justice to date — remains appalling! There will be no racial justice in America until our leaders “connect the dots” between racist immigration policies, a racist-enabling Immigration Court, and degradation of people of color in all areas of the law!
Judge Garland could cut through all the BS by putting the right folks in charge of EOIR and turning them loose. We needa lot less talk and a lot more action!
Many of us out here have long supported social and racial justice, through good times and bad. But, we’re likely to remain unconvinced about the good faith and competence of the Biden Administration until we see radical due process and racial justice reforms at EOIR and the DOJ.
There are many folks who could solve America’s immigration problems in a humane, progressive, and efficient manner that advances and enhances due process. But, to date, Judge Garland short-sightedly refuses to put them in the game or even to publicly acknowledge the debilitating problems in his wholly-owned and incompetently operated courts! And, every minute of delay costs lives and credibility.
Here’s a very recent letter from Senator Gillibrand and other Senators requesting that Judge Garland turn his attention to the EOIR disaster/travesty.
It’s a terrific letter. But, there is a major problem! All of this was well known long before the election! A number of us made the same points to the Biden Transition Team! Among other things, we emphasized the critical importance off “seizing the moment and hitting the ground running with a complete new approach at EOIR led by a team of available experts.”
The election was over in early November. Yet, here we are with the “same old, same old” failed anti-due process EOIR daily inflicting unnecessary pain, suffering, and abuse on migrants and their lawyers. Most of the same old DOJ unethical, legally questionable, defenses of the indefensible are still the order of the day. Some of the worst and most incompetent jurisprudence in modern American legal history, rendered in Garland’s name, is still being “outed” every week. There is no known plan for correction or even simple statement of awareness from Judge G.
Totally unacceptable! And the lack of preparation and basic competence is reflected in the problems the Administration has had at the border. A functional EOIR could and should have been part of reestablishing the rule of law at the border.
Instead, Judge Garland is making himself part of the latest chapter in America’s disgraceful and unnecessary failure to establish an asylum system that complies with due process and domestic and international laws. One that fulfills international treaty obligations, implements the generous protection objectives of the Refugee Act of 1980, rejects institutionalized racism, reflects the reality of forced migration, incorporates basic human values, and furthers the national interest.
It’s not rocket science; but it requires historical knowledge, recognition of the realities of human migration, legal competence, moral courage, and radical action that Judge Garland has yet to hint is within his capabilities. And, that’s bad news for American justice and humanity!
Inexcusable! But neither the issues of human migration nor the efforts of the NDPA to make the historically false, yet clear, promise of “due process and equal justice under law” a reality will go away, no matter how much Judge Garland and other “head in the sanders” in the Administration might want to believe and act otherwise!
Oh, yeah, don’t forget the heavy dose of overt misogyny that drove the Trump/Miller/Sessions/Barr/BIA “immigration jurisprudence” over the past four years. Yet, no repudiation from Judge Garland!
As I previously said, on “day one” Judge Garland would either repudiate or “own” the despicable treatment inflicted on female refugees and other migrants of color by the Trump kakistocracy. Until we see radical remedial action, Judge Garland now “owns” all the ugliness of the last four years. Our job becomes to let him escape neither responsibility nor the judgement of history for his failure of humanity and good judgement!
Trump supporters and hangers-on boast the “success” of Trump’s immigration policies, demonstrated by the supposed drop in illegal entries. But this is merely an “out of sight, out of mind” approach to managing a very real problem. It was a giant sleight of hand which hid the actual number of people seeking entry into the U.S. Biden’s policies have pulled back the curtain and like so many other aspects of Trump’s administration, it is clear that the claims of success are nothing more than fantasies.
And yet the Biden administration is not off the hook. While it did agree to permit unaccompanied children to enter the U.S. despite the Title 42 ban, it did so following a preliminary injunction issued by a federal court last November. DHS continues to expel families, as well as single men and women, under the existing Title 42 order.
. . . .
Despite the clear moral and legal imperatives to stop Title 42 expulsions, the Biden administration is clearly worried that returning to pre-pandemic processing of asylum seekers will overwhelm the system. It is also clear that they fear a political backlash if critics are able to characterize the border as out of control.
Taking these final steps takes courage and political will. Those of us who support the rights of asylum seekers have to let the administration know that doing the right thing will not tarnish its reputation and that we will work even harder to ensure that making good on humane immigration policy is not political suicide.
Protecting asylum seekers is a woman’s issue of the first order. We must encourage and challenge both the administration and Congress to live up to U.S. obligations. We must turn out at the voting booth to support candidates and elected officials who act on behalf of asylum seekers. And we must push back, every way we can, against those who hope to weaponize the border in a callous effort to turn following the law into a political liability.
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Read Mary’s complete article at the link. Many thanks to Judge Alex Manuel of the ABA’s National Conference of the Administrative Law Judiciary for passing this along.
Surprisingly, “forced migration,” is exactly what it says it is: “FORCED migration” — not optional! As I have pointed out before: “We can diminish ourselves as nation (and are doing so), but it won’t stop human migration.”
Refugees come, because that’s what refugees do. They often come when the world is in crisis, because that’s one of the primary reasons why refugees flee. They seldom come in an orderly manner because flight to save your life doesn’t lend itself to “regularity.” How many Jews perished in Nazi-controlled areas before and during WWII waiting for visas that were never going to come?
And, what brings refugees to our borders actually has little to do with inane statements of politicos, bureaucrats, border cops, and the media. One of the main consequences of illegally “closing the border to asylum seekers” is that large numbers simply enter between ports of entry. Those who used to turn themselves in to the Border Patrol are encouraged by our short-sighted policies and unwillingness to follow our own laws just to keep on going.
We’d certainly do much better if we “canned” all the Trump-era illegal, racist nonsense, reopened border ports to asylum seekers, and encouraged them to apply there or in locations abroad. But, to make that happen we would also have to review their claims in a timely, fair, and humane manner — not “rocket science,” yet something that largely has eluded our nation, particularly since 2014.
It’s achievable. But not without much better leadership coming from experts who actually know how to deal with refugee situations in a humane and effective manner. Failed bureaucrats and grandstanding politicos, those who usually “drive the train heading for a wreck,” can’t do the job! That’s been proved time and again! Why do we insist on repeating all our mistakes? Cruelty and threats simply aren’t effective.
To emphasize Mary’s concluding point about women’s concerns, Jeff “Gonzo Apocalypto” Sessions and Neo-Nazi Stephen Miller made misogyny a focus of their vicious attack on people of color seeking asylum. It started with Sessions’s atrocious decision ignorantly and unlawfully targeting women refugees in Matter of A-B- and continued through Miller’s now-enjoined effort to unlawfully eradicate gender-based asylum grants. Never mind that women form the largest group of clearly identifiable refugees in the world and that femicide and violence against them driven by sexual antipathy and issues of control are rampant worldwide, particularly in the Northern Triangle.
But, a large problem here is that more than two months into the Biden Administration, Attorney General Merrick Garland has yet to repudiate Matter of A-B- and the other debilitating racist and misogynist “precedents” and grotesquely illegal anti-asylum policies of Sessions and Barr. Worse yet, he has neither stood up for the reinstatement of asylum laws and compliance with Constitutionally-required due process at the border, nor has he removed and replaced “his” Board of Immigration Appeals and taken steps to curb those of “his” Immigration “Judges” who are still engaged in furthering the Sessions/Barr White Nationalist, misogynist, anti-asylum agenda!
