"The Voice of the New Due Process Army" ————– Musings on Events in U.S. Immigration Court, Immigration Law, Sports, Music, Politics, and Other Random Topics by Retired United States Immigration Judge (Arlington, Virginia) and former Chairman of the Board of Immigration Appeals Paul Wickham Schmidt and Dr. Alicia Triche, expert brief writer, practical scholar, emeritus Editor-in-Chief of The Green Card (FBA), and 2022 Federal Bar Association Immigration Section Lawyer of the Year. She is a/k/a “Delta Ondine,” a blues-based alt-rock singer-songwriter, who performs regularly in Memphis, where she hosts her own Blues Brunch series, and will soon be recording her first full, professional album. Stay tuned! 🎶 To see our complete professional bios, just click on the link below.
EL PASO — Chaos, confusion and disillusionment marked the experience of many of the first asylum seekers to be enrolled in the Biden administration’s revised “Remain in Mexico” program, saying they understood little about what was happening or why they were selected.
The Trump-era program — formally known as Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP) — returns border-crossers to Mexico to await the outcomes of their asylum claims and resumed earlier this month under court order. Although the Biden administration said it has made changes to the program that make it more humane, several of the first enrollees interviewed by The Washington Post said they did not understand documents they were asked to sign, did not have access to lawyers and were puzzled about why they were not released along with some of their compatriots.
Three men — two from Nicaragua and one from Venezuela — who were among the more than 160 migrants enrolled so far, said they had been robbed or extorted before crossing the U.S.-Mexico border. The men, who were fleeing political persecution, said they hoped for relief in the United States, but instead felt as if they had won a raffle they never entered.
“I told the asylum officer I’d rather be in a U.S. detention center than be sent back to Mexico,” said Pedro, a 27-year-old asylum seeker from Nicaragua. “It’s dangerous for us.”
(The Washington Post is identifying the men only by their first names because they fear they might jeopardize their cases by speaking publicly.)
Biden’s Department of Homeland Security is still trying to terminate MPP, even though it was ordered to reimplement it by a federal judge. The administration lost an appeal of the ruling this week after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit in Louisiana upheld the lower court decision. The circuit court order said the Biden administration erred when it issued a memo earlier this year terminating the program, “affecting billions of dollars and countless people.” The program, which is in effect in one border community and accepting only men, will soon expand to six more communities and could soon include families.
[‘Remain in Mexico’ program begins in El Paso amid skepticism from advocates]
Advocates say that MPP subjects migrants to a policy as hazardous to their lives as the reasons that prompted them to flee to the United States for protection. They say the revised version of the program is as flawed as it was under the Trump administration, when the New York-based nonprofit Human Rights First tracked more than 1,500 “violent attacks” against migrants.
“The Biden administration’s revamped ‘Remain in Mexico’ is already presenting security and due process concerns we saw under the Trump administration,” said Julia Neusner, who interviewed 16 MPP enrollees for Human Rights First. “I anticipate this process will deny people their due process rights and accessing counsel. This policy is inherently dangerous and I expect it to cause tremendous suffering as the rollout expands.”
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Read the full article at the link.
”Let ‘Em Die In Mexico!” What a thoughtful way for the world’s richest and most powerful nation to recognize and honor the birth of Christ. Doubt that Jesus would approve, though! He’d more likely be found among the “floaters” than with the arrogant, privileged, inhumane politicos and judges who came up with this idea and then enabled it!
Completely unnecessary! The incoming Biden Administration had the blueprints to reestablish due process and the rule of law at the border and to start robust, realistic, expanded refugee programs in potential sending countries. The practical human rights/immigration experts who could have pulled it off were out there.
The Administration could have “hit the ground running” with bold innovative actions, practical expert leadership, and a show of competence and humanity. But, they didn’t!
Instead, Biden, Harris, Mayorkas, and Garland dissed the progressive experts, ignored their recommendations, and froze them out of key judicial and leadership positions, preferring instead to use modified versions of “proven to fail deterrence-only programs” administered largely by Trump-era holdovers and other bureaucrats insensitive to the rights, needs, and multiple motivations of asylum seekers. (There is an important legal doctrine of “mixed motive” that politicos, bureaucrats, and bad judges often choose to ignore when it suits them.)
Not surprisingly, this ridiculous, muddled “Miller Lite” approach has been spectacularly unsuccessful! Predictably, flows of desperate refugees, generated largely by circumstances outside our immediate control (contrary to restrictionist myths reinforced by some enforcement aficionados and mindlessly repeated by some mainstream media) have continued. Humans have continued to needlessly suffer and die. Backlogs have grown without credible plans to address them. The rule of law and the U.S. justice system (led by failed Immigration Courts, but also including poorly functioning and too often “brain dead” jurists at all levels of the Federal Judiciary) has continued to flounder and lose credibly. The “die in place and never darken our doors” message delivered by Gauleiter Miller and his acolytes, cluelessly repeated by VP Harris, hasn’t convinced anyone. Would YOU basically accept an invitation to “commit slow suicide by persecution rather than taking a chance on survival.”
And, also predictably, nobody is pleased or supportive of the Biden Administration’s inept and disingenuous approach. From hard core racist nativists to liberal asylum advocates, nobody, but nobody, outside the Administration’s party line flackies, supports this approach! Indeed, nobody in the Administration can even explain what they are doing on any particular day in a coherent manner.
Humanity, moral courage, common sense, and the rule of law might be taking a holiday. But death and despair don’t.
Somewhat reminiscent of how the Chinese workers who were key to building the transcontinental railroad were “rewarded” with the Chinese Exclusion Act and more than a century of anti-Asian bias and hate that continues today.
☹️Unfortunately, America has a long unhappy history of mistreating, exploiting, and demonizing immigrants whose hard work, courage, and perserverance against the odds built our nation into what it is today! Old habits of bias, ingratitude, false racial supremacy, and vilification of “the other” — or at least the “perceived other,” since in truth we’re all important parts of the real America— are hard to break. But, it would be a real boost for our nation and humanity if we could overcome the darker part of our past and move forward as one.
Thanks for sending this important piece my way, Julia!
For “respondents” (non-citizens in removal proceedings) and their lawyers, Individual Hearings in Immigration Court are a big deal. Evidence must be gathered. Affidavits have to be prepared, checked, and re-checked. Witnesses must be identified, convinced to attend the hearing, and prepared for trial. Respondents practice their testimony. In most cases, the noncitizen has been waiting for many months or years for the trial date. The result of the trial determines whether the applicant can remain in the United States or must leave. When a respondent receives asylum, he is permitted to stay in the U.S. If he loses, he may be deported to a country where he faces danger. In many cases, respondents have family members here or overseas who are counting on them, and the outcome of the case affects the family members as well as the respondent. All of this provokes anxiety and anticipation. In short, Individual Hearings are life-changing events that profoundly effect respondents and their families.
So what happens when the Individual Hearing is canceled?
“Sorry boys and girls, the ‘nice’ list is too long. We’ll reschedule Christmas for next year… or maybe the year after that.”
The first thing to know is that cancellations are common. Cases are canceled weeks, days or even minutes before the scheduled time. Indeed, we often cannot be sure that a case will actually go forward until the hearing begins.
Why does this happen?
