⚖️🗽WATCH, LISTEN TO PROFESSOR GEOFFREY HOFFMAN OF U. OF HOUSTON LAW DELIVER THE 2021 SKELTON LECTURE: “What Should Immigration Law Become?”

https://youtu.be/GvwuahGzZQ8

*****************

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hardship and injustice have been eliminated by Congress: suspension of deportation, JRAD, 212(c), 245(i), registry (not repealed but now virtually useless b/c of 1972 cutoff date).

👍🏼🗽Thanks, Geoffrey, and Due Process Forever!

PWS

03-04-21

🏴‍☠️TRUMP REGIME LEFT BEHIND AWFUL MESS 🤡 @ EOIR: BACKLOGS GREW EXPONENTIALLY, CASES TOOK LONGER TO COMPLETE, BUT MORE (LESS QUALIFIED) JUDGES WERE ON THE BENCH — Haste Makes Waste Gimmicks Created “Worst Of All Worlds!”

EYORE — “Eyore In Distress”
Once A Symbol of Fairness, Due Process, & Best Practices, Now Gone “Belly Up”

Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse

Immigrants Facing Deportation Wait Twice as Long in FY 2021 Compared to FY 2020

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

The latest available case-by-case Immigrant Court records show that immigration cases that were completed in the first four months of FY 2021 took nearly twice as long from beginning to end as cases completed in the first four months of FY 2020. Cases that were completed between the beginning of October 2020 and the end of January 2021 took, on average, 859 days compared to 436 days over the same period a year before. The duration was calculated as the number of days between the date the Notice to Appear was issued to the date of completion as recorded in the Immigration Court’s records.

The top ten Immigration Courts with the most case completions thus far in FY 2021 accounted for four out of every ten closures (42%). The Miami Immigration Court was the most active with 2,129 case closures. Completion times at the Miami Immigration Court have increased since November 2020, but were slightly lower than the national average at 832 average days. In November, the Miami court took on average 787 days. The Immigration Court in Los Angeles had the second highest number of case completions with 1,857 case closures, followed closely by San Francisco with 1,849. Baltimore and Dallas were in fourth and fifth place.

The longest disposition times were found in the Atlanta Immigration Court where it took on average 1,577 days to close a case. The Cleveland Immigration Court was close behind, taking an average of 1,573 days. The Arlington Immigration Court was in third place with completion times so far in FY 2021 averaging 1,535 days. Newark and Boston Immigration Courts were in fourth and fifth place. Cases completed by immigration judges in Atlanta, Cleveland, Arlington, and Newark all took, on average, longer than four years.

The full report is found at:

https://trac.syr.edu/immigration/reports/639/

To examine a variety of Immigration Court data, including asylum data, the backlog, MPP, and more now updated through January 2021, use TRAC’s Immigration Court tools here:

https://trac.syr.edu/imm/tools/

If you want to be sure to receive a notification whenever updated data become available, sign up at:

https://tracfed.syr.edu/cgi-bin/tracuser.pl?pub=1

Follow us on Twitter at:

https://twitter.com/tracreports

or like us on Facebook:

https://facebook.com/tracreports

TRAC is self-supporting and depends on foundation grants, individual contributions and subscription fees for the funding needed to obtain, analyze and publish the data we collect on the activities of the US Federal government. To help support TRAC’s ongoing efforts, go to:

https://trac.syr.edu/cgi-bin/sponsor/sponsor.pl

David Burnham and Susan B. Long, co-directors

Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse

Syracuse University

Suite 360, Newhouse II

Syracuse, NY 13244-2100

315-443-3563

trac@syr.edu

https://trac.syr.edu

The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse is a nonpartisan joint research center of the Whitman School of Management (https://whitman.syr.edu) and the Newhouse School of Public Communications (https://newhouse.syr.edu) at Syracuse University. If you know someone who would like to sign up to receive occasional email announcements and press releases, they may go to https://trac.syr.edu and click on the E-mail Alerts link at the bottom of the page. If you do not wish to receive future email announcements and wish to be removed from our list, please send an email to trac@syr.edu with REMOVE as the subject.

***************

Maliciously incompetent management fuels “Aimless Docket Reshuffling!”

It’s what happens when you combine White Nationalism, maliciously incompetent management, bad judging, and endless “enforcement-only” gimmicks that tried to cut corners and short-circuit justice — “Aimless Docket Reshuffling” (“ADR”) to the max. What has been absent from this system for years is leadership that understands immigration, views migrants as humans, and is committed to due process, fundamental fairness, and best practices.

Pretty much what AILA pointed out in today’s report (policy brief).

🎇🧨💣BLOCKBUSTER NEW REPORT MAKES COMPELLING CASE FOR IMMEDIATE END TO EOIR CLOWN SHOW! 🤡🦹🏿‍♂️ — Lays Out Blueprint For Restoring Due Process, Enhancing Justice In America’s Most Dysfunctional, Unfair, and Abusive “Courts!”

The system can’t improve without better personnel — not necessarily more — just better qualified to get the job done in a fair and timely manner consistent with due process and human dignity!

🇺🇸⚖️🗽Due Process Forever!

PWS

02-12-21

DUH OF DA DAY: White Nationalist Agenda, Anti-Asylum Gimmicks, Grotesque Mal-Administration Leads To Longer Waiting Times @ Disastrously Dysfunctional EOIR 🤮 — Biden-Harris Administration Must End America’s Disgraceful Star Chambers ⚰️!

Star Chamber Justice — “Justice”
Star Chamber
Style

Four Horsemen — BIA Asylum Panel In Action
Albrecht Dürer, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse

Immigration Court Case Completion Times Jump as Delays Lengthen

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Not surprisingly, Immigration Court closures and delays in hearings for courts that are conducting hearings have drastically reduced the number of completed cases for the first two months of this fiscal year as compared with prior years at the same time.

New cases continue to drastically outpace case completions. In October and November 2020, the Immigration Courts received 29,758 new filings. This is fewer filings than usual, but still almost twice the 15,990 cases they completed.

As a result, the court’s active backlog at the end of November 2020 reached 1,281,586. This is up 18,821 cases in just the last two months. Adding to the court’s workload are not only new filings, but previously closed cases that have been reopened, remanded for reconsideration, or otherwise placed back on the court’s docket.

Disposition times for closed cases have also shot up this year. Cases disposed of in FY 2020 took on average 460 days. During the first two months of FY 2021, the courts disposed of a much smaller number of cases, but the disposition times were much longer at an average of 755 days—or 64 percent longer. The longest disposition times were found in the Cleveland Immigration Court where it took on average 1,617 days.

For the latest disposition times at each Immigration Court read the full report at:

https://trac.syr.edu/immigration/reports/634/

To examine a variety of Immigration Court data, including asylum data, the backlog, MPP, and more now updated through November 2020, use TRAC’s Immigration Court tools here:

https://trac.syr.edu/imm/tools/

If you want to be sure to receive a notification whenever updated data become available, sign up at:

https://tracfed.syr.edu/cgi-bin/tracuser.pl?pub=1

Follow us on Twitter at:

https://twitter.com/tracreports

or like us on Facebook:

https://facebook.com/tracreports

TRAC is self-supporting and depends on foundation grants, individual contributions and subscription fees for the funding needed to obtain, analyze and publish the data we collect on the activities of the US Federal government. To help support TRAC’s ongoing efforts, go to:

https://trac.syr.edu/cgi-bin/sponsor/sponsor.pl

David Burnham and Susan B. Long, co-directors

Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse

Syracuse University

Suite 360, Newhouse II

Syracuse, NY 13244-2100

315-443-3563

trac@syr.edu

https://trac.syr.edu

The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse is a nonpartisan joint research center of the Whitman School of Management (https://whitman.syr.edu) and the Newhouse School of Public Communications (https://newhouse.syr.edu) at Syracuse University. If you know someone who would like to sign up to receive occasional email announcements and press releases, they may go to https://trac.syr.edu and click on the E-mail Alerts link at the bottom of the page. If you do not wish to receive future email announcements and wish to be removed from our list, please send an email to trac@syr.edu with REMOVE as the subject.

*******************

As mom used to say, “Haste makes waste.” Taking more time to decide cases would be perfectly defensible if it actually produced useful deliberation, thoughtful scholarship, and just and fair results. But, this currently is a system that must limit its intake while it develops the expertise, scholarship, analytical skills, quality control mechanisms, and best practices necessary for judicial efficiency that complies with due process and fundamental fairness (not to mention basic asylum law). That’s a “complete rebuild.”

Then, once that system is running well, it could be methodically and rationally expanded, if actually necessary. But, aimlessly building more assembly lines producing defective products and then ratcheting up the speed will, not surprisingly, produce nothing except more dangerous and defective products.

Not exactly rocket science that a bunch of hacks implementing racist policies, trying to speed up the assembly line, engaging in “Aimless Docket Reshuffling,” eradicating due process, discouraging fairness and deliberation, eliminating their own jurisdiction to control the dockets, and denying everything while mindlessly throwing more resources into a broken beyond belief “(non)system” at war with its own essential employees and those whom it (dis)serves would produce total chaos and dysfunction. Also, throw in lack of best technology and overt disregard for public health and safety.

And, while this is going on, an undisciplined, out of control, and for all practical purposes worse than useless ICE continues to pour new cases into the maelstrom at twice the rate it can get turn them out! As the late NY Met’s Manager Casey Stengel once said, “Can’t anyone here play this game?”

This is an ongoing and increasingly visible unmitigated national disgrace. It’s also an abuse of public funds and a betrayal of the public trust — fundamentals of sound government.

And, it won’t be “swept under the table” in the finest tradition of incoming Administrations. As I’ve said before, the Biden-Harris Administration either fixes EOIR🤡 immediately with some new faces with real expertise, or it “owns” it. And, the current White Nationalism infested atrocity and den of “malicious incompetence” at EOIR🤡 is not something an Administration striving to achieve equal justice and racial reconciliation should want to own!