Interesting lack of action from a distinguished former Federal Judge who several months ago claimed great gratitude that his ancestors were given refuge from harm by the U.S. Is there some reason that those people of color and others now arriving at our borders and claiming legal protections under our laws are less deserving of fair, generous, and humane treatment?
Judge Garland’s View Of Proper Treatment of Women Seeking Asylum? Amazing StoriesArtist Unknown, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
President Biden’s top advisers promise “long-needed systemic reforms” to address a backlog of more than 1 million asylum cases in the immigration court system, which often keeps people applying for asylum waiting years to resolve their cases. That could mean some big changes to how asylum cases are processed at the southern border.
The plan the Biden administration is considering to speed up the process would take some asylum cases from the southern border out of the hands of the overloaded immigration courts under the Department of Justice and instead handle them under the purview of the Department of Homeland Security, where asylum officers already process tens of thousands of cases a year, two people familiar with the discussions who were not authorized to speak about administration plans told NPR exclusively.
Those familiar with the discussions say one outcome could be discouraging unauthorized migration. That’s because those who can argue for a certain fear of persecution are able to gain temporary residence and often a work permit as they wait out their cases.
. . . .
Advocates say they welcome a more efficient system, provided changes are not used as a way to expedite removals as the Trump administration did.
Eleanor Acer of Human Rights First says there are a host of reasons to allow asylum officers to conduct the first set of interviews and reduce the numbers, but she says it’s important that applicants have a chance to appeal to the court before being removed.
“The massive backlog must be dealt with,” she said. “But the answer to that problem is not to deprive asylum seekers of due process and a fair hearing, or to weaponize the asylum process to try to deter other people from seeking U.S. protection.”
The Biden administration has already ended two of the Trump administration’s programs, the Prompt Asylum Case Review and the Humanitarian Asylum Review Program, that were designed to quickly return Mexican and Central American asylum seekers suspected of having invalid claims.
Department of Homeland Security officials declined to discuss plans to shift border cases to the asylum division.
But an administration official said last week they are now working on a number of policies and regulations to create “a better functioning asylum system.”
That includes establishing refugee processing in the region and strengthening other countries’ asylum systems.
Biden also resurrected the Central American Minors program that reunited children with parents who are in the United States legally.
The Biden administration is now seeking to “pick up the pieces” after the Trump administration, with a different set of policies that abide by U.S. law but also international obligations, Meissner said.
“We need to have access to asylum,” Meissner said, “but it needs to be done in a way that can be prompt and fair, not in a way that leads to waits of years and years and court backlogs.
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Read the complete article at the link.
Why it could work:
Granting relief at the lowest level of the system is cost effective;
It’s easier to hire, train, and assign Asylum Officers than Immigration Judges;
Immigration Court time should be reserved for those cases where there is a real issue as to whether relief can be granted.
Why it probably won’t work:
Leadership is critical. Right now, there are only a few experts in government with the knowledge, proven leadership ability, organizational skills, and courage to lead this program.
Two obvious names that come to mind are Judge A. Ashley Tabaddor, currently USCIS Chief Counsel, and Judge Dana Leigh Marks, one of the “founding mothers” of U.S. asylum law and pioneer of the well-founded fear standard. Both are past Presidents of the NAIJ. Neither has yet been tapped for this assignment.
By contrast, there are a number of experts in the private/NGO sector who could lead this effort. Obvious choices would be Judge Paul Grussendorf, former Immigration Judge, Asylum Officer, UN Representative, and professor; Professor Karen Musalo, Director, Center for Refugee & Gender Studies, UC Hastings Law; Eleanor Acer, Senior Director, Refugee Protection, Human Rights First (quoted in this article); Professor Michele Pistone, Creator and Founder of the VIISTA asylum training program at Villanova Law; Professor Phil Schrag, Co-Director of the CALS Asylum Clinic at Georgetown Law and author of Baby Jails and the upcoming release The End of Asylum; Michelle Mendez, Director, Defending Vulnerable Populations at CLINIC; or Judge Ilyce Shugall of our Round Table. But, nobody of that caliber has been tapped either.
Without creative, dynamic, expert leadership, and a different approach to personnel, the program will be yet another bureaucratic failure. In case nobody has noticed, after four years of never ending abuse, gross mismanagement, and intentional misdirection by the Trump kakistocracy, the USCIS Asylum & Refugee program is also in shambles — demoralized, disorganized, leaderless, incredibly backlogged. An obvious untapped source is retired Asylum Officers and Adjudicators who could be brought back on a limited-term basis, intensively trained by experts from a “Better EOIR,” and who often are in a position to travel frequently and on short notice.
It’s not about deterrence. Already, this article speaks of “possible deterrent effect.” WRONG!The purpose of an asylum adjudication system is to provide fair, timely, generous adjudications of asylum eligibility in accordance with the letter and spirit of the Refugee Act of 1980, the U.N. Convention and Protocol on which it is based, and the due process clause of our Constitution. We have never had such a system, which inevitably would be more orderly and efficient, but also result in many more grants.
The main reason why we don’t currently have a functioning asylum system, and never have had the system that asylum seekers need and deserve, is that the system is at the mercy of a bogus Executive-controlled “court” system that time and time again has been compromised by politicos seeking who use it as an enforcement tool rather than an independent court of justice.
In 2014, the last year that I taught Refugee Law & Policy at Georgetown Law I “graded” the U.S. Asylum system at “B-.” Not as good as it should be, but not as bad as it could be.
Now I’d give it an “F.” Completely dysfunctional, highly arbitrary, and a tool of institutionalized racism and White Nationalism.
The system is ineffective as a deterrent. There is no known basis to believe that quick and often arbitrary and wrongful “rejections” are an effective deterrent. That’s particularly true because rejections are seldom explained in a reasonable, understandable manner. So, to the extent that there is a “message” it’s that you got the wrong officer or the wrong judge on the wrong day or that the U.S. legal system is inherently unfair and should be avoided by hiring a smuggler to get you to the interior of the U.S. where, as a practical matter, you have a better chance of obtaining “de facto refuge.”
The only “efficiency and leverage” that comes from the Asylum Officer system is in quickly identifying and consistently granting a substantial number of applications. That, and only that, does actually relieve the Immigration Court system of unnecessary cases. Otherwise, “non-grants” still have to go to the Immigration Courts for de novo review. I probably granted the majority of asylum cases “referred” from the Asylum Office. That leaves plenty of room to believe that a better trained and operated system with some positive guidance and effective supervision by better Immigration Judges and a truly expert BIA would achieve substantially higher grant rates and higher efficiency at the Asylum Office, thereby keeping many cases out of court and speeding the process for asylees to obtain permanent residence and eventually U.S. citizenship!
Some assumptions appear invalid. This article also repeats the unproven assumption that a fair, just, and efficient asylum system would result in rejection of the majority of cases. I doubt that.
Prior to the Trump disaster, approximately 75-80% of asylum applicants at the Southern Border passed “credible fear.” That the majority of them never achieved asylum was due less to the lack of merit in their claims than to factors such as: 1) lack of a system to match asylum seekers with qualified counsel; 2) wrong-headed anti-asylum precedents from the BIA that were specifically directed against asylum seekers from Latin America — basically institutionalized racism in the guise of “enforcement;” 3) poor selection, training, and motivation of Immigration Judges some of whom simply did not treat asylum seekers fairly, nor were they given any incentive to do so.
I granted asylum or other protection to many refugees from the Northern Triangle. I probably could have granted twice that number had the BIA precedents actually fairly and reasonably interpreted asylum law to specifically cover gender-based claims and claims arising from persecution by gangs basically operating “in lieu of government authorities” in most of the Northern Triangle.