There are many reasons, some more legitimate than others. The most common reason these days is the pandemic. Sometimes, courts close due to potential exposures. That is understandable, but as far as I can tell, these represent a small minority of Covid cancellations. I have had 50% or more of my Individual Hearings canceled over the last year and a half, and none of those was caused by a Covid exposure. I suspect that the large majority of these cancellations are due to reduced capacity to hear cases–since judges and staff are often working from home. Indeed, most pandemic cancellations seem to occur a week or two before the Individual Hearing. By that time, we’ve already completed and submitted the evidence, witness list, and legal brief, and have usually started prepping the client for trial. The client is also psychologically gearing up for the big event.
And then we check the online system and find that the case is off the docket.
What’s so frustrating about these cancellations is that we’ve been living with the pandemic since early 2020. The Immigration Courts should have adjusted by now. If cases need to be canceled, why not do that several months in advance? At least that way, applicants would not build up hope, only to have that dashed when the case is cancelled at the last minute. Also, it wastes attorney time–since we will have to submit updated country condition evidence (and perhaps other evidence) later, re-prep witnesses, and potentially prepare new legal briefs, if the law changes (which is more common than you’d like to think). For attorneys who charge hourly, this additional work will involve additional costs to the applicants. So all around, last minute cancellations are harmful, and it’s hard to understand why they are still so frequent.
“I’m double booked today, so let’s put off your heart surgery until 2023.”
Besides the pandemic, court cases are cancelled for a host of other reasons: Immigration Judges (“IJs”) are out sick, hearings get bumped to accommodate “priority” cases or sometimes cases are “double booked,” meaning that they are scheduled for the same time slot with the same IJ, and so only one can go forward. To me, all these are weak excuses for canceling individual hearings. Most courts have several judges, and so if one judge is out sick, or if a priority case must be scheduled at the last minute, another judge should be able to help out (in all but the most complicated cases, judges need little time to prepare for a hearing, and so should be able to adjudicate a case on short notice). Also, there is no excuse for double-booking cases. IJs should have a sense of their schedules and simply not overbook. In addition, all courts are overseen by Assistant Chief Immigration Judges (“ACIJs”), who should be available to hear cases if need be. Finally, given the ubiquity of video conferencing equipment and electronic records, judges can adjudicate cases remotely, and so there should almost always be a judge available to fill in where needed.
Of course, there are times when case cancellations are unavoidable, due to inclement weather, for example. But in an ideal world, these should be rare.
“Oy vey! I have to give priority to a better-looking couple. Let’s reschedule this wedding for later. Are you free in 2024?”
If the delay caused by case cancellations was measured in weeks or even months, the problem would not be so severe. But in many cases, hearings are postponed for one or two years–or even longer! This is obviously distressing for the applicant, as the long-anticipated end date is pushed back to who-knows-when. It is particularly devastating for applicants who are separated from family members. The long postponements are also a problem for the case itself, as evidence becomes stale and must be replaced with more up-to-date information, and laws change, which can require a new legal brief. In short, these delays often force the applicant (and the applicant’s lawyer) to do significant extra work on the case, and this can add additional costs in terms of legal fees.
It seems obvious to me that courts do not fully appreciate the damage caused by last minute cancellations. If judges and staff (and management) knew more about the harm these cancellations cause, perhaps they would make a greater effort to ensure that hearings go forward, and that any delayed hearings are rescheduled as quickly as possible.
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Readers of “Courtside” are familiar with the “toxic culture” of EOIR — actively encouraged by some Attorneys General, enabled and abetted by others.
The real problem here is that Immigration Courts are “led” by “managers” beholden to political agendas rather than the public they should serve. Also, since far too many EOIR “managers” and Immigration Judges have never represented individuals in Immigration Court, they are basically clueless as to the human and practical effects of their actions on individuals as well as on the dedicated, often pro bono or “low bono” lawyers who must guide their desperate and often re-traumatized clients through this morass.
At a time when the need for pro bono assistance has never been greater, the disgraceful dysfunction, mismanagement, and “studied user unfriendliness” of EOIR under Garland is actually discouraging attorneys from donating their time and endangering their emotional well-being! Could there be any worse public policy?
With so many extraordinarily talented, creative, courageous, independent legal minds out there in the private/NGO/academic sector of human rights/immigration/racial justice/due process this “intentional mediocrity (or worse)” is inexcusable. Yet, this massive failure of the U.S. justice system at the most basic level gets scant attention outside of Courtside, LexisNexis, ImmigrationProf Blog, Jeffrey S. Chase Blog, The Asylumist, and a few other specialized websites.
This “leading disintegrator of American justice and cosmic threat to our entire democracy” is largely “shoved under the carpet” by “mainstream media,” leaders of the legal profession (outside of immigration/human rights), politicians, policy makers, and the general public. Will they only “wake up” when it is too late and their own rights and futures have been diminished, dehumanized, and de-personified as if they were “mere migrants, not humans?”
In other words, who in America will always be immune from the “Dred Scottification of the other” now practiced, tolerated, and often even encouraged at the highest levels of our government? Don’t think it couldn’t happen to you! If immigrants, asylum seekers, and migrants in the U.S. are not “persons” under the Fifth Amendment, what makes YOU think that YOUR “personhood” will be honored by the powers that be!
In defense of today’s IJs, they actually have remarkably little control over their own dockets which are incompetently “micromanaged” from on high or by non-judicial “administrators.” Sound like a formula for an incredible, largely self-created, 1.5 million case backlog?
Cutting to the chase, the Immigration Courts are controlled by the Attorney General, a political official and a chief prosecutor to boot. Beyond that, no Attorney General has actually had to experience practice before the totally dysfunctional and intentionally user unfriendly “courts” he or she runs.
Foreign Service Officers must initially serve as consuls — the basic operating level of an embassy. Hotel managers usually start by working the front desk, where the “rubber meets the road” in the industry.
But, we enthrone those who are supposed to be the best, wisest, and fairest in the legal profession as Attorneys General and Article III Judges without requiring that they have had experience representing individuals at the “retail level” of our legal system — the U.S. Immigration Courts.
It doesn’t make sense! But, what does figure is that a system run by those without expertise and relevant experience, haphazardly “supervised” by Article III Judges who almost invariably exhibit the same blind spots, indifference to injustice, and lack of practical knowledge and expertise as those they are “judicially reviewing” has devolved into the worst court system in America. It’s an oppressive catastrophe where “liberty and justice are not for all” and survival is often more about the mood, mindset, or personal philosophy of the judge, or the “whim of the day” of DOJ politicos, than it is about the facts of the case or the most fair and reasonable applications of the law by experts! Is this really the way we should be determining who lives and who dies, who thrives and who will struggle just to survive?
These “courts” are not fair and impartial courts at all. They are places where service to the public comes last, poor leadership and mismanagement are tolerated and even rewarded, backlogs are out of control, due process, fundamental fairness, scholarship, and best practices scorned, and precious lives and human dignity routinely are ground to dust and scattered to the wind.
We deserve better from our legal system!