Due Process Forever!

Hey hey, ho ho, the EOIR Clown Show 🤡 has got to go!

EOIR Clown Show Must Go T-Shirt — “EOIR Clown Show Must Go” T-Shirt Custom Design Concept

PWS

12-22-20

EXPOSING THE KAKISTOCRACY 🏴‍☠️ — LATEST TRAC “DATA DIVE” SHOWS WHY THERE ARE LIES, DAMN LIES, & EOIR’S “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” ☠️🤮👎 – The Round Table & Other Immigration Experts, As Well As Some Article III Judges, Have Been Saying It Ever Since “Gonzo” Sessions’s Unethical & Dishonest Opinion In Castro-Tum: “TRAC finds that far from contributing to the backlog, administrative closure has helped reduce the backlog. [T]he EOIR significantly misrepresented the data it used to justify this rule.”

Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse

The Life and Death of Administrative Closure

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

In August 2020, the Executive Office of Immigration Review (EOIR) proposed a new rule that would effectively eliminate administrative closure as a docket management tool for Immigration Judges. The EOIR justified this proposed rule by claiming that administrative closure has “exacerbated both the extent of the existing backlog of immigration court cases and the difficulty in addressing that backlog in a fair and timely manner.” TRAC analyzed the EOIR’s claims as well as the historical data on administrative closure from 1986, and has just published its findings in a detailed report. The link to the report is below.

TRAC’s detailed analysis of the court records on administrative closure yields four key findings. First, administrative closure has been routinely used by Immigration Judges to manage their growing caseloads as well as manage the unresolved overlapping of jurisdictions between the EOIR and other immigration agencies. From FY 1986 to 2020, 6.1 percent (or 376,439) deportation and removal cases had been administratively closed during their lifespan. Each year, between 1 percent and 30 percent of cases are administratively closed, with high percentages of administrative closures during the Reagan and Bush Administrations in the late 1980s and early 1990s and during the Obama Administration between 2012 and 2016.

Second, TRAC finds that far from contributing to the backlog, administrative closure has helped reduce the backlog. If the 292,042 cases that are currently administratively closed and not yet recalendared were brought back onto the Court’s active docket, this would suddenly increase the Court’s active workload from its current backlog at the end of July 2020 of 1,233,307 cases to 1,525,349 cases. This would produce a 24 percent jump in the court’s already clogged hearing schedules, pushing the resolution of other backlogged cases off for many additional months if not years.

Third, data from the Immigration Courts show that immigrants who obtain administrative closure are likely to have followed legal requirements and obtain lawful status. When cases were administratively closed, recalendared, and decided, most immigrants met the legal standard to remain in the country lawfully. For example, for those cases in which the government was seeking removal orders, six out of ten (60.1%) immigrants met the high legal threshold of remaining in the country. The largest proportion of these had their cases terminated since the Court ultimately found there were no longer valid grounds to deport them. Just three out of ten (30.3%) immigrants were ultimately ordered removed.

Fourth, the EOIR significantly misrepresented the data it used to justify this rule. Specifically, the agency claims to show low numbers of case completions during the Obama Administration and high numbers of case completions during the Trump Administration. In reality, the data behind this argument artificially eliminates cases that were administratively closed. Its argument also fails to recognize that average annual case completions per Immigration Judge have actually declined from 737 closures per judge to 657 per judge during the past four years, not increased, perhaps due to the changes introduced by the current Administration.

Read the full report at:

https://trac.syr.edu/immigration/reports/623/

TRAC’s free web query tools which track Immigration Court proceedings have also been updated through July 2020. For an index to the full list of TRAC’s immigration tools and their latest update go to:

https://trac.syr.edu/imm/tools/

If you want to be sure to receive a notification whenever updated data become available, sign up at:

https://tracfed.syr.edu/cgi-bin/tracuser.pl?pub=1

Follow us on Twitter at:

https://twitter.com/tracreports

or like us on Facebook:

https://facebook.com/tracreports

TRAC is self-supporting and depends on foundation grants, individual contributions and subscription fees for the funding needed to obtain, analyze and publish the data we collect on the activities of the US Federal government. To help support TRAC’s ongoing efforts, go to:

https://trac.syr.edu/cgi-bin/sponsor/sponsor.pl

David Burnham and Susan B. Long, co-directors
Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse
Syracuse University
Suite 360, Newhouse II
Syracuse, NY 13244-2100
315-443-3563
trac@syr.edu
https://trac.syr.edu

The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse is a nonpartisan joint research center of the Whitman School of Management (https://whitman.syr.edu) and the Newhouse School of Public Communications (https://newhouse.syr.edu) at Syracuse University. If you know someone who would like to sign up to receive occasional email announcements and press releases, they may go to https://trac.syr.edu and click on the E-mail Alerts link at the bottom of the page. If you do not wish to receive future email announcements and wish to be removed from our list, please send an email to trac@syr.edu with REMOVE as the subject.

*************************************

“Significantly misrepresented” — That’s a euphamism for “blatantly lied.” Of course, that’s what the head of the regime does on life or death matters. So, I suppose we wouldn’t expect anything else from the “toadies on parade” filling out the kakistocracy.

Look, you don’t “jack” the backlog to at least twice its “pre-regime” level with twice the number of Immigration Judges without some pretty grotesque mismanagement, cover-ups, falsification of data, dishonesty, and denial of rights to migrants.

Moreover, TRAC specifically shows the “false narrative” peddled by the racists in the Trump regime that administrative closing is some type of “evasion” that is not in the public interest. As Judge Richard Leon would say “poppycock.” It’s exactly the opposite! TRAC finds that “data from the Immigration Courts show that immigrants who obtain administrative closure are likely to have followed legal requirements and obtain lawful status.”

Administrative closure is a sane, reasonable, well-established, entirely legal, and absolutely necessary procedure. Gee whiz, one of the original proponents of administrative closure and its aggressive use as a docket management tool was the late first Chief Immigration Judge William R. Robie. Chief Judge Robie was a Republican appointee during the Reagan Administration. He also was a devotee of fundamental fairness and judicial efficiency. He had led a number of professional organizations and was known and respected in the DC Legal Community as a “guru of timeliness and efficient legal administration.”

What’s abusive are the illegal tactics, lies, and mismanagement at both DOJ and DHS that have been concocted to justify racist, White Nationalist policies that do not serve the public interest!

Due Process Forever!

PWS

09-10-20

**************************

Here’s an Addendum from Margaret Stock:

From: Margaret Stock [mailto:MStock@CASCADIALAWALASKA.COM]
Sent: Saturday, September 12, 2020 10:17 AM
To: Benson, Lenni B.
Cc: Immprof (immprof@lists.ucla.edu)
Subject: Re: [immprof] FW: The Life and Death of Administrative Closure

The Administration is most definitely putting out misleading information (as usual). Example: one often overlooked “administrative closure” group has been members of the US military who got tossed into removal proceedings for one reason or another (usually because of a referred asylum case or failure to file an I751 or denial of an I751 by USCIS). They almost always naturalize after being put into proceedings, then reopen and terminate. Lately, they’ve had to hire a lawyer to keep showing up at master calendar hearings, usually for a couple of years. The judges can’t hear the case because they’ve got naturalization applications pending. But the judges have to keep wasting docket time on them because there’s no such thing as admin closure anymore. It’s foolish and costly for the service members.

Sent from my iPhone

🏴‍☠️🤡KAKISTOCRACY KORNER: Experienced Immigration Judges Flee America’s Star Chambers At Record Numbers As Trump Regime’s Malicious Incompetence Triples Backlog With Twice The Number Of Judges On Bench, According To Latest TRAC Report!

🏴‍☠️🤡KAKISTOCRACY KORNER: Experienced Immigration Judges Flee America’s Star Chambers At Record Numbers As Trump Regime’s Malicious Incompetence Triples Backlog With Twice The Number Of Judges On Bench, According To Latest TRAC Report!

Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse

More Immigration Judges Leaving the Bench

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

The latest judge-by-judge data from the Immigration Courts indicate that more judges are resigning and retiring. Turnover is the highest since records began in FY 1997 over two decades ago. These results are based on detailed records obtained by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) from the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) which administers the Courts.

During FY 2019 a record number of 35 judges left the bench. This is up from the previous record set in FY 2017 when 20 judges left the bench, and 27 judges left in FY 2018.

With elevated hiring plus the record number of judges leaving the bench more cases are being heard by judges with quite limited experience as immigration judges.

Currently one of every three (32%) judges have only held their position since FY 2019. Half (48%) of the judges serving today were appointed in the last two and a half years. And nearly two-thirds (64%) were appointed since FY 2017.

While the Court is losing many of its most experienced judges, the backlog of cases continues to balloon. It is now almost three times the level when President Trump assumed office.

Update on Disappearing Immigration Court Records

Records continue to disappear in the latest data release for updated court records through the end of June 2020. The report provides the latest statement from EOIR Chief Management Officer Kate Sheehey about this matter.

To read the full report on Immigration Judges leaving the bench as well as the Sheehey statement, go to:

https://trac.syr.edu/immigration/reports/617/

TRAC’s free web query tools which track Immigration Court proceedings have also been updated through June 2020. For an index to the full list of TRAC’s immigration tools and their latest update go to:

https://trac.syr.edu/imm/tools/

If you want to be sure to receive a notification whenever updated data become available, sign up at:

https://tracfed.syr.edu/cgi-bin/tracuser.pl?pub=1

Follow us on Twitter at:

https://twitter.com/tracreports

or like us on Facebook:

https://facebook.com/tracreports

TRAC is self-supporting and depends on foundation grants, individual contributions and subscription fees for the funding needed to obtain, analyze and publish the data we collect on the activities of the US Federal government. To help support TRAC’s ongoing efforts, go to:

https://trac.syr.edu/cgi-bin/sponsor/sponsor.pl

David Burnham and Susan B. Long, co-directors
Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse
Syracuse University
Suite 360, Newhouse II
Syracuse, NY 13244-2100
315-443-3563
trac@syr.edu
https://trac.syr.edu

The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse is a nonpartisan joint research center of the Whitman School of Management (https://whitman.syr.edu) and the Newhouse School of Public Communications (https://newhouse.syr.edu) at Syracuse University. If you know someone who would like to sign up to receive occasional email announcements and press releases, they may go to https://trac.syr.edu and click on the E-mail Alerts link at the bottom of the page. If you do not wish to receive future email announcements and wish to be removed from our list, please send an email to trac@syr.edu with REMOVE as the subject.