Additionally, an honest interpretation of the CAT by the BIA would have allowed life-saving protection to be extended to many others who lacked nexus but had a high probability of torture with Government acquiescence upon return. I believe that a return to the original Acosta-Kasinga line of asylum analysis and adoption of proper CAT interpretationsalong the lines set forth by the (exiled) dissenting judges in Matter of J-E- would result in grants of some type of protection (asylum, withholding, or CAT) in the majority of Southern Border cases coming from the Northern Triangle that passed credible fear or reasonable fear.
Asylum, along with refugee status, is a key form of legal immigration to the U.S. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. It’s NOT a “loophole.” It’s the law! Studies by groups of experts such as CMS have shown the huge benefits that refugees confer on the U.S. I have no reason to believe that asylum seekers as a group are any different.
As long as we keep treating the reality of human migration and the strengths and humanity of asylum seekers as a negative rather than a positive, we will continue to fail, as we have for decades, to fully comply with either our own laws or international conventions.
A broken, dysfunctional, unfair EOIR will continue to drag American justice down. There must be de novo review of denials by EOIR and far, far more competent review and direction in the review of credible fear denials by EOIR. A better BIA could actually set binding precedents on “credible fear” and “reasonable fear.”
Currently, EOIR is incapable of producing either consistently fair results (particularly for asylum seekers) or the inspired legal scholarship and leadership for the asylum system to be functional and held accountable. It’s going to require all new leadership, an all new BIA, elimination of all of the Trump-eraprecedents that impede fairness for asylum seekers, new merit-based selection criteria for Immigration Judges, professional administration from judicial experts, and an immediate slashing of the largely self-created “backlog” of 1.3 million cases by closing and removing from the docket every case more than a year old that doesn’t relate to a priority (most are folks who would be covered by Biden’s legalization program anyway; many are eligible for relief that USCIS could grant) to get EOIR in a position to provide the necessary legal guidance and system accountability for the Asylum Office. The absurdist notion that we could or would want to remove every one of the 10-11 million undocumented residents (many performing essential services that propped us up through the pandemic) is one of the “big lies” that has prevented rational reforms of our immigration system.
In plain terms, EOIR needs an immediate “rebuild” with a new progressive, humanitarian judiciary of experts. There is no early indication that Judge Garland either understands that “mission-critical” need or has a plan for achieving it.
As we say in the business the “devil is in the details.” Right now, I can see neither the details nor theleadership in place or “in the pipeline” to solve the debilitating problems in our asylum system that actually are undermining the entire U.S. justice system.
Biden could fix it. But, I wouldn’t count on it. That means that the only real fix in the offing will be for the NDPA to force the Administration to “get it right” through aggressive, never-ending litigation as well as continuing to seek better legislators. Highly inefficient. Yet, sometimes it’s the only way to get the attention of those in power.
If nothing else, we’ll continue to make an important historic record of the cruelty and stupidity with which the current asylum system is being administered. It doesn’t have to be this way. We can always choose to follow our “better angels.” It just takes the courage and the good judgement to get the right folks in the right jobs to make it happen.
Anti-Chinese Poster Public RealmSkeleton in the Closet Public RealmJessica Pearce Rotondi American Freelance Writer & Editor PHOTO: Facebook
Before the Chinese Exclusion Act, This Anti-Immigrant Law Targeted Asian Women
The 1875 Page Act was one of the earliest pieces of federal legislation to restrict immigration to the United States.
Jessica Pearce Rotondi Mar 19, 2021
The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 is often seen as the first major law to restrict immigration in the United States. But there is an earlier law that was used to effectively prevent Chinese women from immigrating to the United States: The Page Act of 1875.
Chinese Immigration in America
The first Chinese immigrants began arriving in the United States in the 1850s. Many were fleeing the economic consequences of The Opium Wars (1839-42, 1856-60), when the British fought to keep opium trafficking routes open in defiance of China’s efforts to stop the illegal trade. An ensuing series of floods and droughts drove members of the lower classes to leave their farms and seek new work opportunities abroad.
When gold was discovered in California in 1848, more and more Chinese immigrants traveled to the West Coast to join the Gold Rush. Some worked on American farms or in San Francisco’s growing textile industry. Others were employed as laborers with the Central Pacific and Transcontinental railroads—railroads which would speed up Westward expansion and facilitate
https://www.history.com/news/chinese-immigration-page-act-women?c…21-0329-03292021&om_rid=&~campaign=hist-inside-history-2021-0329 Page 1 of 7
Before the Chinese Exclusion Act, This Anti-Immigrant Law Targeted Asian Women – HISTORY 3/29/21, 11:35 PM
the movement of troops during the Civil War.
Despite their pivotal role in building the infrastructure of the United States, racism directed at Chinese immigrants was a constant from the moment they arrived on American shores.
. . . .
Both European and Asian immigrants came to the United States seeking to improve their economic well being, explains Dr. Melissa May Borja, assistant professor in the Department of American Culture at the University of Michigan. But Chinese immigrants were regarded as a bigger threat.
“They were seen as a racial threat to a pure white America. They were seen as an economic threat to free white labor. They were depicted as a disease threat—a lot of anti-Chinese rhetoric hinged on portraying Chinese people as filthy and disease-ridden. They were also seen as a religious and moral threat as heathens who threatened a Christian America.”
. . . .
Chinese women were perceived as a particular type of threat: A sexual one. “They were stereotyped as promiscuous, as prostitutes,” says Borja.
While there were Chinese women working in the sex industry in the mid-19th century, they were singled out from their white peers: “Chinese women were specifically accused of spreading sexually transmitted diseases. They were scapegoated. That sexualized stereotype stuck,” says Dr. Kevin Nadal, professor at the City University of New York and vice president of the Filipino American National Historical Society.
Did you know? The earliest known Chinese woman to immigrate to America, Afong Moy, arrived in New York from Guangzhou in 1834. She had bound feet and was exhibited as a curiosity across the United States, first by traders Nathaniel and Frederick Carne and later by American promoter and circus founder P. T. Barnum.
. . . .
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Read the full article at the link.
The ugly history of abuse, vilification, sexualization, and racism directed at Asian American women has deep roots. It’s the history of the “real America” — essentially a “white’s only” sociopolitical structure engrafted on a national economy and culture built on the backs of black, Asian, Hispanic, and immigrant labor. The history that today’s GOP both doesn’t want you to learn while they generate hate directed at people of color and strive to repeat the mistakes and “reprise” the false racist narratives of the past.
The answer to the question posed is actually simple. As of today, DHS Enforcement and politicos at the DOJ “own” the so called Immigration “Courts” lock, stock, and barrel!
That’s an overt violation of the clear Fifth Amendment requirement that those whose lives and property are at stake be judged by a fair and impartial adjudicator — by definition one who is an expert in asylum law, human rights, and has demonstrated the ability to conduct fair hearings.
That’s also bad news for the Hispanic Community, because for the last four years those wholly owned “courts” have been operating with a clear bias against the civil and human rights of people of color, with Hispanic migrants and asylum seekers being a particular target — one that has adversely affected, even terrorized, Hispanic communities throughout the U.S. Hispanics are also grossly underrepresented among the “Immigration Judiciary” at both the trial and appellate levels, as well as on the Article III Bench — despite there being scores of Hispanic and other lawyers of color out here who would be head and shoulders above many of those currently holding these critical “life or death” judgeships!