Once, there was a court system with a dream of a better future for all in America — a noble, if ambitious, vision, if you will: “through teamwork and innovation, become the world’s best administrative tribunals, guaranteeing fairness and due process for all.”😎
Now, sadly, that enlightened vision has disintegrated into a nightmare of dedicated dockets, biased precedents, endless backlogs, sloppy work, due process denying gimmicks, bogus statistics, mediocre judicial selections, secrecy, customer unfriendliness, dishonest blame shifting, and ridiculous Aimless Docket Reshuffling.☠️
Where there once was the promise of “light at the end of the tunnel,” now there is only “Darkness on The Edge of Town:”
Well lives on the line where dreams are found and lost
I’ll be there on time and I’ll pay the cost
For wanting things that can only be found
In the darkness on the edge of town
In the darkness on the edge of town
RESEARCH | FALL 2021 ISSUE
SPECIAL REPORT: IMMIGRATION AND THE DUTY TO HELP
“Bringing the university into the streets”
BY BILL BOYARSKY
ACADEMICS, UNIVERSITY STUDENTS and activists are creating an informal network reaching throughout California and beyond to seek justice for the more than 25,000 immigrants held in federal detention centers across the nation. It is eye-opening work and often distressing.
Members of the network struggle to penetrate the secrecy in which Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) shrouds its immigration centers, many located far from attorneys who might be able to help. When the network pierces the concealment, it often finds babies imprisoned with their mothers, random mistreatment by guards and an ever-growing backlog of cases awaiting hearings in immigration court.
“As a state university, we have an obligation to train students who will give back to the state, and immigrants are terribly important. Immigrants contribute greatly to the state,” Ingrid Eagly, a UCLA law professor who is part of the network, told me in a recent telephone interview.
Victor Narro, project director at the UCLA Labor Center and one of Eagly’s network colleagues, put it this way: “We are activist scholars, bringing the university into the streets.”
Championing justice is crucial now, when immigrants are arriving in California and throughout the United States in ever-growing numbers, and it will become ever more urgent as desperate newcomers — refugees hoping for asylum after President Biden’s end to the war in Afghanistan — attempt to enter the country. This is the immediate future of the battle over immigration, one that will shape the future of Los Angeles and the larger nation. It is far from settled.
A Washington Post-ABC News poll in early September showed, for example, general support for the resettlement of Afghans in the United States, after security screening. But granting them entry is likely to anger Americans bitterly opposed to immigration of any kind.
UCLA and beyond
UCLA is at the center of this informal network of professors, students and activists pursuing justice for immigrants. But it is hardly alone.
Immigration clinics at the USC Gould School of Law and Southwestern Law School send students into the community to represent immigrants in deportation hearings. Centers for undocumented students at California State University, San Bernardino, and other Cal State campuses provide gathering places for students and faculty, as well as on-campus locations from which activists can enter the community and fight for those fearing deportation. There are many such examples around the state.
As faculty director of the UCLA Law School’s criminal justice program, Prof. Eagly is deeply involved. She took her students to rural Texas to work with immigrants arrested by federal officers who accused them of illegal entry into the country. The immigrants were jailed by ICE officers after seeking amnesty at the border, or they were caught during raids on their workplaces.
The students went from familiar surroundings at UCLA to ICE’s South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas, 70 miles southwest of San Antonio, where the company that runs the center for the federal government had been accused of treating the immigrants as if they were dangerous criminals. The students met with migrants from Guatemala, Mexico, El Salvador, Ecuador and Honduras.
The center is tantamount to a prison for families as they await hearings in which they try to convince an immigration court that they fled their countries because they had feared death or injury at the hands of criminal gangs or corrupt police. These hearings are called “credible fear” interviews. If the immigrants are not persuasive enough, deportation proceedings begin. Like most detention centers, the South Texas facility is far from the immigration lawyers and translators the immigrants need to guide them through the complex process. Among Guatemalans, for example, 22 languages are spoken.
Visiting the South Texas Center gave Eagly’s students a unique experience, she said. “They had deep concerns. We saw babies in arms being detained. We would hear about inadequate health care and mistreatment by guards.” Even though the observers were only law students, Eagly added, the fact that the inmates had any representation at all made a difference in the process and getting people released.
It was an intense introduction to a system bogged down in bureaucracy and shaped by years of hostility toward immigrants, extending through Democratic and Republican administrations. Democrats, fearing an electoral backlash, promoted laws increasing penalties for immigration violations. President Trump, elected as an anti-immigrant crusader, carried them to new extremes. The students learned that the backlog of cases awaiting hearings in immigration court numbered almost 1.4 million, according to Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC). Someone seeking a hearing at the Texas center could wait as long as 2.4 years, TRAC said.
When Eagly’s students returned from Texas, they recruited lawyers who would take immigration cases without charge and try to help immigrants through the legal maze.
UCLA SOCIOLOGY PROFESSOR Cecilia Menjivar and her students focused on the inequalities that immigrants found in the United States. For many, it was simply a continuation of the hard life they had left in Central America. “Because it is so difficult to access people in detention, we approached it through lawyers,” Menjivar said. “What we wanted to do was capture the everyday life in detention centers. We wanted to focus on what life is like in detention centers. We also interviewed immigrants who had left detention.”
Menjivar recalled visiting a detention center in Eloy, Arizona, about 65 miles southeast of Phoenix, to attend immigration court. “I had to go through three gates before entering the facility, first a barbed-wire gate, then two [more],” she said. “A guard accompanied me until I got to the courtroom. Six gates or doors [total] to get to the courtroom.
“Immigrants are often moved from one place to another. Lawyers may lose contact with them. Immigrants can’t be found, [are] moved to a different facility, sometimes to a different state. So families have to locate relatives.”
Studying the crisis
Narro, the UCLA Labor Center project director, told me about students venturing into Pico-Union in Los Angeles, where impoverished immigrants from Central America and Mexico crowd into apartments, making it one of America’s densest neighborhoods. Some of the immigrants try to find work in the food industry.
The students enroll in classes such as “Immigrants, Students and Higher Education,” taught by Labor Center Director Kent Wong. From these classes come academic studies like the center’s examination of the impact of robots on food workers. The studies, in turn, help shape legislation on the federal, state and local levels.
“Two summers ago, they did a project on gig workers,” Narro said. “We train students on how to survey workers. They interviewed gig drivers. They collected data and analyzed it, and the information was used by community activists.
“[In that way], the activists become scholars.”
Shannon Speed combines many of the attributes of scholars and activists. Speed is a professor of gender studies and anthropology at UCLA and director of the American Indian Studies Center. She also is a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma.
The center brings together indigenous American Indian students with faculty, staff, alumni and members of the indigenous community. Its goal is to address American Indian issues and support native communities. It also acts as a bridge between the academy and indigenous peoples locally, nationally and internationally.
One of Speed’s accomplishments has been to lead a successful effort to have Los Angeles adopt Indigenous People’s Day, the largest city to do so. As director of the Community Engagement Center at the University of Texas in Austin, she was one of a corps of volunteers who inspected detention centers.
“We would talk [to immigrants] about how things were, what their needs were, how they came to be there,” she said. “Almost all had been kidnapped for ransom.” Now, Speed said, they had no idea when — or whether — they might be released from detention.
She collected some of their stories in a book, Incarcerated Stories: Indigenous Women Migrants and Violence in the Settler-Capitalist State. The subtitle reflects Speed’s thesis: that European settlers imposed a violent culture on Indians living throughout the length and breadth of South and North America, a violence that continues in the treatment of the indigenous people Speed grew up with and whom she and her students met every day.
“What the stories of indigenous women migrants make evident, above all else,” Speed wrote, “is their strength and resilience as they seek to free themselves of the oppression and violence that mark their lives.”