***************************

Look folks, I’m not disputing that Susan B. Long and David Burnham of TRAC are smart people. I’m even willing to speculate that they are smarter than most of the folks still in so-called public service (that largely isn’t any more) in all three branches of our failing Government.

But, are they really that much smarter than Supreme Court Justices, Article III Federal Judges, and Legislators who have let this grotesquely unconstitutional, dysfunctional, and deadly Star Chamber masquerading as a “court system” right here on American soil unfold and continue its daily abuses right under their complicit noses? Or, do we have too many individuals in public office lacking both the human decency and moral courage to stand up against institutionalized racism, unnecessarily cruelty, corruption, and pure stupidity, all of which very clearly are prohibited by both the due process and equal protection clauses of our Constitution, not to mention the 13th and 15th Amendments. It’s not rocket science!

Enough with the Congressional and Court-enabled “Dred Scottification” of the other! That’s how we ended up with things like the “Chinese Exclusion Act” and “Jim Crow” and why we have an institutionalized racism problem now.

Instead of standing up for equal justice for all under the Constitution, the Supremes and Congress often have willingly been part of the problem — using the law knowingly and intentionally to undermine constitutionally required equal justice for all and an end to racism. And, we can see those same attitudes today, specifically in the Supremes’ ridiculously wrong, intellectually dishonest, and cowardly decisions “greenlighting” various parts of White Nationalist Stephen Miller’s bogus program of dehumanizing asylum seekers and immigrants of color. This is not acceptable performance from Justices of our highest Court!

We need better, more courageous, and more intellectually honest public officers in all three branches who are willing to stand up for individual rights, human lives, and the common good over bogus right wing legal doctrines and inhumanity cloaked in legal gobbledygook. It won’t happen overnight. But, a better America starts with throwing a totally corrupt, cruel, and maliciously incompetent President and his GOP enablers out of every public office at every level of government this November.

This November, vote like your life depends on it! Because it does!

PWS

07-14-20

EYORE’S KAKISTOCRACY KORNER: EOIR Director Shoots Messenger, But Fails To Address Serious Systemic Inaccuracies in Statistics & Record Keeping!

EOIR Director McHenry Replies To TRAC’s Letters But Ignores Agency’s Data Troubles

Despite TRAC’s appeals to the EOIR, Immigration Court records continue to disappear each month. This is unfortunately still the case with EOIR’s latest data release. Yesterday, June 15, we finally received a letter from EOIR Director James McHenry in response. But instead of addressing the obvious serious data management problems at EOIR, Director McHenry denied there were any problems and attacked TRAC’s motives for spreading what he claims are falsehoods about the agency.

Background

TRAC initially reported 1,507 missing applications for relief in our October 2019 report, which grew to 3,799 missing applications the following month. We wrote EOIR Director James McHenry providing a copy of the 1,507 missing applications asking for answers on why these records were missing from their files. We wrote again when the number of missing applications more than doubled the following month. Not only did we provide substantive evidence of the issues, we also repeatedly reassured the administration that we stood ready to work with them to fully resolve the underlying issues. These letters were met with silence. Not only have these particular cases disappeared entirely, they have not been restored in any subsequent data releases including the latest data TRAC received last week.

Alarmingly, the data from EOIR for April 2020 on asylum and other applications for relief to the Immigration Courts was missing an even larger

https://trac.syr.edu/immigration/reports/614/ Page 1 of 4

EOIR Director McHenry Replies To TRAC’s Letters But Ignores Agency Data Troubles 6/16/20, 4:29 PM

number of records—so large, in fact, that TRAC ceased publishing this information on our website and recommended the public be cautious in relying on EOIR asylum statistics until these problems were corrected. TRAC published those findings on June 3, 2020.

The Good and The Bad: EOIR’s Latest Data Release

Late on Friday, June 5, after normal business hours, EOIR sent a brief email acknowledging that data the agency had provided TRAC was, as TRAC had reported two days earlier, not usable. The problem was attributed to a “scripting error”—that is, problems made in the computer code that the EOIR’s Office of Information Technology had developed. A “corrected” version of the data was posted, shortly followed by EOIR’s regular monthly release with updated data through May 2020.

The good news is that TRAC has confirmed that the large number of asylum and other applications that had disappeared from the April shipment were now included in the May release. The bad news is that EOIR did not fix the underlying problem. Yet again, thousands of records that had been present in the April shipment were now missing. And the disappearing records from prior months, including the 1,507 missing asylum and other application for relief that TRAC first wrote about back last fall, continued to be missing from this latest release.

Even setting aside the issue of missing records, the persisting problem of computer processing malfunctions remains very troubling. Fixing one computer processing glitch after another does not address this larger systemic problem. Why do basic programming errors that lead to countless additional data errors keep reoccurring month after month in data and reports the agency publishes? Why aren’t these caught earlier and corrected before any data and statistics are released? The agency has yet

https://trac.syr.edu/immigration/reports/614/ Page 2 of 4

EOIR Director McHenry Replies To TRAC’s Letters But Ignores Agency Data Troubles 6/16/20, 4:29 PM

to address these questions.

EOIR Director McHenry Responds

At the same time we published our June 3 report, we wrote a third letter to EOIR Director McHenry expressing our concern and seeking a commitment from him to take the steps needed to address these problems. We assured Director McHenry again that we would be more than happy to work cooperatively with the agency to help them better ensure that going forward the public is provided with more accurate and reliable data about the Immigration Court’s operations.

This Monday we received a response from Director McHenry. His response is available here. Rather than addressing the real issues concerning the agency’s continuing data management problems, Director McHenry attacked our motives for alleging that the agency had any problems and further claimed that TRAC knew our statements to be untrue but had made them anyway.

Director McHenry also falsely alleged that TRAC wanted “to obtain all sensitive, identifying information” in EOIR data about particular immigrants in court proceedings. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Our requests have been limited to anonymized data. Indeed, EOIR publicly posts the monthly data TRAC receives on its own website.

In fact, due to the agency’s computer management problems, in March 2020 the agency posted data online which the agency itself intended to withhold. It was TRAC—not the EOIR—who uncovered this mistake and alerted agency officials.

Why did the EOIR post data online that it intended to withhold? Again it was the same underlying problem: deficiencies in EOIR data management

https://trac.syr.edu/immigration/reports/614/ Page 3 of 4

EOIR Director McHenry Replies To TRAC’s Letters But Ignores Agency Data Troubles 6/16/20, 4:29 PM

processes mistakenly allowed the public posting of information on tens of thousands of immigrants the agency had sought to redact. Once again basic checks were not in place to verify that their programs had functioned properly so no one at the agency had caught these mistakes before the data was distributed.

What Comes Next?

TRAC has been asked to refer any future issues to EOIR Chief Management Officer Kate Sheehey. TRAC’s co-director had an initial phone conversation with her last Friday, June 12. TRAC asked Director Sheehey to find out why month after month more records keep permanently disappearing from EOIR’s data. She has promised to look into this and provide answers. TRAC will continue to keep the public informed on any future developments.

*********

Director

Susan B. Long

Co-Director, TRAC and

Associate Professor

Martin J. Whitman School of Management Syracuse University

721 University Avenue

Syracuse, New York 13244

David Burnham

Co-Director, TRAC and

Associate Research Professor

S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications Syracuse University

215 University Place

Syracuse, New York 13244

Dear Professors Long and Burnham:

U.S. Department of Justice

Executive Office for Immigration Review

Office of Director

5107 Leesburg Pike, Suite 2600 Falls Church, Virginia 22041

June 12, 2020

This letter responds to your letter dated June 3, 2020, and to your previous letters dated November 4, 2019, and December 18, 2019, respectively.

As you are aware, EOIR has committed to an unprecedented data transparency initiative over the past two years, including the monthly posting of data from its Case Access System for EOIR (CASE) database pursuant to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). As you are also aware, EOIR does not delete data from CASE in the sense that you have repeatedly alleged. As EOIR has explained to you previously, data that you allege has been “deleted” actually reflects either real-time updates to information in CASE, technological errors in the extraction and posting of the data which have been corrected, or data that was appropriately withheld from disclosure pursuant to FOIA.

Because you know that EOIR does not delete data, I can only speculate as to your motives for continuing to publicly accuse EOIR’s hardworking and conscientious career personnel in the Office of the Chief Immigration Judge (OCIJ), the Office of Information Technology (OIT), and the FOIA Unit of malfeasance. Moreover, your apparent desire to obtain all sensitive, identifying information in CASE related to specific cases of aliens in immigration proceedings—including aliens with particular types of

Letter to Professors Susan B. Long and David Burnham Page 2

claims subject to protection from disclosure under FOIA—is perplexing. Nevertheless, regardless of your motivation, your inflammatory and inaccurate accusations do nothing to advance our mutual goals of improving the availability of reliable data to inform decision-making in the immigration sphere.

In light of your continued disparagement of the employees within OCIJ, OIT, and the FOIA Unit, I have asked Chief Management Officer Kate Sheehey to address any future issues that you raise with the monthly data release under FOIA. Please direct any future comments or inquiries to her.

cc: Kate Sheehey, Chief Management Officer

Sincerely,

JAMES MCHENRY

Digitally signed by JAMES MCHENRY

Date: 2020.06.12 16:43:24 -04’00’

James R. McHenry III Director

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While nobody is infallible, TRAC is a well-respected independent source of statistics and nonpartisan analysis.