The real questions are:
1) What can we do about it, and
2) How can we get Judge Garland and others in the Administration to listen, put an end to “Dred Scottification,” and get started on the task of bringing due process and fundamental fairness to a totally dysfunctional and dangerously biased system?
Tune in on April 7 to join the dialogue on how we can finally force the U.S. Government to make good on its unfulfilled, even mocked, Constitutional promise of due process for all persons!
🇺🇸⚖️🗽🧑🏽⚖️Due Process Forever!
“Eyore In Distress” Once A Symbol of Fairness, Due Process, & Best Practices, Now Gone “Belly Up”
The Republican senator Ted Cruz has drawn criticism for taking a trip to America’s southern border as the conservative Texan politician once again became the butt of internet jokes and memes.
In the style of a wildlife documentary, Cruz captured his experience with the help of professional photographers and shared his recent journey to the US-Mexico border Thursday night on social media, where he aimed to shed light on what Republicans have dubbed a crisis.
Sporting a dark green fishing shirt and matching baseball cap with the Texas flag, Cruz spoke at a press conference where he sought to paint a dramatic picture of his experience: “On the other side of the river we have been listening to and seeing cartel members – human traffickers – right on the other side of the river waving flashlights, yelling and taunting Americans, taunting the border patrol.”
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Despite his claims that the border situation is a direct result of the Biden administration’s immigration policies, residents in the Rio Grande Valley have said no such crisis exists. In fact, the number of border crossings under the Biden administration largely mirror those under the former Trump administration. Cruz was accompanied by 18 other Republican senators including John Cornyn, Susan Collins and Lindsey Graham.
After claiming he ran into heckling cartel members and saw a dead body floating in the Rio Grande, Cruz was derided by many, including the former congressman Beto O’Rourke who said:“You’re in a border patrol boat armed with machine guns. The only threat you face is unarmed children and families who are seeking asylum (as well as the occasional heckler).”
. . . .
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Read more at the link about the GOP’s complete farce — while much more courageous individuals, asylum seekers, are forced to risk their lives because the U.S. is incapable of administering our own asylum laws in a fair, responsible, and competent manner. Cruz & co apparently view this as a “photo op.” Actually, it’s a human tragedy for which history will hold Cruz and his racist party largely responsible, even if the voters fail to do so.
The best solution is to hire experts from the private/NGO/academic sectors; build a functioning asylum and refugee system that will process applicants fairly, generously, predictably, and efficiently; reopen legal ports of entry; establish a robust “on site” refugee program for the Northern Triangle; and work with the international community to alleviate the causes of forced migration. Figure out how new arrivals who qualify for legal status can help rebuild our economy moving forward. Develop a humane program for returning those who don’t qualify without endangering their lives, health, and safety.
An absolutely essential part of the solution is a new, “reimagined” EOIR, staffed with real judges who are experts in asylum, human rights, and due process. An EOIR that will “through teamwork and innovation, be the world’s best courts, guaranteeing fairness and due process for all.” Judge Garland, where are you in American justice’s hour of dire need?
“Eyore In Distress” Once A Symbol of Fairness, Due Process, & Best Practices, Now Gone “Belly Up”
Imperfect as our current laws may be, they cover all of the foregoing. What we really need to do is follow our own laws with common sense, humanity, and a sense of urgency!
What we don’t need is more inane walls, more border enforcement directed against asylum seekers, and more cruel and illegal schemes to return refugees to back to danger without any due process. And, we certainly don’t need any more photo ops from Cruz and his GOP cronies.
The Democratic senator has spent years calling for more public defenders and fewer corporate attorneys getting federal judgeships. Now Joe Biden agrees.
For years, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has been a lonely voice in the Senate on the need to put people with all kinds of different legal backgrounds into lifetime federal judgeships.
“We face a federal bench that has a striking lack of diversity,” she said at a 2014 event on this topic, hosted by Alliance for Justice, a progressive judicial advocacy group. “President Obama has supported some notable exceptions but … the president’s nominees have thus far been largely in line with the prior statistics.”
Warren wasn’t talking about diversity in terms of demographics like race or gender; Obama made history on those fronts with his judicial nominees. She was talking about the problem with presidents and senators ― in both parties ― routinely picking corporate attorneys and prosecutors who went to Ivy League schools to be federal judges.
If you want the nation’s courts to reflect the people they serve, Warren has argued, we need judges who have been public defenders and civil rights attorneys, people familiar with the legal needs of everyday Americans who may be living on low incomes or otherwise marginalized. A diversity of legal professionals on the federal bench means more informed decisions on issues related to economic justice and civil rights.
At last, the times are catching up with Warren.
President Joe Biden is signaling he’s ready to make professional diversity central to his judicial selection process. He hasn’t nominated anyone yet, but White House counsel Dana Remus wrote to Democratic senators in December urging them to recommend court picks to the White House as soon as possible, and said that Biden is “particularly focused on nominating individuals whose legal experiences have been historically underrepresented on the federal bench, including those who are public defenders, civil rights and legal aid attorneys, and those who represent Americans in every walk of life.”
Top Democrats in the House are putting a spotlight on the issue too, even though they don’t have a say in confirming federal judges.
“Unfortunately, we have a lot of work to do when it comes to judicial diversity,” House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) said in a Thursday subcommittee hearing on this subject. “There are ways in which the federal judiciary of 2021 looks uncomfortably similar to the federal judiciary of 1921 … Somehow, despite all our progress, today’s federal judges remain, for instance, overwhelmingly male, white, former prosecutors or corporate lawyers who went to a handful of law schools.”
. . . .
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Read the complete article at the link.
Biden is “particularly focused on nominating individuals whose legal experiences have been historically underrepresented on the federal bench, including those who are public defenders, civil rights and legal aid attorneys, and those who represent Americans in every walk of life.”
That’s basically a description of scores of immigration/human rights experts out here in the New Due Process Army (“NDPA”). Yes, they should be a primary source of appointees to the Article III Judiciary! Absolutely! But, they should also be appointed to the BIA and the Immigration Courts — now!
At present, the Immigration Courts are “administrative courts,” not part of the Article III Judiciary; therefore, Senate confirmation isn’t necessary. They are “administered” by a now “evil-clown-like” 🤡🦹🏿♂️ DOJ bureaucracy called “EOIR.” We need to get the right progressive scholars and “disciples of due process” on the Immigration Bench — immediately, without further delay!
“Eyore In Distress” Once A Symbol of Fairness, Due Process, & Best Practices, Now Gone “Belly Up”
Immigration Courts are one of most powerful tools in American law. Also, Constitution be damned, until we get a long overdue Article I independent Immigration Court, they are completely controlled by the AG — Judge Merrick B. Garland. This is a big, big deal — nearly 600 judgeships, almost the size of the entire U.S. District Court system, are at stake!
Sessions and Barr quickly figured: Why not aggressively weaponize EOIR to undermine American democracy, institutionalize racism and misogyny, and promote White Nationalist authoritarianism? And, that’s exactly what they did — to the max. Using EOIR judgeships to reward some of their unqualified, white, nativist buddies in the process was an “added bennie.”
G. Reaper Approaches ICE Gulag With “Imbedded Captive Star Chamber” Run By EOIR, For Their “Partner” Reaper Image: Hernan Fednan, Creative Commons License
Even the totally incomprehensible incompetence with which they administered EOIR fulfilled their “negative dream.” Dysfunctional Immigration Courts became an important tool for debilitating the entire U.S. justice system and “Dred Scottifying” (dehumanizing) persons of color before the law.