These are the lessons, learned in migrant communities, that students and their academic and activist mentors will take with them as the United States meets its ongoing challenge of immigration, with its newest confrontation: this one between those who approve of Afghan resettlement and those who do not.
There is work left to do: Even as Americans have voiced their sympathy for Afghans who helped U.S. soldiers fight the 20-year war in Afghanistan, the Post-ABC News poll shows that 27% of Americans oppose resettling Afghans here.
IN TOPICS: BIDEN CIVIL RIGHTS FAMILIES IMMIGRATION SANCTUARY TRUMP
TAGGED:IMMIGRATION, PUBLIC POLICY, UCLA
Bill Boyarsky
Veteran American Journalist & Author
PHOTO: UCLA
BILL BOYARSKY
Boyarsky is a veteran journalist and author. He was with the L.A. Times for 31 years, serving as city editor, city county bureau chief, political reporter and columnist. He is the author of several books, including: “Inventing LA, The Chandlers and Their Times.”
Republished with author’s permission.
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Thanks, Bill, for forwarding this great and timely article!😎👍
Courtside recently has highlighted the extraordinary efforts of other All-Star 🌟 Immigration Clinics at Wisconsin, Cornell, and George Washington.
These are just a few of the many law schools across our nation that have answered the call for due process and human dignity for all migrants in America!
I’ve made the point many times that Professor Eagly and other leaders of the NDPA like her are the folks who rightfully should be on the BIA, the Immigration Judiciary, and in the key “sub-cabinet” policy positions at DOJ & DHS. These are critical jobs that generally do not require the delays and inefficiencies associated with Presidential appointments.
I’m thankful for Professor Eagly, her students, and all of the other extraordinary members of the NDPA and the Round Table for courageously and steadfastly standing tall every day for due process for all persons in the U.S., regardless of race, creed, gender, or status! Also, as I always tell my students, I’m personally thankful: 1) that I woke up this morning; and 2) that I’m not a refugee!
Additionally, my condolences ☹️ to UCLA “Bruin Nation” 🐻 for the drubbing their (previously) #2 Men’s hoopsters took at the hands of #1 Gonzaga Tuesday night!🏀
Given the strength and rigor of the IJ’s underlying opinion, along with the BIA having exceeded its proper scope of review, we will vacate the BIA’s final order of removal and remand with instructions to reinstate the IJ’s opinion.
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There is the good, the bad, the ugly, and the absurdly horrible. This latest BIA travesty falls in the latter category.
Not surprisingly, the Circuit opinion quotes liberally from the BIA’s insipid, mealy-mouthed “bureaucratic double-speak” language! To paraphrase my BIA colleague the late Judge Fred Vacca, thank goodness the 3rd Circuit finally put an end to this “pathetic attempt at appellate adjudication.”
Interesting that rather than remanding to give the BIA a chance to deny again on some newly invented specious basis, the court just reinstated the IJ opinion. There should be a message here! But, Garland and his lieutenants aren’t “getting it!”
This case illustrates deep systemic and personnel problems that Garland has failed to address. Instead of summarily dismissing the DHS’s frivolous appeal with a strong warning condemning it, these types of bad BIA decisions contribute to the unnecessary backlog and both encourage and reward frivolous actions by the DHS.
Additionally, reversing, for specious reasons, a well-done and clearly correct IJ decision granting relief, just to carry out the wishes of DHS Enforcement and political bosses, is intended to discourage respondents and their attorneys while unethically steering Immigration Judges toward a “norm of denial.”
Abused women of color from the Northern Triangle have been particular targets of the EOIR’s seriously skewed anti-immigrant adjudications. This makes the Garland DOJ’s claims to be a “champion of racial justice” ring all the more hollow and disingenuous in every context. There will be no racial justice in America without radical EOIR reform!
What ever happened to our first ever woman of color Veep? Hypothesize that one of the BIA Appellate Immigration Judges responsible for this mess had come before the Senate Judiciary Committee for confirmation. Wouldn’t you have had some questions about judicial qualifications? So, why is it OK to continue to employ them in untenured Executive Branch quasi-judicial positions where they exercise life or death power over many of the most vulnerable among us, overwhelmingly persons of color, many women, lots of them unrepresented! Kamala Harris, where are you?
It’s all part of an improper “culture of denial” at EOIR, led and “enforced” by the BIA. Garland has disgracefully failed to come to grips with the “anti-due process” that he fosters every day that the “Miller Lite Holdover BIA” remains in their appellate positions.
For heavens sake, with unnecessary “TV Adjudication Centers” coming out EOIR’s ears, reassign these purveyors of bad law and appellate injustice to those lower “courts” where they can do less cosmic damage and real, better qualified appellate judges can “keep on eye” on them!
I keep thinking (or perhaps hoping) that eventually Circuits will tire of continually redoing the BIA’s sloppy work product and then having the cases come back again, sometimes years later, denied on yet another bogus ground!
On the flip side, Judge Garland seems to have infinite “patience” with well-documented substandard performance and painfully obvious anti-immigrant, pro-DHS bias on the part of his BIA.
Wrongful denial of CAT costs lives and can improperly condemn individuals to gruesome and painful death! This is no way to run a court system! I guess it’s easier to “tolerate” lousy judicial performance when you aren’t the one being unfairly and illegally condemned to torture!
As a retired immigration judge, I have watched with concern reports of the surge of unaccompanied immigrant children crossing the border into the United States. There are many reasons for concern—their housing, their health, their safety. To me, there is an additional, very real, and often overlooked question looming on the horizon: What will happen when these children, even toddlers and babies, appear alone in immigration court?
Yes, alone. While a person in immigration proceedings is entitled to be represented by a lawyer if they can afford it, there is no constitutional or even statutory right to appointed counsel in immigration proceedings. That means those who cannot afford a lawyer must appear in court alone, including children.
While I am pleased to see the Biden administration plans to provide government-funded legal representation for certain immigrant children in eight U.S. cities, this new initiative is still a far cry from the universal representation needed to support children in removal proceedings.
Imagine, if you can, a child — 2 years old, 10 years old or 17 years old — appearing before an immigration judge alone. How does a child, already intimidated and confused by the courtroom setting, understand the nature of the court proceedings and the charges against them? How can a child understand the complexities of immigration law, their burden of proof, and possible defenses against deportation? The short answer is they cannot.
. . . .
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Read the rest of the op-ed at the above link.
The “Fair Day For Kids in Court Act of 2021” is endorsed by the “Round Table” ⚔️🛡 among many other groups in the NDPA!
Here’s a summary (courtesy of Hon. “Sir Jeffrey” S. Chase):
Senator Mazie Hirono (of [Round Table “Fighting Knightess” Judge] Dayna Beamer’s home state of Hawaii) plans to introduce the attached bill on Thursday, that would provide counsel for unaccompanied children in Immigration Court by:
Clarifying the authority of the federal government to provide or appoint counsel to noncitizens in immigration proceedings;
Requiring the appointment or provision of legal counsel to all unaccompanied children in proceedings unless they obtained counsel independently;
Mandating access to counsel for all noncitizens in CBP and ICE facilities;
Requiring that, if the government fails to provide counsel to an unaccompanied child and orders that child removed, the filing of a motion to reopen proceedings will stay removal; and
Requiring government reporting on the provision of counsel to unaccompanied children.