EOIR, on the other hand, is a highly partisan mismanaged charade of a court system dedicated to carrying out the DOJ’s anti-asylum, anti-immigrant agenda.

Recently, the DOJ’s own independent watchdog exposed the incompetent handling of the funding for court interpreters that directly diminished due process for those appearing before EOIR. https://immigrationcourtside.com/2020/06/10/%e2%98%a0%ef%b8%8f%f0%9f%a4%a1%f0%9f%a5%b5kakistocracy-korner-w-eyore-tal-kopan-sf-chron-tanvi-misra-roll-call-report-on-our-anti-heros-latest-adventures-in-fraud-waste-abuse-a/

https://immigrationcourtside.com/2020/06/10/naij-speaks-out-on-fraud-waste-abuse-eoir-the-mismanagement-uncovered-by-oig-in-yesterdays-report-is-only-the-tip-of-the-iceberg-of-persistent-systemic-and-structural-failures/

Additionally, the Congressional Hispanic Caucus has written to McHenry expressing grave concerns about EOIR’s data management practices (or lack thereof). https://chc.house.gov/media-center/press-releases/congressional-hispanic-caucus-demands-trump-administration-explain

Who ya gonna believe? No contest!

This also provides insights into why, after two decades of failed efforts and squandered taxpayer funds, EOIR failed to deliver on a functional nationwide e-filing system. It also helps explain how the already overwhelming docket backlog has more than doubled even with nearly twice as many judges under the “malicious incompetence” of the Trump DOJ.

But, this “gang that can’t shoot straight” had time to develop ridiculously unneeded and counterproductive “Immigration Judge Dashboards” that nobody except politicos wanted, to keep the pressure on judges to deny due process and deny asylum. They also had time to set up a totally unneeded “Office of Policy” under the Director and to disembowel the Office of Legal Assistance Programs, one of the few functional parts of EOIR “management” whose projects once long ago actually helped to reduce backlogs while promoting due process. The Office of Policy duplicates functions that formerly were adequately performed by the Office of General Counsel.

EOIR has always had a problem of too many positions and too much funding devoted to Headquarters in Falls Church rather than to the courts in the field. But, under the Trump kakistocracy the problem has become an epidemic. EOIR management has been used to exert improper political control over the quasi-judicial process and to interfere in independent decision making and due process. But, it’s been totally “MIA” in providing the basic apolitical professional administrative services needed by the judges and the public they are supposed to be serving (but aren’t right now under an Administration that has open contempt for due process, service to the public, and the immigrant community).

An independent Article I Court is the only solution! Competent administrative services dedicated to promoting full due process with efficiency and top notch public service is a prerequisite for any type of meaningful backlog reduction. As long as “Aimless Docket Reshuffling” and mismanagement rule, the backlog will continue to grow by leaps and bounds. But, because of chronically unreliable EOIR statistics and record keeping, we might never know the true extent of the court backlog. You can bet, however, that’s it’s now considerably more than the previously reported 1.4 million “on docket plus waiting to be recalendared” mess.

Maybe, rather than “shooting the messengers,” EOIR should enlist the assistance of true experts and statisticians to help fix the current broken system!

Due Process Forever!

PWS

06-17-20

🏴‍☠️“BIZARRO COURTS” — THE CONSTITUTION APPLIES TO ALL PERSONS IN THE U.S., YET ICE & THEIR “PARTNERS” AT EOIR HAVE ESTABLISHED A CONSTITUTION-FREE “COURT SYSTEM” THAT OPERATES BEYOND THE LAW & MORALITY IN A LEGAL NEVER-NEVER LAND 🧚‍♂️ — How Do They Get Away With It Under The Noses Of Congress & Article III Courts? — An Outrageous Story of Gross 🤮 Institutional & Personal Failures & Ethical Lapses Across All Three Branches of Our Federal Government ☠️👎🏻!

Paul Moses and Tim Healy report for The Daily Beast:

‘The Bizarro-World’ Immigration Courts Where the Constitution Isn’t Applied Detainees can be held for weeks or months before seeing a judge. The Justice Department gave “the word of the agency under penalty of perjury” that it would fix that—but only in NY

·         ICE officials acknowledged that they couldn’t handle the volume of arrests their own agents made; the major clog was in getting a legal review from the agency’s understaffed legal unit.

·         In 11 of the 55 venues that heard more than 500 cases last year, detainees spent six weeks or more in jail before an initial hearing. Such long waits would be unconstitutional in criminal cases; the right to due process requires authorities to not only get a case filed but also to provide an arraignment promptly, generally in no more than 48 hours.

·         Among the 55 venues that handled 500 or more detainee cases last year, the longest waits from arrest to initial hearing were in hearing locations at privately run lockups under contract with ICE: Winn Correctional Center in Winnifield, Louisiana, a median of 140 days; T. Don Hutto Residential Center in Taylor, Texas, 72 days; Richwood Correctional Center in Richwood, Louisiana, 64 days…

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Ironically, by his own overt corruption and open disdain for our Constitution and the rule of law, Trump has exposed the deep flaws, grotesque derelictions of duty, and unethical complicity throughout our Constitutional institutions that are supposed to protect all of us, particularly the most vulnerable among us like civil immigration detainees and asylum seekers, from abuses by would-be authoritarian tyrants like Trump!

Here’s a gem:

“The larger question behind this mass of numbers is why DHS is detaining so many people when both its legal office and the court lack the staffing—not only judges but support staff as well—to handle them.

‘I would just say, they are the prosecuting agency and in this context, they have complete control over the timeline,’ said Aaron Hall, an immigration lawyer who practices at the court in Aurora, Colorado, which has had substantial delays. ‘If the charging document isn’t ready to go, why are they arresting them?’”

Good question! But don’t expect a straight answer from the “malicious incompetents” at DHS. Nor will today get anything except misleading nonsense from their “partners” at EOIR (“ICE Jr.”).

DOJ was forewarned of this disaster by an independent consultant back in 2017. But, rather than solving the problem, then AG Jeff “Gonzo Apocalypto” Sessions intentionally made things even worse at EOIR. You might remember “Gonzo” as the “mastermind” behind the regime’s unconstitutional child separation policy. His victims were returned to abuse, scarred for life, or imprisoned for the “crime” of asserting their Constitutional and legal rights to fair treatment.

All of this is wrong, plain and simple! It’s part of “Dred Scotiffication” — now playing out across our nation in many ways. Finally, the systematic “dehumanization of the other” as aided, abetted, and actually encouraged by a majority of the Supremes, is getting some much-needed and long overdue “pushback.”

But the abuses of our Constitution and our values, and the unaccountability of corrupt public officials, present and former, of the Trump immigration kakistocracy, won’t cease until we get “regime change.” That requires substantial personnel and attitude changes across all three branches of our reeling Federal Government! And that definitely includes accountability for those who have failed to insure “equal justice for all” and instead permitted and sometimes aided and abetted the existence of “Constitution-Free Zones” right under their noses!

Due Process Forever! Complicit Officials & Institutions, Never!

PWS

6-04-20

KAKISTOCRACY KORNER: FRAUD, WASTE, & ABUSE UNDER THE EOIR BIG TOP 🤡🎪🤹‍♂️ — TRAC DECLARES EOIR’S BOGUS STATISTICS TO BE NATIONAL DISASTER! ☠️— “The EOIR’s apparent reckless deletion of potentially irretrievable court records raises urgent concerns that without immediate intervention the agency’s sloppy data management practices could undermine its ability to manage itself, thwart external efforts at oversight, and leave the public in the dark about essential government activities.”🤮 — WHERE’S THE OVERSIGHT? WHERE’S THE ACCOUNTABILITY?

https://trac.syr.edu/immigration/reports/611/

EOIR’s Data Release on Asylum So Deficient Public Should Not Rely on Accuracy of Court Records

TRAC has concluded that the data updated through April 2020 it has just received on asylum and other applications for relief to the Immigration Courts are too unreliable to be meaningful or to warrant publication. We are therefore discontinuing updating our popular Immigration Court Asylum Decisions app, and will take other steps to highlight this problem[1]. We also wish to alert the public that any statistics EOIR has recently published on this topic may be equally suspect, as will be any future reports the agency publishes until these major data deficiencies are explained and rectified[2].

The EOIR’s apparent reckless deletion of potentially irretrievable court records raises urgent concerns that without immediate intervention the agency’s sloppy data management practices could undermine its ability to manage itself, thwart external efforts at oversight, and leave the public in the dark about essential government activities. Left unaddressed, the number of deleted records will compound each month and could trigger an expensive data crisis at the agency. And here the missing records are the actual applications for asylum, and how the court is handling them. This is a subject on which there is widespread public interest and concern.

EOIR Data Irregularities Approaching Point of No Return

Despite TRAC’s appeals to the EOIR, Immigration Court records continue to disappear each month. TRAC initially reported 1,507 missing applications for relief in our October 2019 report, which grew to 3,799 missing applications the following month. We wrote EOIR Director James McHenry providing a copy of the 1,507 missing applications asking for answers on why these records were missing from their files. We wrote again when the number of missing applications more than doubled the following month. These letters were met with silence. Not only have these cases disappeared entirely, they have not been restored in any subsequent data releases and the number of missing relief applications continue to grow. (See the final section for a short explanation of TRAC’s methodology.)

Alarmingly, the number of relief applications that were present in the March 2020 data release but were missing in the April release jumped to 68,282. This is just the number of records that disappeared over a single month. It does not include the ever growing number of applications that had previously disappeared month-by-month. As was true in past months, roughly four out of five of the records in the March 2020 release that disappeared from April’s release concerned applications on which the court had rendered its decision, including many cases in which the immigration judge had granted asylum as well as other forms of relief.