Those with compelling cases for relief, many pending for years, were shuffled off to the end of the docket. Or, if they did get a hearing, incompetent or compromised “judges” at the trial and appellate levels often arbitrarily denied their claims for bogus reasons. This disgraceful mess of a “court” actually penalized those with strong cases for relief — many who should have been done and joined our society years ago instead linger in the largely self-created EOIR “backlog” of 1.3 million cases. Or, theyare condemned to endless litigation to vindicate their rights in a system intentionally rigged against them.
“Justice” Star Chamber Style
Looking for the underpinning for the idea that people of color have reduced rights to vote, political participation, and that their lives don’t really matter? Look no further than the ongoing “Dred Scottification” of asylum applicants and other people of color in Immigration Court, now enshrined in a number of bogus “precedents” issued by White Nationalist AGs and their wholly-owned BIA!
BIA Asylum Panel In Action Albrecht Dürer, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
And, their job was “easy as pie” following the indolent stewardship of their Dem predecessors. When the latter finally got around to filling judicial vacancies at EOIR, every couple of years, they handed them out almost exclusively to government “insiders” — like they were “length of service” pins! Better-qualified progressive, due-process-oriented, experts, scholars, advocates, and others in the private/NGO/academic sector — folks who actually could have brought badly needed professionalism, excellence, and order to a system careening out of control — were basically “shut out” by the Dems. Interesting way to reward your potential allies!
The Dems’ “diverse recruiting program” for the Immigration Judiciary was to advertise the positions for about 10 minutes on the “insider online bulletin board” known as “USA Jobs.” Then, after an average two-year long, excruciatingly wasteful and mindless “Rube Goldberg-designed evaluation” by layer after layer of bureaucrats — few, if any of them actual sitting Immigration Judges — participating, in most cases they basically just selected “the next ICE prosecutor, EOIR staffer, or OIL litigator up.” But, the “beauty” of this system is that with so many layers of bureaucracy involved, nobody could be held accountable for the actual selections! Talk about a “finger-pointers’ dream.”
Oh yeah, and of course there was no room for public input and/or participation in this process. Some of the newly anointed judges actually had rather less-than-stellar reputations in the immigration community at large. Many would have drawn blank stares if mentioned to a panel of acknowledged immigration and human rights experts. Few were “household names,” except perhaps in a negative sense. No matter to the Obama folks!
During the Obama Administration, I attended a so-called “training-session” at an Immigration Judge Conference — this was “in person,” although for a number of years we got “home-video grade” training CDs. There, curiously, one of these “newbies” was selected to “educate” a group of us, many of us with decades of experience in the field and some with actual teaching credentials under their belts. Our “instructor” referred to the Government as “us,” to the respondent and counsel as “them,” and bragged that “our big wins from OIL” would make it easier to deny asylum.
Other “instructors” parroted cringingly mind boggling mis-statements of asylum law — apparently designed to fit into OIL’s preferred litigation positions. And, incredibly, this was with the “founding mother” of U.S. Asylum Law, Judge Dana Leigh Marks, who had argued and won the landmark “well-founded-fear” case INS v. Cardoza-Fonseca before the Supremes, effectively muzzled and holding her head in the audience.
In 21 years on the bench, during “EOIR training,” I was lectured to by a variety of BIA Attorney Advisors, OIL Attorneys, politicos, DHS Officials, State Department Officials, Ethics Officers, stress managers, and an occasional NGO advocate. Never, did I get to hear my colleague Judge Marks’s views on the development of asylum law since Cardoza. Sure, that didn’t stop us from carrying on a dialogue elsewhere, as we did. But, we were pretty much “on the same page.” The folks who needed to hear what Judge Marks had to say didn’t.
Hon. Dana Leigh Marks U.S. Immigration Judge San Francisco Immigration Court Past President, National Association of Immigration Judges
And, we wonder why Dems inevitably screw up immigration law, and end up defending highly regressive actions and “designed to fail” policies — try “baby jails,” indefinite detention, and non-English-speaking toddlers “representing themselves” in Immigration Court. I kid you not! Each of the foregoing were things that the Obama DOJ vigorously advanced and defended before Federal Courts!🤮
Will Judge Garland figure it out before it’s too late? Or, as his Obama predecessors did, will he fritter away his time with “more sexy,” but actually far less important initiatives and lofty ideals that will be effectively undermined by failing to create a progressive, expert, well functioning, professional Immigration Judiciary.
Judge Merrick B. Garland, U.S. Attorney General Official White House Photo Public Realm
Racial justice, equal justice, and due process for all persons in America start in the Immigration Court. And, right now they are dying there! If Judge Garland doesn’t pay attention, grasp the moment, aggressively clean house, and take the long overdue, radical, courageous actions to build a better Immigration Judiciary, the whole U.S. justice system might well come crashing down upon him! And, he will have only himself to blame!
🇺🇸⚖️🗽🧑🏽⚖️Due Process Forever! A Better EOIR for A Better Federal Judiciary! A Better Federal Judiciary For A Better America! Not rocket science! But, it does require vision, recognition of the problem, and the courage to solve it!
Tom Ricker, Policy Director, The Quixote Center, tomr.quixote@gmail.com, (301) 922-8909
Biden’s Invisible Wall: New Report Describes the Hardships that Title 42 Expulsions Create for Haitian Migrant Families and Calls on Biden to Stop Expelling Migrants to Haiti
San Diego, California, March 25, 2021 — Today, one year after the “Title 42” policy was enacted, the Haitian Bridge Alliance, Quixote Center and UndocuBlack release the report, The Invisible Wall: Title 42 and its Impacts on Haitian Migrants, and call on the Biden-Harris Administration to immediately revoke Title 42 and end expulsions to Haiti. According to Guerline Jozef, Executive Director of Haitan Bridge Alliance, “Most if not all of the expulsions to Haiti are per the Title 42 policy, which was adopted under a false pretext of the coronavirus pandemic. Title 42 is Trump’s invisible wall that effectively closed the U.S.-Mexico border to migrants.” “Our Report,” says Ms. Jozef, “presents the voices and hardships of Haitian migrant families who have been abused in immigration custody and then expelled under the Title 42 policy without the opportunity to seek legal counsel or request asylum or other protection.”
On February 1, 2021, the first day of Black History Month, the U.S. government drastically expanded removals and expulsions to Haiti. Rather than dismantle the Trump Administration’s invisible wall, the Biden-Harris Administration doubled down. More Haitians have been removed per the Title 42 policy in the weeks since President Joe Biden took office than during all of Fiscal Year 2020. The Report provides the narratives of Haitian families who were apprehended at the U.S. Mexico border within the last year under the Title 42 policy and were subject to expulsion to Haiti or Mexico.
The Report explains how Haitian migrants are expelled under the Title 42 policy without being informed whether or when they will be expelled, and without the opportunity to seek asylum or other forms of protection. “Abigale” (name changed), a Haitian woman interviewed for the Report, describes the cruelty of immigration officials during her family’s expulsion, “None of the officers ever confirmed that we were being deported. No one would even say the word deportation. None of them, through this whole process. All the families were crying on the bus, for over an hour. My husband and others kept asking what was going on, if they were deporting us. They would not tell us anything despite our desperation. It was all extremely emotional.”