Here’s the text of the bill, which will be introduced by Sen. Hirono later this week:
Thanks Sarah and Jeffrey! So pleased to be part of the “support group” for this long-overdue and badly needed legislation that would do what to date Congress, the Federal Courts, and DOJ have failed to do: Enforce the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment in Immigration Court!
And, of course, we should never forget the ongoing, daily work performed by NDPA Superhero 🦸🏻♂️ Wendy Young and Kids in Need of Defense (“KIND”) in ending the disgraceful blot on American justice of unrepresented kids in Immigration Court:
Dear Paul,
I met Maria* in immigration court. The judge sat in his robes behind the bench when he called her deportation case.
A trial attorney from the Department of Homeland Security sat at the front, prepared to argue for Maria’s removal from the U.S.. Maria was by herself without a lawyer by her side.
She was five years old.
She approached the bench, wearing her nicest clothes, clutching a doll. She sat behind the respondent’s desk, barely able to see over the microphone. The judge asked her a number of questions about why she was in the US and about her life here, none of which she could answer. Her eyes grew bigger and bigger as she sat silently, until he finally dismissed her and told her to come back at a later date. As she left the court, he asked her what the name of her doll was. In Spanish, she replied, “Baby Baby Doll.” That was the only question she could answer.
This October, KIND is honoring the pro bono attorneys who have helped more than 27,000 children referred to KIND receive legal representation that often means the difference between relief and deportation and, by extension, a child’s safety or danger.
Paul, these are just a few ways we’ll put your gift to work, but know that your donation in ANY amount is critical to the number of children we can reach, and represent, through the amazing efforts of our pro bono attorney network.
These kids are scared, they are traumatized. They are intimidated. And without the services provided by organizations like KIND, they are all alone.
They raped women, burned homes and killed dozens of people, including children, chopping up their bodies with machetes and throwing their remains to pigs.The gruesome massacre three years ago, considered the worst in Haiti in decades, was more than the work of rival gangs fighting over territory. It was organized by senior Haitian officials, who provided weapons and vehicles to gang members to punish people in a poor area protesting government corruption, the U.S. Treasury Department announced last year.
Since then, Haiti’s gang members have grown so strong that they rule swaths of the country. The most notorious of them, a former police officer named Jimmy Cherizier, known as Barbecue, fashions himself as a political leader, holding news conferences, leading marches and, this week, even parading around as a replacement for the prime minister in the violent capital.
. . . .
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Read the rest of this gruesome, yet telling, report at the link.
Over 21 years on the Immigration Bench as both a trial and appellate judge, I adjudicated thousands of asylum claims. The circumstances described on this article undoubtedly would give rise to many potentially valid asylum and withholding claims, based on actual or implied political opinion and/or family or gender-based “particular social groups” and Convention Against Torture (“CAT”) grants based on torture with government acquiescence or actual connivance!
So, how do Biden, Harris, Mayorkas, and Garland, who to my knowledge have never represented an asylum applicant or adjudicated an individual asylum case among them, “get away” with simply suspending the rule of law, under false pretenses, for those entitled to seek asylum?
Stephen Miller must be on “Cloud Nine” as Biden & Co. carry out his White Nationalist plans to eradicate asylum, particularly when it protects women and people of color! This is even as Miller and his neo-Nazi cohorts (a/k/a “America First Legal”) are gearing up to sue the Biden Administration to block every measure that might aid immigrants, particularly those of color.
Angering and alienating your potential allies and supporters to aid the far-right program of your enemies who are determined to do whatever it takes to undermine, discredit, and destroy your Presidency! Obviously, I’m no political expert. But, sure sounds like an incredibly stupid, “designed to fail” strategy to me!
“I believe when I go to do this work, I need to integrate myself into the lives of the people I’m covering,” he says. “I don’t want them to see me as above them. We’re on the same level; we’re human.”
That context is needed to understand why Dennison entered the Darién Gap several weeks ago and why, unlike other photographers and videographers, he didn’t take any security guards with him.
That decision would end up giving him a different experience from that of others who have gone there to document the harrowing passage. They have left that jungle and come home with photos that show the horrific struggles of others. He almost didn’t leave the jungle, and he came home with only a fraction of the photos he took and with his own horrific story.
“What he’s been through is horrible and really disturbing,” says Erika Pinheiro, a lawyer who is the litigation and policy director of Al Otro Lado, an advocacy and legal aid organization that serves migrants, refugees and deportees on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. The organization has been working with Dennison to create a film that captures the experiences of U.S.-bound Black migrants.
“The only way to understand it is to see it, and that’s what he’s providing,” Pinheiro says. “It’s really important that people understand what’s happening, and that it’s not over in Del Rio.”
The Biden administration recently cleared out a border camp in Del Rio, Tex., where an estimated 15,000 migrants, most of them Haitian nationals seeking asylum, had gathered. The clearing out of the camp came after viral images and video footage showed Border Patrol agents on horseback grabbing migrants and charging at them. In one video, a young girl in a mint-green dress scrambles to get out of the way of a horse heading toward her.
President Biden decried the agents’ actions, and the Department of Homeland Security opened an investigation into the incident.
But what happened in Del Rio captures only part of what many Haitians experience to get to the United States. Many pass through the Darién Gap, some with children in tow and infants strapped to their backs or chests. Officials in Panama have said that a record 70,000 people traveled the 66 miles through the terrain this year.
Before going, Dennison did extensive research on what to expect: spiders with bites that can cause death within six hours, criminals who routinely rob travelers, and polluted water that if not filtered can sicken you. But nothing, he says, could have prepared him for what he experienced.
“When you’re in the jungle, you’re no longer a filmmaker,” he says. “You’re no longer a humanitarian. It becomes about survival.”
. . . .
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Read the full story at the link.
Sad as truth is, it’s not rocket science:
Desperate people do (and will continue to do) desperate things;
For forced migrants, the dangers of staying will always exceed those of leaving;
“Die in place” isn’t a “policy;”
“Deterrence only” can’t work in the long run;
While institutionalized racism has a long history in U.S. immigration policy, it’s never been a good policy for America, nor will it ever be!
Honestly, where does the Biden Administration get these folks who don’t “get the obvious,” lie about it, and then expect good results?
Right now, after nearly eight months, the Biden Administration still appearsto be in no better position to process the next border influx than they were on January 20, despite numerous warnings and eight months of graphic practical and humanitarian failures. Racially charged rhetoric and more cruel, wasteful, dishonest enforcement and removals won’t do it!
We need reopened legal border ports of entry staffed with more and better Asylum Officers overseen by a pragmatic progressive corps of expert Immigration Judges and a BIA composed of progressive asylum experts with the guts to knock heads and get our broken border legal system back to functionality. To state the obvious, that would promote consistency, transparency, and take some of the pressure off of the Article III Courts!
Because neither Mayorkas nor Garland is committed to taking the bold actions necessary to change the dynamics at the border, America, the Biden Administration, and vulnerable legal asylum seekers appear headed for another four years of avoidable failure with all of its unhappy human and political consequences!
On Thursday, a federal appeals court allowed the continued use of the Title 42 policy, pushed initially through the previous administration by Stephen Miller, that’s used the novel coronavirus pandemic as an excuse to quickly deport asylum-seekers, including thousands of Haitians who have arrived at the southern border in search of help.