To put that into perspective, the number of missing cases just last month is more than the 63,734 asylum applications received by the Immigration Courts during all of FY 2015. If these applications are missing because they have been deleted from the Court’s own master files, the magnitude of the task of restoring just this single month’s destruction—assuming this is even possible—is enormous. To go back and restore the cumulative number of relief applications that went missing during previous months will obviously be even greater.

In fact, so many asylum decisions were dropped from EOIR’s April release that the cumulative number of asylum decisions went down, not up, despite asylum decisions continuing to be made. The volume of disappearing records has reached a scale that little faith can be placed in the factual accuracy of reports published by the EOIR based on its data.

The EOIR’s escalating data problems should raise dire concerns for Congress, policymakers and the public who routinely put their faith in federal agencies to provide complete and accurate information about their work. Indeed, the management of the court system itself, including the quota system recently imposed on immigration judges, presupposes the accuracy of the court’s own records. It is deeply worrisome that the EOIR and the Department of Justice appear unconcerned with ensuring that their own records are accurate and uncommitted to providing the public with accurate and reliable data about the Court’s operations.

TRAC Urges EOIR to Take Immediate Action

To date, the EOIR has not responded to TRAC’s requests for an explanation of these disappearances, nor has the EOIR responded to TRAC’s FOIA requests for records that would shed light on this matter.

Therefore, TRAC has written a third letter to Director McHenry reporting our findings of 68,282 new disappearances and we are again seeking a commitment from him to take the steps needed to address the problem. More urgently, we are asking that the EOIR immediately preserve—rather than destroy—all back-up tapes or other media in the hopes that records apparently improperly deleted from the Court’s master files might be restored. We assured Director McHenry that we would be more than happy to work cooperatively with the agency to help them better ensure that going forward the public is provided with more accurate and reliable data about the Immigration Court’s operations.

How EOIR’s Data Mismanagement Impacts TRAC’s Immigration Court Tools

TRAC’s mission is to provide the public with accurate, reliable, unbiased, and timely data on the operations of the federal government, and to ensure that the public is informed about changes that impact our data.

The EOIR’s disappearing records fall under the data related to applications for relief. The record on the existence of the court case itself is present, but for a growing number of these cases there now is no record that the immigrant ever applied for relief, or the court’s decision on that application. One of the key moments in the life of the case—including applications for asylum—is missing entirely. As a direct consequence TRAC does not have the information needed to provide reliable or meaningful updates on the court’s handling of applications for asylum and must therefore discontinue updating its asylum decision app.

While each of the other files in EOIR’s monthly data releases also have the same problem of records disappearing, the magnitude of these disappearances has not reached the levels seen with applications for relief. While still worrisome, these levels have not yet climbed to where we believe we can no longer use the information we receive. Thus, we are continuing to update the rest of our other Immigration Court apps. We continue to closely monitor the situation, while we urge EOIR to explain why records keep disappearing. We further continue to ask the agency to take the steps needed to rectify the situation.

TRAC will continue to retain all previous and future EOIR data shipments for research purposes.

How did TRAC Identify the EOIR’s Data Irregularities?

The Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) oversees the nationwide Immigration Court system, including more than 60 physical Immigration Court locations (as well as many more remote hearing locations including teleconference sites and ad hoc “tent” courts), hundreds of Immigration Judges, and millions of immigration cases that pass through the court system. The EOIR records information on each case and tracks various proceedings, filings, hearings and other aspects of each case in a large database. This database is central to the Court’s ability to manage its workload, prepare and publish reports for the public, and respond to queries from Congress about its operations. It is also used in implementing new practices, including the recent decision to impose new evaluation criteria for Immigration Judges.

As a result of TRAC’s ongoing FOIA requests, the EOIR releases a large batch of anonymized Immigration Court data each month that provides a snapshot of a great deal of the information recorded in this database on the handling of each case. In short, TRAC does not create data on the EOIR; rather, TRAC’s uses the EOIR’s own data. This data is the foundation for TRAC’s Immigration Court data tools which help ensure transparency and accountability for the American public.

TRAC used this data to precisely identify deleted records. While the information TRAC receives does not identify individuals, EOIR’s computer system assigns a unique computer sequence number to each case that identifies it. Because TRAC receives comprehensive data shipments from the EOIR each month that include these unique computer-assigned tracking numbers, TRAC can match each record received in the previous month with the same corresponding record in the following month’s release. Each release is also cumulative. That means it should include every record from the previous month plus every new record that has been added to the database over the course of the current month. As a rule, records should therefore never disappear[3].

When a record that was present is not included in the next month’s release, TRAC refers to these as missing or disappearing records. Because humans maintain most databases including EOIR’s, mistakes will occur. Therefore no database is ever perfect. So a few disappearing records might be expected. However, as is the situation here, concern is warranted whenever significant numbers of records disappear. Indeed, alarm bells should ring as the number of disappearing records grow. This situation means the data can no longer be trusted to reliably track the court’s proceedings.

Footnotes

[1] EOIR monthly releases consist of a series of tables covering different aspects of its workload. While each of these tables continue to have disappearing records each month, the magnitude of these missing records varies by table. For example, in the table that tracks each case before the court there were 228 cases present in March that disappeared from the April release, compared with 41,233 new cases that were added. While the problem of disappearing case records remains very troubling for the case table along with each of the other EOIR tables, TRAC believes that their magnitudes do not rise to the same level as the problem for applications for relief where the data now are so unreliable and misleading that they do not warrant the public placing any trust in them. At this time, we therefore are continuing to update our other Immigration Court apps while alerting the public to this continuing serious problem that affects the reliability of EOIR data releases more generally.

[2] For an example of a recent EOIR publication that may contain significant data errors, see the graph and table reporting total asylum applications through March 2020, which was generated using data from April 2020: https://www.justice.gov/eoir/page/file/1106366/download.

[3] Even when a data entry error is made, the database has special codes to indicate that a record should be disregarded because it was a data entry error so that rarely is it necessary to actually delete records.

TRAC is a nonpartisan, nonprofit data research center affiliated with the Newhouse School of Public Communications and the Whitman School of Management, both at Syracuse University. For more information, to subscribe, or to donate, contact trac@syr.edu or call 315-443-3563.

. . . .

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Read the rest of TRAC’s report at the link.

EOIR isn’t willing and able to do its only function: provide fair, impartial, and timely adjudications to asylum seekers and other migrants while following best judicial practices.

But they do have time to waste taxpayers’ money on nonsense like the chart at this link: https://www.justice.gov/eoir/file/1217001/download. This was obviously designed to further the Trump regime’s false narrative regarding the merits of asylum claims. While the chart is largely incomprehensible, misleading nonsense, what stands out is this:

At the end of an abusive process during which the law has been illegally skewed against asylum seekers and “judges,” most of whom are not experts in asylum law and who have never even represented an asylum seeker, are encouraged to deny meritorious claims for protection, against the odds, over 25% (12 of 47) of those who actually get through this biased dysfunctional mess still get asylum!

It’s reasonable to believe that under a fair system, with impartial decision makers who have expertise in asylum law, and without the interference of biased, overtly anti-asylum politicos like Sessions and Barr, asylum seekers would succeed the majority of the time, as they did before efforts by both the Obama and Trump Administrations to “ratchet down” asylum grants so that the EOIR system would serve DHS Enforcement as a “deterrent” to those seeking protection.

Obviously, the DOJ is afraid that under a fair, independent judicial system that actually employed judges who were experts in asylum law and who had real life experience representing asylum applicants, the majority of claims would be granted, thereby exposing the fraud, dishonesty, and misconduct involved in the present anti-asylum system.

It’s a national disgrace that is actually harming and sometimes killing those deserving of protection under our law.

Due Process Forever! Dishonest, Unethical, Incompetent, and Intentionally Biased “Courts” Never!

PWS

06-04-20

TRAC IMMIGRATION: Crisis In Immigration Court Representation? — 60% In Immigration Court Live In Rural Counties Where Immigration Lawyers Are Scarce!

Read the complete report here:

https://trac.syr.edu/immigration/reports/602/

Here’s an excerpt:

The Hidden Impact of Removal Proceedings on Rural Communities

Although the Immigration Courts with the largest backlogs of cases are located in large cities, the latest Immigration Court records show that when adjusted for population, many rural counties have higher rates of residents in removal proceedings than urban counties. In fact, of the top 100 US counties with the highest rates of residents in removal proceedings, nearly six in ten (59%) are rural. In these communities, residents facing deportation may find themselves in rural “legal deserts[1]” where there are few qualified immigration attorneys, longer travel times to court, and high rates of poverty.

The Immigration Court data used in this report was obtained and analyzed by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University in response to its Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR).

Mapping Pending Immigration Court Cases

TRAC recently mapped the Immigration Court’s current active backlog—over 1.1 million cases—to show the number of residents in each county who are awaiting their day in court. In this follow-on report, TRAC used the same data set to map the proportion of residents (“rate”) with pending immigration cases as a fraction of total residents[2].

When the total number of backlog cases is mapped, urban areas such as Los Angeles, New York City, and Chicago emerge as areas with large numbers of pending cases. This makes sense, because the total number of immigration cases is driven by the geographic concentration of large numbers of people in urban areas. However, when the number of pending immigration cases is mapped relative to county population, a different picture emerges. Many large urban counties are revealed to be more average, while many rural counties are shown to have much higher concentrations of removal cases.

In these rural counties, residents may have a heightened sense that immigration enforcement is impacting their community. This, in fact, would be an entirely rational perception since the odds are indeed greater.

Figure 1 below includes a map of the proportion of residents in each county currently in the backlog (top) and the total number of cases in each county in the backlog (bottom, reprinted from our previous report). The county-level rate is represented as the number per 100,000 residents who are currently in removal proceedings.