“The Biden-Harris Administration has continued cruelty against immigrants,” said Patrice Lawrence, Co-director of the UndocuBLack Network. “We hope that this will not be their legacy. It is cruel to use Title 42 as a loophole for deporting immigrants in general and Black migrants in particular. It is a euphemism for removals and deportation of immigrants which the Trump Administration deemed expendable in the wider context of its eugenic agenda of creating a Whiter America and atmosphere of nativism. The invisible wall named Title 42 keeps at bay brown and Black people fleeting war, violence, poverty and disasters under the pretext of protecting Border Protection officers from COVID-19 and to minimize the number of persons in congregate settings, such as immigration detention centers. The Biden-Harris Administration continues to ignore the cry and plight of immigrants that are being forced to board a plane and are taken to the very places they escaped from. The xenophobic language of the previous Administration might be gone, but the practices still remain.”
“There is no sound public health rationale for the Title 42 ban on migrants,” says Tom Ricker, Policy Director with the Quixote Center. “The idea for the policy came not from public health officials, but from the Trump White House. The entire justification for the Title 42 policy is the claim that the United States lacks the capacity to safely detain people. Yet, the United States is holding people for weeks only to then put them on crowded planes. How do you deny someone asylum who has been placed in detention – with no legal representation at all – based on the argument that there is no capacity to detain them?”
The Report also describes the high security risks that Haitian migrants face when they are expelled to Haiti or Mexico. As one woman who was recently expelled to Haiti under Title 42 describes, “Now the country is in more turmoil so I’m even more afraid to leave [my home]. If these people find us, they would just kill us this time around.”
“Haitian migrants flee violence, instability and persecution in Haiti, then travel a long and treacherous journey to the U.S.-Mexico border seeking safety and security in the United States,” says Nicole Phillips, Legal Director of Haitian Bridge Alliance. “Instead of security, they are abused by immigration officers and – under the Title 42 policy – summarily expelled back to the country they fled without any chance to seek protection. As this Report explains, these expulsions are not only tragic, they are illegal.”
The authors offer nine recommendations. “First,” says Ms. Phillips, “the Title 42 policy must be revoked immediately. It is also critical that asylum processing resumes, while migrants are released to shelter in place with their loved ones in the United States rather than being detained. Incarceration must stop.”
Same old song! Where’s Vice President Kamala Harris on this one?
🇺🇸🗽⚖️Due Process Forever! Treat Haitians as persons with constitutional and human rights. End the racist travesties embodied in U.S. immigration policy that fuel racial injustice throughout America!☠️
Leon Krauze in the WashPost tells us what’s really happening at the border. WARNING: It has little to do with the myths and false narratives being peddled by the GOP, the Administration, and the media.
The current emergency at the border has found the U. S. media at its most solipsistic. Coverage seems more focused on whether the emergency should be called “a crisis” (it should) and what the political fallout for the Biden administration will be. With few exceptions — like the remarkable work of MSNBC’s Jacob Soboroff or Politico’s Sabrina Rodriguez — many news outlets seem utterly uninterested in the stories of the migrants themselves.
This is wrong because it fails to provide one crucial piece of the puzzle: the very concrete context of human suffering.
. . . .
This by no means excuses the stories of anguish and confinement that have emerged over the last few weeks from within the facilities set up by the Biden administration to deal with the number of young migrants crossing the border, nor does it absolve the president himself from delivering on his promise of a humane immigration system, diametrically opposed to Trump’s cruel policies, designed in collaboration with unapologetic racist xenophobes like Stephen Miller.
The Biden administration can and should do better. But the current debate cannot ignore the very concrete despair facing thousands of immigrant families who, under the direct threat of violence or abuse, chose to push their young children to the United States, in search of safety.
If the alternative was famine, gang violence, kidnapping, rape or sexual slavery, wouldn’t you bet it all on the journey north? If more people understood this, the political debate and the coverage surrounding the crisis would be much more empathetic and we would get closer at delivering concrete, humane solutions.
Now, let’s hear more “simple truth” from Suzanne Gamboa over at NBC News:
Suzanne Gamboa, Political Editor, NBCLatino, NBC NewsDate: October 21, 2013 Place: Washington, DC Credit: Maria Patricia Leiva/OAS Creative Commons License
America’s immigration impasse — an endless loop across different administrations — is largely self-inflicted, because Congress has repeatedly failed to acknowledge one simple thing: Immigration happens.
Accordingly, immigration laws must be continually adjusted, reformed and revised, experts say.
“People will always want to come to the U.S., and the U.S. will always need people,” said former Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez, who was a top immigration adviser to President George W. Bush.
Until there is a system that allows enough legal immigration to meet the economy’s needs, there will be illegal immigration, Gutierrez said.
“That’s just part of how our economy is set up. It’s part of demographics,” Gutierrez said. “Our birthrate is not high enough to be able to fill the needs of our economy.”
The coronavirus pandemic reinforced the importance of immigrant labor to the American economy, including labor by the undocumented.
All of those people and many other immigrants, including young immigrants — often called “Dreamers” based on never-passed proposals in Congress called the DREAM Act — will play a key role in helping the economy recover from its pandemic bust.
But immigration requires periodic calibration, and the economics and the changing patterns are lost in the politics.
“People are going to move — as they are all around the world — where they think they can find places to better feed their children. That’s the bottom line, and that’s the history of migration to the United States,” said Luis Fraga, director of the Institute for Latino Studies at the University of Notre Dame.
. . . .
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Everyone should read the rest of the stories at the above link.
Degrading Ourselves As A Nation Won’t Stop Human Migration
By Judge (Ret) Paul Wickham Schmidt
“Courtside” Exclusive
March 26, 2021
Notwithstanding the endlessly disingenuous and self-centered alarmist rhetoric coming from all directions on the border mess, often mindlessly regurgitated by the press (not just Fox News), the real “crisis” involves the human lives at stake and the unnecessary human misery we are causing by failing to establish, professionally staff, and fairly and competently operate the legal refugee and particularly asylum systems required by law. This “due process crisis” actually has devastating and debilitating practical effects, starting with the dysfunctional immigration, refugee, and asylum system and the beyond dysfunctional Immigration Courts.
Heck, we don’t even pretend to comply with Constitutionally-required due process of law for asylum seekers who present themselves to us seeking life-saving refuge. Most of those who show up at legally-established border ports are told that the border is “closed” and that there is no way for them to apply. OK, so they attempt to cross between ports and immediately present themselves to the Border Patrol. But, they also are told there is no way to apply and are orbited back to some of the most dangerous countries in the world without any process whatsoever, let alone due process of law. Who are we kidding with all our dishonest pontificating about “the rule of law?”
It’s a strange way to implement the statutory command that any foreign national “irrespective of . . . status, may apply for asylum,” along with a constitutional guarantee that “No person shall . . . be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.” Gee, you don’t even need one of those fancy Ivy League law degrees to understand that language. You just have to be able to read, comprehend, and act.
What you do have to do to get where we are today is to view asylum seekers and other migrants (predominantly people of color) as less than human — “non-persons” in a constitutional sense. It’s what some of us call “Dred Scottification of the other” and it has accelerated over the past four years — not just in immigration.
The whole idea of a “court system” being run by the Executive who also is the chief of enforcement is beyond constitutionally preposterous. It’s a “negative tribute” to the Supremes and other Article III life-tenured judges who have grown so distant from their own humanity and immigration stories as to become willfully blind to the ongoing farce that constitutes “justice” and “due process of law” for asylum seekers and other immigrants in the U.S.
Today’s nearly non-existent “asylum system” is a deadly and illegal “catch 22,” with the Supremes sitting in their marble palace refusing to do the primary task that justifies their continued existence: enforce the Constitution against Government misbehavior and in favor of the “little guys” and the “vulnerable.” No thanks, not up to the job!