The Biden administration was set to be blocked from using the policy against families, following a federal judge’s order earlier this month. That lower court order was set to go into effect Thursday. But the policy was saved by the Biden administration, which had shockingly appealed the lower court’s decision. To be clear, the administration could have let the lower court decision stand. But it decided to protect this scientifically unsound order for continued use.
“It’s troubling to see the court grant the government’s motion to reinstate Title 42 just days after the district court ruled that its policy violates U.S. law,” Oxfam America global policy lead Noah Gottschalk told NBC News. The group is among the organizations that have led lawsuits against the policy. “We all saw the horrific images of the abuse faced by Haitian asylum-seekers subjected to Title 42, and we cannot allow people to face further harm because of this xenophobic policy.”
Department of Homeland Security Sec. Alejandro Mayorkas has claimed it is continuing Title 42 “out of a public health need.” Meanwhile, White House Press Sec. Jen Psaki has defended the policy as “a public health requirement.” That’s complete bullshit. “Vice President Mike Pence in March directed the nation’s top disease control agency to use its emergency powers to effectively seal the U.S. borders, overruling the agency’s scientists who said there was no evidence the action would slow the coronavirus,” The Associated Press (AP) reported last October.
The previous administration got its way by twisting arms. There was no science involved, only anti-immigrant and anti-asylum animus. “That was a Stephen Miller special. He was all over that,” a former Pence aide told the AP.
And, as vaccines have become readily available, the supposed rationale to keep Title 42 in place has only gotten more flimsy. If this is truly all about public health, why not rescind the policy and offer families the single-shot Johnson & Johnson vaccine? “Let me also remind the Biden administration that over 300,000 people cross the border from Mexico every day through ports of entry,” American Immigration Council Policy Counsel Aaron Reichlin-Melnick tweeted in July. “None are given COVID tests, unlike migrants who all get tested and nearly all get vaccinated.”
. . . .
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Read more about this legal, moral, and political travesty perpetrated by the Biden Administration with Garland’s support at the link.
When it comes to things like defending ending the reprehensible “killer-program” known as “Remain in Mexico” or protecting the DACA program, Garland’s litigation team has fared poorly.
They also have drawn raised eyebrows, even if not yet any ethical complaints, from Article III Judges for their questionable representations and disingenuous defense of wrongfully issued BIA final orders of removal.
Perhaps, part the problem is that after four years of “anything goes” often misleading, sometimes downright dishonest, defense of the Trump/Miller White Nationalist xenophobic, often misogynistic, dehumanizing agenda, their hearts aren’t in it. The other glaring problem is the obvious lack of commitment to progressive humanitarian values, due process for all, and “cleaning house” at a broken and dysfunctional DOJ that has been shown by Garland.
Obviously, Garland’s DOJ lawyers are more at home and more successful when when arguing for intellectually dishonest and unconstitutional dehumanization (or “Dred Scottification”) of “the other,” primarily individuals of color who are the most vulnerable among us.
What a totally disgraceful legacy for a guy that was once just “one Moscow Mitch” away from the Supremes! On the other hand, it now appears that the GOP right wingers wouldn’t have had much to fear from a guy who won’t stand up for liberal American democratic values or even simple human decency! I doubt that he would have presented much threat to the far-right, anti-American agenda!
Thousands of Haitian migrants removed from a makeshift camp near Texas have been sent back to Haiti. Now we’re getting our first up-close look at what they are facing upon their arrival. NBC’s Jacob Soboroff reports for TODAY from Port-au-Prince, Haiti.
Sept. 30, 2021
Human Rights First debunks myth that seekers present a COVID health threat:
ASYLUM DOES NOT THREATEN PUBLIC HEALTH
The last week saw more of the Biden administration’s despicable deportation of Haitians and use Title 42 to deny their right to seek asylum. The administration perpetuates the false claim that their use of Title 42 is not an immigration policy, but a public health one, despite the vehement disagreement of public health experts.
Courtesy Washington Times
Migrants, many from Haiti, wade across the Rio Grande
river to leave Del Rio, Texas to avoid possible deportation.
Human Rights First also responded to the administration’s plans to use Guantanamo Bay as a migrant detention facility.
“Sending people who are seeking protection to a place that is notorious for being treated as a rights-free zone is the last thing that the Biden administration should do,” Eleanor Acer, Senior Director of Refugee Protection at Human Rights First told NPR. “It is nothing more than a blatant attempt to evade oversight, due process, human rights protections and the refugee laws of the United States.”
Even in rolling out otherwise more reasonable enforcement priorities for ICE, Mayorkas insisted on making the bogus claim that recent border arrivals present a “national security threat,” as reported by the WashPost’s Maria Sacchetti:
Mayorkas said in his memo Thursday that migrants who cross the border illegally, particularly those who arrived unlawfully over the past year or so, remain a “threat to border security” and a priority for removal. But the ACLU has argued in its lawsuit that migrants have a legal right to seek asylum.
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“Courtside’s” rating of Mayorkas’s claims: 🤥🤥🤥🤥🤥🤥🤥🤥🤥🤥
Who would have thought that more than eight months into the Biden Administration, we’d still be arguing about basics like “migrants have a legal right to seek asylum in the US?” See, INA section 208.
There are enormous downsides to border disorder, to immigration policy paralysis and to leaving the fates of more than 11 million current immigrants without any path to a secure future — even beyond the reinforcement it provides to the United States’ growing international reputation for dysfunction. No one gains by the chaos except smugglers who soak desperate migrants financially on their way north in hopes of a better life. The losers include not only the “dreamers” brought to this country as children, who must live in perpetual anxiety, but also the country as a whole, which loses the value of immigrants, skilled and otherwise, who would turbocharge entrepreneurship, create jobs and help the economy grow.
There are available solutions if Congress could overcome its horror of bipartisan compromise. The goal should be to establish a realistic annual quota of immigrant visas for Central Americans, Haitians and others desperate to reach this country who otherwise will cross the border illegally — a number that recognizes the U.S. labor market’s demand for such employees. That must be supplemented by a muscular guest worker program that enables legal border crossing for migrants who want to support families remaining in their home countries.
. . . .
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Read the complete editorial at the link.
It’s worth adding that the current “border disorder” is largely the result of White Nationalist, legally defective, anti-immigrant policies of the Trump regime compounded by the failure of Mayorkas and Garland to take the obvious, available, common sense steps necessary to reopen legal border ports of entry, to make the long overdue necessary reforms to establish a fair, efficient, and generous legal asylum system at the USCIS Asylum Offices and the Immigration Courts, and to insist on the creation of a robust, functional refugee program for Latin America and the Caribbean.
None of the this is “rocket science!” 🚀 Plenty of great blueprints for administrative reforms and the potential expert leadership to implement them were “out there for the taking” at the beginning of the Biden Administration. By dawdling, tapping the wrong leaders, and continuing enforcement policies and bad judicial practices that were proven failures, the Administration predictably put itself “behind the eight-ball” in establishing order and implementing the rule of law at our borders!
Until the Biden Administration ends its disgraceful, cowardly, illegal, cruel, ineffective, and inhumane reliance on bogus “Title 42” restrictions to suspend orderly legal processing at the border, they will continue to bobble the next predictable “border crisis.” The GOP will continue to spout nativist nonsense. Desperate people will continue to do desperate things. Only a tone-deaf Administration would continue to ignore this reality!