Particularly striking is how many counties in Southern California and the New York City-Boston corridor, which are prominent in the map of the number of cases, look more typical once population is taken into account. Also striking is how counties in the Great Plains regions from Southwest Minnesota to western Oklahoma pop off the map as places where higher percentages of the community are facing deportation proceedings today.

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There is little doubt that DHS Enforcement and their “partners at EOIR” have made an effort to hinder individuals’ Constitutional and statutory right to representation by counsel of their choice. From “Aimless Docket Reshuffling,” to locating so-called “detained courts” in obscure places, to arbitrary denial of continuances, to restricting bonds, to failures to provide notices and giving intentionally “bogus” notices, to rude and unprofessional treatment of attorneys, to trying to get rid of “know your rights” presentations, to skewing the law to change results to favor DHS.

All this leads to a largely “due process free” Deportation Railroad.

Due Process Forever!

PWS

04-10-20

TRAC: TRUMP REGIME ON PACE TO TRIPLE IMMIGRATION COURT BACKLOG WITH NO PLAN & NO END IN SIGHT — Now @ 1.4 Million Cases & Counting!

From ImmigrationProf Blog:

According to the latest report from TRAC Immigration, just under 100,000 cases were added to the Immigration Court’s backlog since the beginning of FY 2020. A total of 1,122,824 cases are now pending on the court’s active docket as of the end of February 2020. This is up from 542,411 cases when President Trump assumed office. When 320,173 inactive Backlogswpending cases are included, the court’s current backlog now tops 1.4 million cases.

With most non-detained court hearings canceled due to the coronavirus pandemic, the backlog is slated to grow even higher, as TRAC found that it did as a result of the government shutdown in January 2019.

KJ

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Bets on when they will hit 2 million?

PWS

03-24-20

LATEST OUTRAGE FROM FALLS CHURCH: BIA IGNORES FACTS, ABUSES DISCRETION TO DENY BOND TO ASYLUM SEEKER: Matter of R-A-V-P-, 27 I&N Dec. 803 (BIA 2020)

Matter of R-A-V-P-, 27 I&N Dec. 803 (BIA 2020)

https://go.usa.gov/xdzDv

BIA HEADNOTE:

The Immigration Judge properly determined that the respondent was a flight risk and denied his request for a custody redetermination where, although he had a pending application for asylum, he had no family, employment, or community ties and no probable path to obtain lawful status so as to warrant his release on bond.

PANEL: BIA Appellate Immigraton Judges MALPHRUS, Acting Chairman; LIEBOWITZ, Board Member; MORRIS, Temporary Board Member.

OPINION BY: Acting Chairman Judge Garry D. Malphrus

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In a real court, with fair and impartial judges who follow the law and respect facts, this should have been a “no-brainer.”

The Government’s own statistics show that represented asylum applicants released on bond show up for hearings nearly 100% of the time, regardless of “likely outcome.” https://immigrationcourtside.com/?s=Asylum+Seekers+Appear. The respondent is a represented asylum seeker from Honduras without any criminal record or record of failures to appear. He passed the “credible fear” process. He has friend with whom he can live in the U.S. while pursuing his case. He comes from a country, Honduras, with known horrible conditions that even in this time of intentionally biased administrative anti-asylum “law” produces more than 1,000 asylum grants in Immigration Court annually, according to FY 2019 statistics from EOIR.

His case apparently is based on his status as a gay man in Honduras. According to the U.S. State Department’s 2019 Country Report, this claim has a very good chance of succeeding:

Nevertheless, social discrimination against LGBTI persons persisted, as did physical violence. Local media and LGBTI human rights NGOs reported an increase in the number of killings of LGBTI persons during the year. Impunity for such crimes was a problem, as was the impunity rate for all types of crime. According to the Violence Observatory, of the 317 cases since 2009 of hate crimes and violence against members of the LGBTI population, 92 percent had gone unpunished.

https://www.state.gov/reports/2019-country-reports-on-human-rights-practices/honduras/

Clearly, he should have been released on a minimal bond, particularly given the potentially health-threatening conditions in DHS detention during the pandemic.

Thus, the BIA’s “no bond” decision in this case was an outrageous misconstruction of the commonly known facts as well as a misapplication of basic bond law. In other words, an “abuse of discretion.” At some point after the justice system resumes functioning, I hope that a “real” Federal court will “stick it to” this disgracefully disingenuous performance by this BIA panel.

We need “regime change” and an Article I U.S. Immigration Court staffed with fair and impartial judges at all levels, with “real life” expertise, who actually understand and will fairly apply asylum laws.

Due Process Forever! Patently Unfair And Biased Immigration “Courts” Never!

PWS

03-18-20

MOLLY HENNESSY-FISKE @ LA TIMES: Conscientious Immigration Judges Continue To Jump Ship As Regime Turns Immigration “Courts” Into DHS Deportation Offices, Where Due Process & Humanity Die Under A White Nationalist Agenda

Hon. Charles Honeyman — Honorable Charles Honeyman
Retired U.S. Immigration Judge
Member, Round Table of Former Immigration Judges

https://edition.pagesuite.com/popovers/dynamic_article_popover.aspx?guid=b5c81c57-52fe-4cd7-a092-fc7c8da23f05&v=sdk

HOUSTON — Immigration Judge Charles Honeyman was nearing retirement, but he vowed not to leave while Donald Trump was president and risk being replaced by an ideologue with an anti-immigration agenda.

He pushed back against the administration the best he could. He continued to grant asylum to victims of domestic violence even after the Justice Department said that was not a valid reason to. And he tried to ignore demands to speed through cases without giving them the consideration he believed the law required.

But as the pressure from Washington increased, Honeyman started having stomach pains and thinking, “There are a lot of cases I’m going to have to deny that I’ll feel sick over.”

This month, after 24 years on the bench, the 70-year-old judge called it quits.

Dozens of other judges concerned about their independence have done the same, according to the union that represents them and interviews with several who left.

“We’ve seen stuff which is unprecedented — people leaving the bench soon after they were appointed,” said A. Ashley Tabaddor, an immigration judge in Los Angeles and president of the National Assn. of Immigration Judges union.

“Judges are going to other federal agencies and retiring as soon as possible. They just don’t want to deal with it. It’s become unbearable.”

Especially worrying to many is a quota system that the Trump administration imposed in 2018 requiring each judge to close at least 700 cases annually, monitoring their progress with a dashboard display installed on their computers.

Tabaddor called the system “a factory model” that puts “pressures on the judges to push the cases through.”

Jeffrey Chase, who served as an immigration judge in New York City until 2007, founded a group of former immigration judges in 2017 that has grown to 40 members.

“They say they would have gladly worked another five or 10 years, but they just reached a point under this administration where they can’t,” he said. “It used to be there were pressures, but you were an independent judge left to decide the cases.”

The precise number of judges who have quit under duress is unclear. Kathryn Mattingly, a spokeswoman for the courts, said a total of 45 left their positions in the fiscal year that ended last September, but she declined to provide a breakdown of how many of those were deaths, planned retirements or promotions to the immigration appeals board.

More information may become available Wednesday, when a House judiciary subcommittee is scheduled to hear testimony on the state of judicial independence and due process in the country’s 68 immigration courts.

The Trump administration has been adding new judges faster than old ones are leaving. Between 2016 and last year, the total number of judges climbed from 289 to 442.

That increase as well as the quota system and other measures are part of a broad effort by the Trump administration to reduce a massive backlog that tripled during the Obama presidency and then grew worse as large numbers of Central Americans arrived at the U.S. border.

Last year, the Department of Homeland Security filed 443,000 cases seeking deportations and immigrants made a record 200,000 asylum applications — both records. More than a million cases remain unresolved.

Still, James McHenry, director of the immigration courts, told the Senate Homeland Security committee in November that the new rules have started to turn around a court system that had been hobbled by neglect and inefficiency.

On average, immigration judges met the quota last year while the number of complaints against judges decreased for the second year in a row, he said.

“These results unequivocally prove that immigration judges have the integrity and competence required to resolve cases in the timely and impartial manner that is required by law,” McHenry testified.

But many judges came to see the new guidelines as a way for the Trump administration to carry out its agenda of increasing deportations and denying asylum claims, which the president has asserted are largely fraudulent.

Those judges say it is impossible to work under the new system and still guarantee migrants their due process rights.

“There are many of us who just feel we can’t be part of a system that’s just so fundamentally unfair,” said Ilyce Shugall, who quit her job as an immigration judge in San Francisco last March and now directs the Immigrant Legal Defense Program at the Justice & Diversity Center of the Bar Assn. of San Francisco. “I took an oath to uphold the Constitution.”

The Trump administration was “using the court as a weapon against immigrants,” she said.

Rebecca Jamil, who was also a judge in San Francisco before quitting in 2018, called it a “nearly impossible job.”

She said the judge appointed to replace her left after less than a year.

The judges union has taken up the cause, fighting to end the quota system and make immigration courts independent from the Justice Department.

In response, Justice officials petitioned the Federal Labor Relations Authority last August to decertify the union, arguing judges are managers and therefore not entitled to union protections. The board is expected to issue a decision later this year.

The conflict intensified after the union filed a formal complaint about a Justice Department newsletter that included a link to a white nationalist website that waged anti-Semitic attacks on judges.

Honeyman, who is Jewish, makes no secret of the empathy he felt for the asylum seekers who appeared in his courtroom in Philadelphia and during temporary assignments to courts in Louisiana, New Mexico and Texas.

His grandparents had come from Eastern Europe through New York’s Ellis Island. “I always thought, ‘But for some quirk of the immigration system, I would be on the other side’ ” of the bench, he said.

He granted asylum more often than many other judges. Between 2014 and 2019, immigration judges across the country denied about 60% of asylum claims, according to Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. Honeyman denied 35% of claims in his courtroom.