The real tragedy is that there are plenty of folks out here with the knowledge, integrity, courage, and ability to establish a legal system that would actually comply with out laws, our Constitution, and further offer the hope of constructively addressing some problems before refugees arrive at our borders. But, they remain “benched,” even by the Biden Team. So the “good guys”are going to keep attacking the corrupt and broken system in court and at the polls for as long as it takes to get some course correction — years, decades, centuries — ask most African Americans how long it takes to achieve the true justice that America promises to all, but historically has only delivered to some.
In the long run, a fair system would undoubtedly accept many more legal refugees and asylum seekers. That’s what happens in refugee situations — it’s the core of what we call “forced migration” — when you sign on to international conventions intended to prevent the “next holocaust,” and you fairly and humanely apply the rules meant to protect refugees and those who face torture. And, as they have in the past, the overwhelming number of refugees and asylees, like the overwhelming majority of immigrants (essentially all of us, except Native Americans) will adapt, fit in, and contribute to the health, wealth, and future of our nation. They will change, but so will we — ultimately for the better!
Sure, America wouldn’t be as white, “Christian” (to the extent that adherence to a nominal Christian denomination, rather than actually performing Christ’s extremely difficult, self-sacrificing, risky, compassionate mission, defines Christianity), and nominally heterosexual as it was when White Nationalist myths and whitewashed history ruled the roost. But, it would be a better nation — one that actually has a chance of prospering, realizing the full potential of all its residents, and leading the world in the 21st century. A nation that could devote more human, natural, and monetary resources to building and exporting greatness, rather than to an endless stream of cruel, inhuman, stupid, and wasteful enforcement and deterrence gimmicks.
Bottom line, folks are going to come to America, as they have throughout history. Some will stay, some won’t. But, come they will, unless and until those like Trump and the GOP create such a mess that our own people start fleeing to foreign shores. Immigration, regardless of status, is a sign of strength. Xenophobia a sign of fatal weakness.
Our real choice isn’t whether we want to “close” borders, bar refugees, and abuse children as the Cottons, Cruzes, Millers, and Hawleys advocate. It’s whether we create a robust, orderly, rational legal system to screen, regulate, and distribute the inevitable flow or whether, as we have for the past decades, we force millions to reside and work underground — part of an “extralegal” or “black market” system that pols of both parties and those who profit from that underground system have created.
Sprawling mismanaged enforcement bureaucracies, dysfunctional “courts,” armies of publicly-paid lawyers defending the indefensible, for-profit civil prisons, big agriculture, hospitality giants, loads of upwardly mobile professionals who need child care to pursue careers, communities that live off of marketing ethnic culture, meat packing conglomerates, architects and construction firms who are “building America,” even news media fixated on hyping the problem rather than fixing it (see, e.g., yesterday’s Biden press conference), the list of those who profit from a talented, hard working, reliable, loyal, yet politically and socially disenfranchised, workforce is endless.
Even the GOP’s “Cotton-Cruz crowd” benefits from having an imaginary enemy to rant and rail and gin up hate against — safe in the knowledge that the tanking of our economy, upheaval of society, and possible threat to their privilege that would result from realizing their disingenuous call to boot the entire undocumented population will never happen. Their kids and grandkids can continue to reap the privilege that comes from exploiting an essential, yet politically neutered, workforce. It’s really more about institutionalizing racism to maintain economic and political power over the eventual non-white majority that drives their bogus and ugly narratives.
We can degrade ourselves as a nation, but it won’t stop human migration!
🇺🇸⚖️🗽🧑🏽⚖️Due Process Forever! It’s a vision based on a written promise, not a “pipe dream!”
“Justice” Star Chamber StyleBIA Asylum Panel In Action Albrecht Dürer, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons“Eyore In Distress” Once A Symbol of Fairness, Due Process, & Best Practices, Now Gone “Belly Up”
Morales Lopez v. Garland, 5th Cir., 03-19-21, unpublished
PANEL: Southwick, Graves, and Engelhardt, Circuit Judges
OPINION BY: James E. Graves, Jr., Circuit Judge
KEY QUOTE:
Morales Lopez argues that the IJ improperly determined that she did not make a sufficient showing of past persecution and a well-founded fear of future persecution. Regarding past persecution, Morales Lopez argues that the IJ erroneously (1) required each incident of harm to rise to the level of persecution, (2) failed to consider all relevant incidents of harm, (3) required a showing of physical harm, and (4) failed to consider significant liberty deprivations suffered by Morales Lopez and her children. Morales Lopez further argues that (5) the substantial evidence compels a finding of past
10
Case: 18-60251 Document: 00515788451 Page: 11 Date Filed: 03/19/2021
No. 18-60251
persecution and (6) the IJ erred by failing to consider Morales Lopez’s psychological harm.
Regarding a well-founded fear of future persecution, Morales Lopez argues that the IJ erroneously (1) applied a preponderance-of-the-evidence standard instead of a reasonable-possibility standard; (2) failed to evaluate Morales Lopez’s fear of future persecution using the four-part test set forth in In re Mogharrabi; (3) conflated the past-persecution and well-founded-fear- of-future persecution analyses, (4) required Morales Lopez to offer direct proof of her persecutors’ motives, and (5) mischaracterized Ungar’s testimony. Morales Lopez further argues that (6) the substantial evidence compels a finding of a well-founded fear of future persecution.
Although we neither agree with nor reach all of Morales Lopez’s arguments, we agree with her overarching point: the IJ and the BIA improperly determined that Morales Lopez did not make a sufficient showing of past persecution and a well-founded fear of future persecution. We address Morales Lopez’s arguments in turn.
**************
Hon. James E. Graves, Jr. U.S. Circuit Judge Fifth Circuit PHOTO: Wikipedia
Too bad this is unpublished. Once again, a Circuit Court has to provide the detailed analysis required by due process after the supposedly “expert” BIA commits error after error!
When they get below the “caption line” in an opinion, things go south fast for EOIR judges. I’d attribute that to a deadly combination of poor judicial selection, defective training, a “culture of prejudgement and denial,” large-scale overuse and misuse of the woefully inadequate and outdated “contemporaneous oral decision” format (not used by any other “court” for decisions of this importance and complexity), “haste makes waste” gimmicks, absurd “quotas,” inane “performance ratings,” constant political interference with decision-making, disastrously incompetent unprofessional docket management, and maliciously incompetent “leadership” from the DOJ. It’s an ungodly and inexcusable mess.
Sadly, my grim description doesn’t begin to capture just how embarrassingly unjust, unfair, dysfunctional, and just plain terrible EOIR’s “killer clown show” 🦹🏿♂️🤡 is. Not to mention that it is clearly unconstitutional, and a “livingrepudiation of due process” as currently constituted and operated. Put this pathetic imitation of a “court system”out of its misery before it causes any more destruction of human lives and irreparable damage to our justice system!
Judge Garland, where, oh where, are you in American justice’s hour of need? Stop this disgraceful mockery of justice, humanity, and common sense! Now!
In the meantime, as I had warned, Judge Garland’s previously sterling record as a jurist 👨🏻⚖️ is being tarnished daily by association with some of the worst jurisprudence out there, courtesy of America’s Star Chambers,🏴☠️ a/k/a “Clown Courts,” 🤡🦹🏿♂️ now wholly owned by HIM, and “operated” in HIS name!
🇺🇸⚖️🗽Due Process Forever! Clown Courts🤡🦹🏿♂️ & Star Chambers☠️🏴☠️⚰️, Never!