Several Black immigration organizations have filed a formal complaint with the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, demanding that the Biden administration halt its continued deportations of Haitian asylum seekers.
The complaint filed by four groups ― the Haitian Bridge Alliance, UndocuBlack Network, African Communities Together and Black Alliance for Just Immigration ― requests that any potential witnesses of Border Patrol abuses be allowed to remain in the U.S. while their asylum claims are investigated. The complaint was first reported by theGrio, and signed by dozens of advocacy groups.
More than 13,000 Haitians were camped along the river at the Texas border town of Del Rio last weekend when Border Patrol officers on horseback charged at some of those gathered there, verbally assaulting and appearing to whip them. Photos of the violence shocked the public.
. . . .
The complaint by the organizations notes that the migrants have been denied access to attorneys, interpreters, adequate medical care, fear-based screening and proper nourishment and sanitation, all under intense heat. It also highlights physical intimidation and violence against migrants by Border Patrol officers, and misleading statements made by Homeland Security officers to Haitians about where they were being flown to.
“We’re not living up to our obligation as a nation to be a place of refuge for people seeking a better life,” former Obama administration Cabinet member Julián Castro told HuffPost earlier this week. “And in the least, asylum seekers, whether they’re from Haiti, or from one of these Northern Triangle countries should be allowed to make their asylum claim, instead of being severely expelled from the country. This was not the change we were hoping for on immigration policy.”
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Mayorkas’s defense of his grotesque, “Trumpist” misuse of Title 42, which actually has been rejected by a Federal Judge, on “Meet the Press” was as disgraceful as it was dishonest!
Either Mayorkas doesn’t understand reality, or he’s too intellectually dishonest to speak truth! Regardless, it’s not good!
Re-establishing the rule of law and treating asylum seekers fairly and generously, as the law requires, is not an option! It’s a legal and moral obligation! There is absolutely no reason to “apologize” for treating asylum seekers fairly and humanely, no matter what racist GOP nativists like Texas “Governor Death” Greg Abbott and Senator “Cancun Ted the Insurrectionist” Cruz say!
The US homeland security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, on Sunday defended the Biden administration’s decision to send thousands of Haitians to a home country they fled because of natural disasters and political turmoil.
White House criticizes border agents who rounded up migrants on horseback
Mayorkas told NBC’s Meet the Press the removals were justified because of the coronavirus pandemic, a point disputed by advocates and public health experts.
“The Centers for Disease Control [and Prevention, or CDC] has a Title 42 authority that we exercise to protect the migrants themselves, to protect the local communities, our personnel and the American public,” Mayorkas said.
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“The pandemic is not behind us. Title 42 is a public health policy, not an immigration policy.”
Since Donald Trump’s administration implemented Title 42 in March 2020, advocates and dozens of public health experts have called for its end.
Under Title 42, people who attempt to cross the border are returned to Mexico or deported to their home countries without an opportunity to test asylum claims.
In January, Joe Biden stopped the rule from applying to children. Despite that, at least 22 babies and children were deported to Haiti in February.
More than 30 public health experts wrote to Mayorkas and the head of the CDC, Rochelle Walensky, earlier this month, saying Title 42 was “scientifically baseless and politically motivated”.
This coalition has repeatedly said the policy violates the right to seek asylum and ignores how basic public health measures can reduce the spread of Covid-19.
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“Title 42 runs counter to the government’s own commitment to address Covid-19 globally,” the coalition said. “The absence of effective Covid-19 mitigation services at the border and the expulsion of people to situations in which they may be exposed to Covid-19 and unable to practice prevention are contrary to the US government commitment to address Covid-19 globally.”
On Sunday, Mayorkas told CNN about 4,000 Haitians who arrived in the past two weeks have been expelled, 13,000 others had been allowed to enter the US to pursue their immigration cases in court and 8,000 had voluntarily chosen to return to Mexico.
NBC’s Meet the Press host Chuck Todd questioned Mayorkas about why thousands were being sent to Haiti even though they had traveled to the US from South America.
“These are Haitian nationals,” Mayorkas said. “Some of them don’t have documents from the countries from which they just left. So they are subject to removal.”
. . . .
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Of course, Haiti clearly is not a safe place to return migrants:
‘They treated us like animals’: Haitians angry and in despair at being deported from US
‘They treated us like animals’: Haitians angry and in despair at being deported from US
Haitian deportees arriving from Texas say they were ‘rounded up like cattle and shackled like criminals’
Joe Parkin Daniels in Port-au-Prince
Published:
05:00 Sunday, 26 September 2021
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About this content
When Evens Delva waded across the Rio Grande with his wife and two daughters, he had dreams of starting a new life in Florida. But less than a week later, he and his family stepped on to the tarmac in Port-au-Prince, the sweltering and chaotic capital of Haiti, with nothing except traumatic memories and a feeling of bubbling anger.
Delva, along with nearly 2,000 other Haitians, was deported from southern Texas this week to Haiti, despite having lived in Chile for the past six years and having few remaining connections to his home country. His younger daughter, who is four, does not hold Haitian citizenship, having been born in Chile, and speaks more Spanish than Haitian Creole.
“I don’t know what we’ll do, we don’t have anywhere to stay or anyone to call,” the 40-year-old said, moments after getting off the plane in the blistering midday Caribbean heat. “All I know is that this is the last place I want to be.”
Evens Delva and his wife at Port-au-Prince airport in Haiti on Friday after being deported from Texas. Photograph: Joe Parkin Daniels/The Guardian
It is not hard to understand why. Haiti, the poorest country in the western hemisphere, is mired in overlapping crises. Gasoline shortages and blackouts are a daily reality, while warring gangs routinely kidnap for ransom and wage battle on the streets.
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The grim situation only worsened when the president, Jovenel Moïse, was assassinated in his home on 7 July, triggering a political power struggle and further instability and street violence. On 14 August, a 7.2-magnitude earthquake struck the country’s poor southern peninsula, killing more than 2,200 people and leaving tens of thousands homeless.
US envoy to Haiti resigns over ‘inhumane’ decision to deport migrants
The Biden administration’s decision to deport thousands of Haitians under such circumstances drew opprobrium around the world, and prompted the US envoy to Haiti to resign in protest. Haiti is “a country where American officials are confined to secure compounds because of the danger posed by armed gangs in control of daily life”, he wrote in his resignation letter. “Surging migration to our borders will only grow as we add to Haiti’s unacceptable misery.”
Last week, the world was shocked by images of police officers on horseback charging at desperate Haitian migrants near a camp of 12,000, set up under the Del Río-Ciudad Acuña International Bridge. Delva was on his way to buy food and water for his family when the cavalry charge sent him and dozens of his compatriots running in a frenzy.
“We were rounded up like cattle and shackled like criminals,” he said, having spent the six-hour flight from San Antonio with his hands and legs tied.
“They treated us like animals,” added Maria, his wife.. “We’ll never forget how that felt.”
. . . .
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David Shipler does a great job of exposing the hypocrisy and intellectual dishonesty of Mayorkas and other Biden Administration immigration officials.