Reflecting on his career in a speech at his retirement party this month, Honeyman said he had been inspired by the cases he heard, including that of a Central American girl who wrote to thank him for granting her asylum. She had graduated from college and was applying to law school “so that she could give back to the America that had saved her life.”

Honeyman said he decided to leave the bench because of “the escalating attack over the past few years on the very notion that we are a court in any meaningful sense.”

“All of these factors and forces I regret tipped the balance for me,” he said. “It was time for Courtroom 1 at the Philadelphia immigration court to go dark.”

**************************************

The idea that things are “turning around” in a positive way for the beleaguered and weaponized “courts” is, of course, pure regime propaganda. The system, is totally out of control.

The Administration eliminated sensible “prosecutorial discretion” guidelines for DHS that prioritized cases in the manner of all other law enforcement agencies in America. DOJ politicos also stripped Immigration Judges of their well-established authority to manage dockets thorough “administrative closure” and restricted their ability to grant reasonable continuances (likely unconstitutional).

At a time when the world is still producing record numbers of refugees, the regime has artificially suppressed the asylum grant rate by issuing unethical and legally wrong politically generated precedents, blocking access to counsel, using intentionally coercive detention, and pressuring judges to “produce or else” which roughly translates into “deny and deport.” “Aimless Docket Reshuffling” (“ADR”) is the order of the day. This toxic brand of ADR (not to be confused with “alternative disputes resolution”) is an insanely wasteful bureaucratic practice whereby “ready to try cases,” many pending for years, are shuffled off to the end of dockets that are many years out, often without advance notice to the parties, to accommodate Immigration Judge details, reassignments, and other “new priorities of the day.”

So totally out of control and mismanaged is today’s weaponized “court system” that the independent TRAC Immigration at Syracuse University recently estimated that it would take approximately another 400 Immigration Judges, in addition to the approximately 465 already on duty, just for the courts to “break even” on the unrestricted and irresponsible flow of incoming cases from DHS enforcement. https://trac.syr.edu/immigration/reports/591/

In other words, to stop creating more backlog. And that would be without further retirements or resignations – something that clearly is not going to happen. Even under those circumstances, the courts would merely be “breaking even.” Eliminating the “backlog” in a fair and legal manner would take additional judges and years, if not generations, if the courts continue to operate as a dysfunctional branch of DOJ dedicated to biased enforcement at the expense of due process, fundamental fairness, and responsible, professional management.

It’s likely that Wednesday‘s House hearings will further document the institutional unfairness and dysfunction of the current “courts” and the urgent, overwhelming need for an independent Article I Immigration court to be established by Congress. But, that reform might not come soon enough for the lives of many of the vulnerable individuals stuck in this “legal hellhole” and the sanity of many of the judges still on the bench.

Due Process Forever!

PWS

01-27-20

AS IMMIGRATION COURT BACKLOGS CONTINUE TO SPIRAL OUT OF CONTROL, TRUMP REGIME TURNS TOWARD PUNISHING MIGRANTS FLEEING LEFT-WING AUTHORITARIAN STATES — Cuban, Venezuelan, Nicaraguan Dissidents Now Squarely In Sights Of Regime’s White Nationalist Enforcement Agenda! — “To put this recent 65,929-case growth in the backlog in perspective, assuming the pace of new filings continues at the existing rate and each judge met their administration-imposed quota of closing 700 cases a year, it would still require the court to hire almost 400 new judges – while stemming resignations and retirements among current judges – to stop the backlog from growing further. And a much larger round of judge hirings than this would be required in order to begin to reduce the backlog.”

Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse

Cubans, Venezuelans, and Nicaraguans Increase in Immigration Court Backlog

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

The fastest growing segments of the Immigration Court backlog are now Cubans, Venezuelans, and Nicaraguans. Between September 2018, when fiscal year 2018 drew to a close, and December 2019, Cubans in the backlog increased by 374 percent, Venezuela increased by 277 percent, and Nicaraguans increased by 190 percent. These rates of increase stand out when compared to the overall growth of 42 percent across all nationalities during this same period.

Despite the many actions by the Trump Administration designed to stem the growth in the Immigration Court backlog, the court’s backlog continues to climb. In just the three-month period from October through December 2019 the backlog has grown by 65,929 new cases. The court ended December 2019 with 1,089,696 in its active backlog.

To put this recent 65,929-case growth in the backlog in perspective, assuming the pace of new filings continues at the existing rate and each judge met their administration-imposed quota of closing 700 cases a year, it would still require the court to hire almost 400 new judges – while stemming resignations and retirements among current judges – to stop the backlog from growing further. And a much larger round of judge hirings than this would be required in order to begin to reduce the backlog.

To read the full report, go to:

https://trac.syr.edu/immigration/reports/591/To examine the court’s backlog in more detail, now updated through December 2019, use TRAC’s free backlog app:

https://trac.syr.edu/phptools/immigration/court_backlog/Additional free web query tools which track Immigration Court proceedings have also been updated through December 2019. For an index to the full list of TRAC’s immigration tools and their latest update go to:

https://trac.syr.edu/imm/tools/If you want to be sure to receive notifications whenever updated data become available, sign up at:

https://tracfed.syr.edu/cgi-bin/tracuser.pl?pub=1&list=immFollow us on Twitter at

https://twitter.com/tracreportsor like us on Facebook:

https://facebook.com/tracreportsTRAC is self-supporting and depends on foundation grants, individual contributions and subscription fees for the funding needed to obtain, analyze and publish the data we collect on the activities of the US Federal government. To help support TRAC’s ongoing efforts, go to:

https://trac.syr.edu/cgi-bin/sponsor/sponsor.pl

David Burnham and Susan B. Long, co-directors
Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse
Syracuse University
Suite 360, Newhouse II
Syracuse, NY 13244-2100
315-443-3563
trac@syr.edu
http://trac.syr.edu

The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse is a nonpartisan joint research center of the Whitman School of Management (http://whitman.syr.edu) and the Newhouse School of Public Communications (http://newhouse.syr.edu) at Syracuse University. If you know someone who would like to sign up to receive occasional email announcements and press releases, they may go to http://trac.syr.edu and click on the E-mail Alerts link at the bottom of the page. If you do not wish to receive future email announcements and wish to be removed from our list, please send an email to trac@syr.edu with REMOVE as the subject.

****************************************

The awful, unconstitutional mess in our Immigration Courts is a direct result of the regime’s “malicious incompetence” leading to round after round of “Aimless Docket Reshuffling” (“ADR”). Contrary to the regime’s false narratives and distortions these backlogs are NOT primarily the result of either a) systematic use of dilatory tactics by migrants and their attorneys, or b) lack of work ethic on the part of Immigration Judges and court staff.

Those of us “in my age group” can remember when a concerted attack on those fleeing from Communist countries or other leftist dictatorships would have earned more immediate “pushback” from the GOP both from Congress and from those within GOP Administrations.

Indeed, the Reagan Administration famously just stopped enforcing deportation orders against Nicaraguans in South Florida, even if they had been denied asylum, without ever announcing a formal policy of “deferred action.” This eventually led to creation of “Temporary Protected Status” by Congress and the “Nicaraguan and Central American Relief Act” (“NACARA”) to grant lawful permanent resident status to nationals of Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala, as well as some former Soviet-Bloc nationals who were in the U.S. without status.

As a former Immigraton Judge who saw the many positive effects of NACARA, it was one of the “smartest ever” bipartisan immigration programs enacted by Congress. It gave many deserving and hard-working families a chance to become permanent residents and eventually citizens. At the same time, it was easy to administer — so easy in fact that many asylum cases could be sent from the the Immigration Courts to the Asylum Offices for adjudication under NACARA, thereby freeing time and space on overcrowded court dockets. Moreover, the NACARA program was self-supporting, being financed from the filing fees charged by USCIS.

Basically, it was a win-win for everyone.

Similarly, the Bush I Administration declined to deport Chinese resistors to the “one-child” policy even where they had been denied asylum under the standards then in effect. This eventually led to a bipartisan amendment to the “refugee” definition to include those opposed to “coercive population control.”

A wiser Administration would draw on the many favorable lessons learned from TPS and NACARA to propose a large-scale legalization program to Congress. In the meantime, those with long residence and no serious crimes could be taken off Immigration Court dockets and granted work authorization pending Congressional action.

With dockets thus cleared of those with substantial equities whose removal actually would harm our national interests, the Immigration Courts could once again begin working “in the present tense” on cases of more recent arrivals who have not yet established equities. And it wouldn’t take another 400 Immigration Judges to put non-detained cases on a more reasonable and achievable 6-18 month completion schedule.

As it is, unless and until the Article III courts do their constitutional duty, or we have regime change and an independent Article I Immigration Court, the backlogs and injustices will continue to grow.

Due Process Forever!

PWS

01-22-20

TRAC: EVEN AS REGIME MOVES TO UNLAWFULLY “ZERO OUT” ASYLUM GRANT RATES, HUGE DISPARITIES REMAIN – Two Of Top Five Asylum Deciding Courts – New York & San Francisco – Appear To Be Maintaining Due Process With Substantial Majority of Asylum Cases Being Granted – Many Others Appear To Be “Tanking” Under Regime’s Pressure To Deny & Deport!

Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse

Asylum Decisions Vary Widely Across Judges and Courts – Latest Results

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

TRAC’s judge-by-judge asylum decision reports are now updated through FY 2019. These reports examine 179,848 asylum decisions across 59 immigration courts. A total of 456 individual reports are available on Immigration Judges who made at least 100 decisions from FY 2014 to FY 2019.

To visualize this unique data in an easy-to-understand format, TRAC created an infographic which shows court denial rates, judge denial rates, and sizes of caseload for all judges included in the reports. This depicts the extent to which asylum decisions vary widely across judges and courts. This graphic is available in the report and also as a downloadable PDF file.