“Floaters — How The World’s Richest Country Responds To Asylum Seekers” EDS NOTE: GRAPHIC CONTENT – The bodies of Salvadoran migrant Oscar Alberto Mart??nez Ram??rez and his nearly 2-year-old daughter Valeria lie on the bank of the Rio Grande in Matamoros, Mexico, Monday, June 24, 2019, after they drowned trying to cross the river to Brownsville, Texas. Martinez’ wife, Tania told Mexican authorities she watched her husband and child disappear in the strong current. (AP Photo/Julia Le Duc)Gabe Gutierrez NBC News Correspondent Atlanta, GA
Reminds me of the essay I recently posted from my friend, Don Kerwin at CMS:
The number of unaccompanied children and asylum-seekers crossing the US-Mexico border in search of protection has increased in recent weeks. The former president, his acolytes, and both extremist and mainstream media have characterized this situation as a “border crisis,” a self-inflicted wound by the Biden administration, and even a failure of US asylum policy. It is none of these things. Rather, it is a response to compounding pressures, most prominently the previous administration’s evisceration of US asylum and anti-trafficking policies and procedures, and the failure to address the conditions that are displacing residents of the Northern Triangle states of Central America (El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras), as well as Venezuela, Cuba, Haiti, and other countries…
The real immigration crisis is not at the border, but in the failure to respond effectively to the conditions driving forced migration, to establish orderly and viable legal immigration policies, to legalize the increasingly long-tenured undocumented population, and to reform and invest sufficiently in the US asylum and immigration court systems.
Donald M. Kerwin Executive Director Center for Migration Studies
It also echoes the words of veteran journalist Marc Cooper, posted by my friend Dan Kowalski over on LexisNexis Immigration Community:
When I was in Mexico reporting on the exodus, I would talk with dozens of migrants who were just a an hour or two away from starting their trek and, to a person, not one of them said they paid any attention to new US laws and regs as they were determined to cross no matter what. And no matter the sacrifices.
Dan Kowalski Online Editor of the LexisNexis Immigration Law Community (ILC)
Even the WashPost editorial page writers “get” the reality of human migration in a way the nativist fear-mongers never will:
Yet despite fearmongering by Republicans, the current influx is neither a public health emergency nor a national security threat. The vast majority of those allowed to enter the country will join relatives here while their asylum claims plod along. That wait is too long — it can stretch to three years or more — and the administration insists it will shrink the backlog. It has also earmarked $4 billion in aid from the pandemic relief bill for Central America — with strings attached to prevent its misuse — to attack the conditions that make life miserable there and drive migrants to seek refuge in this country.
Dumping Asylum Seekers in Honduras Artist: Monte Wolverton Reproduced under license
Still, sadly, facts and reality seem largely irrelevant here.
Despite denials from Secretary Mayorkas, the Biden Administration appears to be believing Kevin McCarthy’s BS on some level.
Thursday, the Administration basically negotiated a “lite version” of Trump’s “Let ‘Em Die in Mexico” — essentially trading AstroZenica vaccine (which wasn’t approved for use in the U.S. anyway) for Mexico’s agreement to step up harsh enforcement measures against migrants crossing their Southern Border and to warehouse families arbitrarily rejected without due process by the U.S. under our bogus CDC directive. We already have seen how well that works out!
A girl peers out from an encampment at the U.S.-Mexico border where she and several hundred people waited to present themselves to U.S. immigration to seek asylum. / Photo by David Maung
Any way you cut it, the realities of human migration, the lives of the desperate individuals involved, the views of human rights experts and advocates, and our supposed commitment to international conventions, the rule of law, and Constitutional Due Process take a back seat when the “bogus border debate” shifts into high gear.
There is actually a very simple truth here: “Forced migration” is not “optional!” In fact, a number of forced migrants prefer “death in the attempt” to “death in place.”
Therefore, all the “deterrents,” “border militarization,” “Baby Jails,” and “stay home statements” won’t ultimately stop the inexorable flow (although they might temporarily divert, modulate, or vary it— usually just enough for the “powers that be” to declare “victory at sea” as a result of their failed policies while ignoring the human carnage and lost opportunities they leave behind).
Professor Philip G. Schrag Georgetown Law Co-Director, CALS Asylum Clinic, Author of “Baby Jails”
Sure, there is a timing factor. Weather, the “business plans” and propaganda of smugglers (Trump’s “enforcement only” policies have been a boon for them in more ways than one, not only boosting their fees, but diverting enforcement resources away from the “real” law enforcement problems at the border involving drugs and human exploitation), and Biden’s pledge to restore humanity and the rule of law to America all factor into the equation in some way.
But, they are not the the primary causes of forced migration, except to the extent that climatechange (ignored and worsened by Trump and the GOP) has aggravated the poverty and economic disorder in the Northern Triangle by destroying the livelihoods of many farmers and making their land essentially worthless.
Tone-deaf GOP politicos like McCarthy and Sen. Rob Portman (R-OH) apparently think the solution is to continue to mock the rule of law, violate the Constitution, and simply declare the Southern Border closed forever, al a Stephen Miller. Let families and children “die in place” in their home countries, die on the journey at the hands of other governments, or rot forever in Mexico — “Out of sight, out of mind.” As long as it isn’t happening in our country and being covered by our news outlets, who cares about human lives? That was certainly the Trump approach!
That’s hardly a “solution,” except in neo-Nazi or Soviet-era terms. The harshest and most inhuman approaches will, as they have in the past and continue to do, fail to stop desperate humans who want to survive from doing what’s necessary to save their lives and preserve their families’ futures, even when that interferes with the GOP’s “whitewashed” version of “American greatness.”
The solution involves following Constitutional due process, re-establishing the rule of law (including a radical “reform and replace” of our dysfunctional Immigration Courts), and adhering to our international obligations, both in letter and spirit. It also requires an expanded, much more robust, legal immigration system that reflects the demands of our economy, the needs of migrants, and the realities of human migration, particularly from Latin America. Like it or not, there will be more immigration.
As I have said before: “There are many ways in which we can diminish our own humanity, but none of them will stop human migration.”
Will G. Reaper Become The Lasting Image of America’s 21st Century Human Rights & Racial Justice Failures In The Eyes Of The Rest Of Humanity & Future Generations? Image: Hernan Fednan, Creative Commons License
Contrary to the GOP blather, immigration, voluntary, forced, coerced, legal, extra-legal, white, non-white, Christian, non-Christian, is what the real America is all about, for better or worse. Overall, immigration is a positive force for America.
Here’s a great essay on the positive nature of immigration by Pedro Gerson on Slate. Pedro isthe director of the Immigration Law Clinic at the Louisiana State University Law Center, and a former immigration staff attorney at the Bronx Defenders. The latter organization has been home to a number of notable members of the NDPA.
Pedro Gerson Director, Immigration Law Clinic LSU Law Center SOURCE: Twitter
As Pedro says, human migration to America will continue notwithstanding GOP xenophobes. The only question is whether we will have the wisdom and courage to work with and take advantage of its power in constructive, creative, forward looking ways, rather than trying to “recreate Jim Crow!”
Or, will we continue, as GOP restrictionists urge, to squander resources, goodwill, and human potential on futile efforts to eradicate what is perhaps the oldest and most fundamental phenomenon of human existence?
🇺🇸🗽⚖️Due Process Forever! Restore the rule of law! Fix The Disgraceful, Dysfunctional Immigration Courts, Judge Garland! End White Nationalist racism!