America’s Callous Border
By David K. Shipler
Several years ago, a gray-haired passport control official at Heathrow Airport in London, noting “writer” under “occupation” on my landing card, asked me what I wrote. I was finishing a book on civil liberties, I told him, with a chapter on immigration. That caught his interest. He leaned forward, glanced around, lowered his voice and said, “I loathe borders.”
Funny line of work you’re in, I said. We shared a chuckle, he stamped my passport, and I crossed the border that he loathed.
We have nation states, and so we have borders. Dictatorships need them to keep people in, lest their countries be drained of the talented and the aspiring. Democracies need them to keep people out—often those with talent and aspiration who are fleeing to safety and opportunity. So far, the United States is lucky enough to be the latter. So far.
When desperate fathers and mothers are drawn with admiring naïveté to the beacon of America, when they carry their children through months of torment by mountain jungles and predatory gangs, when their courage and towering fortitude set them apart from the masses, shouldn’t they be embraced when they reach the final border of a nation of fellow immigrants that touts its compassion and humanity?
Cut through the crazy tangle of immigration laws, regulations, and inconsistent enforcement to the essential ethic, and the answer is an obvious yes. But the obvious is not obvious in the White House or in the Department of Homeland Security or in the ranks of the beleaguered Border Patrol, whose horsemen scramble, as if herding cattle, to intercept frantic Haitians wading from the Rio Grande onto the banks of freedom and promise.
Instead, a new torment is found: Haitians with enough grit to leave their country a decade or so ago and build lives on the margins in Brazil, Chile, and elsewhere are taken from their first steps onto U.S. soil and summarily—summarily, without due process—deported. And where to? To Haiti, a failed state where many have long since lost family or work or even places of shelter. To Haiti, which has collapsed into such violence and disarray that the State Department warns Americans on its website: “Do not travel to Haiti due to kidnapping, crime, civil unrest, and COVID-19.”
What is wrong with the air in the White House? Is there not enough oxygen? What accounts for the impaired thinking that seems to transcend administrations, from Republican to Democratic. Where is the regard for human dignity? Why is it so often absent in the calculations that create policy?
Donald Trump wore callousness on his sleeve and was proud of it. His base hooted its applause at his vilification of Mexican immigrants as rapists and drug dealers. By contrast, Joe Biden wears a badge of empathy. His mantra is compassion. “Horrible” and “outrageous” were the words he found to describe the photographed attacks on Haitians from horseback. He halted the use of horses and vowed that agents responsible “will pay.” He also said, “It’s simply not who we are.”
But it is who we are. The images have been compared to old photos of white overseers on horseback commanding enslaved Blacks in the fields. The Border Patrol in cowboy hats have been compared to Texas Rangers “who were celebrated for their excellent ‘tracking skills’ that were put to use to hunt and capture enslaved people,” said historian Monica Martinez of the University of Texas.
These are compelling analogies with painful resonance. They are also flawed as parallels, for the Black migrants at the border are not slaves. They are clamoring to be here, crossing illegally, seeing the border as a threshold. They were not brought here in chains against their will. Some are being removed in chains against their will.
Nevertheless, in a sense they are enslaved by their blackness. If white Canadians tried this up north, does anybody truly believe that they would be treated as the Black Haitians are? Animating America’s conscience should not require reaching back to the sin of slavery. The present ought to be enough.
Our borders always put our split personality on display: We are cruel and welcoming, hateful and helpful, defined by doors closed at times to entire ethnic groups and then opened to invigorate the nation with willing hands and vital contributions.
In fact, if the country is not sufficiently moved by simple morality, then it might consider self-interest. The U.S. population growth rate has been falling steadily since 2008, dropping to a mere 0.58 percent from 2020 to 2021. Many regions lack skilled workers, as homeowners and small business owners and even hospitals can testify from trying to hire carpenters, plumbers, electricians, welders, mechanics, and nurses. We should have winced when one Haitian deportee was quoted as describing himself as a welder and carpenter.
Using abuse to manipulate determined people did not work under Trump—a lesson that Biden and his advisers might have learned. Trump’s administration separated children from their parents at the border, his aides reasoning that families heading north would get the message and—what?–abandon their fortitude and survival instincts, turn around, and head back to life-threatening misery?
So, too Biden officials are reportedly figuring that tossing Haitian expatriates into Haiti’s maelstrom will dissuade others from coming. In other words, don’t be humane, and folks will give up. But they won’t give up. They will still roll the dice, because there’s always a chance, especially since some are being allowed to stay, at least for a while, pending proper examination of their asylum claims as the law requires. When your ship has sunk, you don’t stop clinging to a piece of flotsam just because some shipmates have slipped off into the sea.
What the Biden White House needs is somebody in an influential position who has made this journey, who has shepherded family and children through jungles and ganglands to reach this supposedly promised land. That official might bring to the Oval Office a glimmer of understanding and respect for the force of personality and perseverance that drive a person toward our callous border.
****************
Something about the DHS Secretary job seem to require checking honesty, common sense, historical perspective, and humanity at the door, not to mention the true “rule of law.”
Phan Quang Tue is a retired San Francisco Immigration Court judge.
As I sit down to start writing this piece, the chaotic scenes of group panic at the Kabul airport in Afghanistan continue to unfold. They bring back memories of similar painful images at the Tan Son Nhat airport in Saigon 46 years ago.
Our family of four, including my pregnant wife and our two small children, then 4 and 8 years old, were sitting on the floor of a C-130 about to take off. The aircraft was crowded but strangely quiet. Everyone stared down and avoided eye contact. It was a moment of collective humiliation, to have to leave one’s country under these circumstances. The irony was that we knew we were being saved by the very same foreign government that did not stand behind its commitment to its allies in South Vietnam. We did not know where exactly we were heading, or what to expect in the days and months ahead of us. It was a moment of total uncertainty.
Although 46 years apart, the parallels between the events in Saigon and Kabul are striking. Once again, we see scenes of a capital in agony, with everyone taking to the streets with no clear direction. We remember images of people climbing over the walls of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon; now in Kabul, it’s people climbing over barriers at Hamid Karzai International Airport or chasing military airplanes on the tarmac. But the similarities do not stop there.
The Americans are withdrawing their troops after 20 years in Afghanistan. That is almost the same as the 21 years between the beginning of U.S. political involvement in Vietnam starting with the 1954 Geneva agreements and the Communist takeover of Saigon on April 30, 1975. And there is more. As in Vietnam, the Americans in Afghanistan treated their opponents with more respect than their allies. Though their opponents have easily identified names — the Vietcong and then the Taliban — they minimized their own allies as temporary “regimes” based in Saigon or Afghanistan.
The Vietnamese refugees who arrived in the United States starting in April 1975 were not always made welcome, as the winners of a popular war might have been. Even the veterans — American and Vietnamese alike — were not warmly received everywhere, despite the service they had given to their countries. This country does not like to lose and does not know how to lose. Afghan refugees should not expect to be welcomed with parades like the gold medalists returning from the Tokyo Olympics.
. . . .
The United States did not win the war against the Taliban. But now is when the American people can step in and provide the Afghan refugees a haven whereby they can join “we the people” to “form a more perfect Union” for themselves, their children and their grandchildren.
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Read the rest of the op-ed at the above link.
Thanks, my friend and colleague, for sharing, for all you have done for America, and for your continuing important contributions. It’s an honor to know you and to be working with you on our Round Table!🛡⚔️