The geographic distribution of asylum cases across immigration courts is highly uneven. Just five immigration courts – New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Houston, and Miami – decided half of all asylum cases. Although just over 60 percent of all asylum applications were denied in this period, slightly less than half of applications – just 49 percent – in the top five courts were denied. This is mostly due to the balancing effect of comparably low denial rates in New York (26%) and San Francisco (30%) in contrast to much higher denial rates in Houston (92%) and Miami (86%) and a more moderate denial rate in Los Angeles (71%).

Twelve immigration courts accumulated denial rates above 90%. Atlanta denied over 97 percent of over 2,000 asylum applications, Las Vegas denied 93 percent of its 2,000 applications, and Conroe denied 92 percent of just over 850 applications. In contrast, only seven immigration courts deny less than 50 percent of cases: Newark (49%), Phoenix (48%), Chicago (47%), Boston (42%), Honolulu (31%), San Francisco (30%), and New York (26%).

View the entire report at:

https://trac.syr.edu/immigration/reports/590/

For the individual judge-by-judge reports go to:

https://trac.syr.edu/immigration/reports/judgereports/

Additional free web query tools which track immigration court proceedings have also been updated through November 2019. For an index to the full list of TRAC’s immigration tools and their latest update go to:

https://trac.syr.edu/imm/tools/

If you want to be sure to receive notifications whenever updated data become available, sign up at:

https://tracfed.syr.edu/cgi-bin/tracuser.pl?pub=1&list=imm

Follow us on Twitter at

https://twitter.com/tracreports

or like us on Facebook:

https://facebook.com/tracreports

TRAC is self-supporting and depends on foundation grants, individual contributions and subscription fees for the funding needed to obtain, analyze and publish the data we collect on the activities of the US Federal government. To help support TRAC’s ongoing efforts, go to:

https://trac.syr.edu/cgi-bin/sponsor/sponsor.pl

David Burnham and Susan B. Long, co-directors
Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse
Syracuse University
Suite 360, Newhouse II
Syracuse, NY 13244-2100
315-443-3563
trac@syr.edu
http://trac.syr.edu

**************************************

So, this is how a feckless Congress and complicit Article III courts are allowing Due Process to be trampled in America – life or death decisions being made in an arbitrary and capricious manner in a broken, dysfunctional, and clearly unconstitutional system. Wonder how legislators and judges would like it if their lives were being decided by “throwing darts at a board.”

It‘s what passes for “justice” in the “Age of Trump” and the ”Era of Complicity.” But, it’s still an entirely preventable national disgrace! And, a personal disaster for those whose lives are lost or irreparably damaged by U.S. Government misfeasance and malfeasance across the Executive, Legislative, & Judicial Branches!

Due Process Forever; Fecklessness & Complicity In the Face Of Tyranny Never!

PWS

01-13-20

NICOLE NAREA @ VOX NEWS: EXPOSING TRUMP & HIS REGIME’S “BIG LIES” ABOUT ASYLUM SEEKERS: When Not Detained They Appear For 99% Of Hearings, According To Gov’s Own Data!

https://apple.news/A2wm08ZZ6SjCQ5R7OJnipHA

Nicole reports:

Trump says most asylum seekers don’t show up for their court hearings. A new study shows 99% do.

This study contradicts Trump’s rationale for expanding immigration detention.

By Nicole Narea @nicolenarea Jan 10, 2020, 4:50pm EST

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Central American immigrant families depart ICE custody, pending future immigration court hearings on June 11, 2018 in McAllen, Texas. John Moore/Getty Images

President Donald Trump has often claimed that the only way to ensure that migrants show up for their court hearings rather than vanish into the US is to keep them in detention or else make sure that they never step foot on American soil in the first place.

But the president’s theory doesn’t hold up: About 99 percent of asylum seekers who were not detained or who were previously released from immigration custody showed up for their hearings over the last year, according to new data from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University, a think tank that tracks data in the immigration courts.

Studies from previous years have also disproven the idea that most migrants will choose to live in the US without authorization rather than see their immigration cases through. But it’s nevertheless central to Trump’s immigration policies, including those that aim to keep migrants in Mexico rather than letting them walk free in the US.

The latest data from TRAC shows that nearly every asylum seeker showed up for their court hearings over the course of 2019. That’s even though the vast majority of asylum seekers — about 4 in 5 — were not detained at all or had been released from US Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody before their court date.

Migrants can end up in immigration court in one of two ways: turning themselves in to immigration agents or getting caught while trying to cross the border without authorization. In both cases, officials will initiate deportation proceedings against them and give them a date to appear in court, where they can ask a judge for asylum and other protections that would allow them to remain in the US with legal status, or else be ordered deported.

On average, immigrants with currently pending cases have been waiting almost two years for their court hearings, and cases take even longer to complete. Under previous administrations, a migrant who came into contact with immigration agents would have typically been released from custody into the US during that waiting period, unless they were found to be likely to flee or a risk to public safety.

But Trump has repeatedly maligned that practice, dubbing it “catch and release,” a concept that predates his presidency but that became a rallying cry during his 2016 campaign. He has falsely claimed that most asylum seekers who are allowed to walk free while their immigration cases are pending will not show up for their court hearings, instead absconding into the US to live as unauthorized immigrants.

In an address last January, Trump asserted that as few as 2 percent of asylum seekers who aren’t in detention show up for their court hearings:

Tell me, what percentage of people come back? Would you say 100 percent? No, you’re a little off. Like, how about 2 percent? And those people, you almost don’t want, because they cannot be very smart… Those two percent are not going to make America great again, that I can tell you.

But data from both TRAC and the Department of Justice clearly refutes Trump’s claim: the rate at which non-detained migrants showed up for their court hearings still far exceeded 2 percent even in the years prior to 2019, in which attendance rates were unusually high. About 75 percent showed up for their hearings in fiscal year 2018, similar to rates over the previous five years.

It’s not clear why migrants skipped out on their hearings at significantly lower rates in 2019, but it’s possible that Trump’s hardline rhetoric on immigration and large-scale immigration raids have discouraged migrants from choosing to live in the US without authorization.

Meanwhile, the rate at which migrants’ asylum claims have been denied has steadily grown over the last seven years from just 42 percent in 2012 to 69 percent in 2019.

Trump has called for the end of “catch and release”

Trump has made efforts to end catch and release, instead keeping migrants in detention or else sending them back to Central America. To do so, he has increased funding for immigration detention, despite Congress’s attempts to rein him in.

Congress had sought to decrease the number of migrants in detention to just over 40,000 in its 2019 appropriations bill. But in August, Trump transferred $271 million in Department of Homeland Security disaster relief funds to ICE to pay for more detention capacity — about 50,000 migrants daily — and temporary immigration courts along the southern border.

Trump has also rolled out a series of policies that allow immigration agents to send migrants back to Mexico and Guatemala.

Under his “Remain in Mexico” policy, officially known as the Migrant Protection Protocols, he has sent about 56,000 migrants back to Mexico to await decisions on their asylum cases in the US. The administration consequently announced that it had ended catch and release for families arriving at the southern border with some limited exceptions, instead sending them all back to Mexico under MPP.

And he’s brokered agreements with the countries in Central America’s “Northern Triangle” region — Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador — that would allow his administration to send migrants back to those countries to seek protection there rather than in the US. Only the agreement with Guatemala is in effect so far, but the agreement with Honduras is weeks away from implementation.

There are comparatively low-cost alternatives to keeping immigrants in detention or sending them abroad, including the now-defunct Obama-era Family Case Management Program. Under that program, which Trump ended in June 2017, families were released and assigned to social workers who aided them in finding attorneys and accommodation and ensured that they showed up for their court hearings.

The program was small in scale, with no more than 1,600 people enrolled at any one time, but appeared to be successful in ensuring that 99 percent of participants showed up for their court appearances and ICE check-ins.

**************************

Thanks, Nicole, for your your clear, articulate, accessible reporting on perhaps America’s most misunderstood area of public discourse.

Intentionally lying and creating false narratives to dehumanize and denigrate the most vulnerable among us. It doesn’t get much more cowardly and depraved than than that. Yet, as Trump knows, millions in his “cult” will uncritically accept any lie or myth that he and his toadies throw out there.

Falsified “no-show rates” was one of the specialties of “Big Mac With Lies” McAleenan. It’s “not OK” for public officials like “Big Mac” to lie and urge policies to be based on “knowingly false narratives” and White Nationalist myths. And, it’s “not OK” to treat Big Mac, Nielsen, Kelly, Homan and other departed DHS toadies like “regular retired Government Senior Executives.” Their dishonesty, bias, and cowardice in the face of tyranny should never be forgotten.

That’s why honest, nonpartisan statistical analysis like that from TRAC and honest, professional reporting like Nicole’s are so important. So many intentional lies and misrepresentations are out there on the net and flowing from the regime on a regular basis.

One reason for the increase in the already very high rate of appearance for asylum seekers, noted by Nicole, might be the relatively high representation rate for those not in detention. Thanks to the many dedicated members of the New Due Process Army, approximately 85% of non-detained asylum seekers are represented. Represented individuals actually understand the system and the importance of reporting to court in an intentionally confusing and opaque process run by bureaucrats in a way that is often openly hostile to the public and Due Process of law.

Clearly, the expanded “New American Gulag” is based on false premises and lies. What would really work for everyone is reprogramming the time, money, and effort wasted on gross overuse of immigration detention into grants to resettlement agencies and legal aid organizations to insure adequate care, representation, and an understanding of our legal system leading to nearly “100% attendance” in Immigration Court. But, ignoring truth and sound public policy is certainly nothing new for the Trump regime.

Undoubtedly, a fair and impartially administered Immigration Court system would result in more asylum grants. That’s why the White Nationalists driving policy under the Trump regime don’t want it to happen.

PWS

01-11-20

👍🏼🗽Thanks, Geoffrey, and Due Process Forever!

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