"The Voice of the New Due Process Army" ————– Musings on Events in U.S. Immigration Court, Immigration Law, Sports, Music, Politics, and Other Random Topics by Retired United States Immigration Judge (Arlington, Virginia) and former Chairman of the Board of Immigration Appeals PAUL WICKHAM SCHMIDT and DR. ALICIA TRICHE, expert brief writer, practical scholar, emeritus Editor-in-Chief of The Green Card (FBA), and 2022 Federal Bar Association Immigration Section Lawyer of the Year. She is a/k/a “Delta Ondine,” a blues-based alt-rock singer-songwriter, who performs regularly in Memphis, where she hosts her own Blues Brunch series, and will soon be recording her first full, professional album. Stay tuned! 🎶 To see our complete professional bios, just click on the link below.
“Floaters — How The World’s Richest Country Responds To Asylum Seekers” — According to the NYT, Biden immigration policy officials always shared this vision of “ultimate border deterrence” with Gauleiter Stephen Miller. Now, they are secretly relieved that Trump’s righty judges have “forced” them to continue running a lawless border and killing asylum seekers without legal process. EDS NOTE: GRAPHIC CONTENT – The bodies of Salvadoran migrant Oscar Alberto Mart??nez Ram??rez and his nearly 2-year-old daughter Valeria lie on the bank of the Rio Grande in Matamoros, Mexico, Monday, June 24, 2019, after they drowned trying to cross the river to Brownsville, Texas. Martinez’ wife, Tania told Mexican authorities she watched her husband and child disappear in the strong current. (AP Photo/Julia Le Duc)
MATAMOROS, Mexico — When the Supreme Court effectively revived a cornerstone of Trump-era migration policy late last month, it looked like a major defeat for President Biden.
After all, Mr. Biden had condemned the policy — which requires asylum seekers to wait in Mexico — as “inhumane” and suspended it on his first day in office, part of an aggressive push to dismantle former President Donald J. Trump’s harshest migration policies.
But among some Biden officials, the Supreme Court’s order was quietly greeted with something other than dismay, current and former officials said: It brought some measure of relief.
Before that ruling, Mr. Biden’s steps to begin loosening the reins on migration had been quickly followed by a surge of people heading north, overwhelming the southwest border of the United States. Apprehensions of migrants hit a two-decade high in July, a trend officials fear will continue into the fall.
Concern had already been building inside the Biden administration that the speed of its immigration changes may have encouraged migrants to stream toward the United States, current and former officials said.
In fact, some Biden officials were already talking about reviving Mr. Trump’s policy in a limited way to deter migration, said the officials, who have worked on immigration policy but were not authorized to speak publicly about the administration’s internal debates on the issue. Then the Supreme Court order came, providing the Biden administration with the political cover to adopt the policy in some form without provoking as much ire from Democrats who reviled Mr. Trump’s border policies.
Now, the officials say, they have an opportunity to take a step back, come up with a more humane version of Mr. Trump’s policy and, they hope, reduce the enormous number of people arriving at the border.
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Read the rest of Natalie’s article at the link.
Who would have thought that neo-Nazi Stephen Miller would be the real winner of the 2020 election?
When he ”wins,” America and humanity “lose.” But, apparently that’s “A-OK” with some Biden Administration officials who lack the expertise, ability, courage, and political will to establish the rule of law for asylum seekers at our Southern Border! Attribution: Stephen Miller Monster by Peter Kuper, PoliticalCartoons.com.
Five decades of experience, including plenty of wall and fence building, civil detention, expedited dockets, restrictive interpretations, criminal prosecutions, family detentions, toddlers without lawyers, money to corrupt foreign governments, “don’t come, we don’t want you and care nothing about your lives messages,” in English and Spanish, says the Biden version of the “Miller Lite” approach will fail and ultimately expand the extralegal population of the U.S.
Of course, it also will kill more desperate humans in the desert, in Mexico, in squalid “camps,” and back in their home countries. Just so long as it’s “out of sight, out of mind.” The great thing about desert deaths is that often the bodies are never found or identified. Therefore, nothing can be proved, and it’s like these people “never happened.” It’s a real bureaucratic triumph! Foreign deaths are almost as good, as they seldom get much “play” in U.S. media and always can be blamed on something other than failed U.S. policies or foreign interventions.
I’d already observed that the DOJ’s “defense” of undoing Trump immigration policies seemed as half-hearted as it was ineffective. Perhaps their lackadaisical approach came right from the top!
And, the “policy geniuses” in the Biden Administration who think “Miller-Lite Time” will be a political “happy hour” (at humanity’s expense) should remember that the right will still successfully label them as “open borders” just as they did when Obama established himself as “deporter-in-chief!”
Meanwhile, their former progressive supporters will see through the false humane rhetoric. Does it really matter if we call individuals “foreign nationals” rather than “illegals” while we’re illegally exterminating them?
I’m afraid we know the answer to “Casey’s question:” NO!
”Sorry, Casey! Not only can’t anyone in the Biden Administration ‘play this game,’ they don’t even have the guts to suit up! They view a ‘forfeit’ to “Team Miller” as good as a ‘W.’ Remember, it’s not THEIR family, friends, or relatives dying at our border. It’s just ‘the other guys,’ so who cares? When it comes to U.S. immigration policy, foreign nationals all too often find that their lives and human dignity are just another form of expendable political capital.” PHOTO: Rudi Rest Creative Commons
Heather Cox Richardson Historian Professor, Boston CollegeFrances Perkins (1880-1965) U.S. Secretary of Labor (1933-45) PHOTO: Public realm
From “Letters From An American:”
September 5, 2021
By Heather Cox Richardson
On March 25, 1911, Frances Perkins was visiting with a friend who lived near Washington Square in New York City when they heard fire engines and people screaming. They rushed out to the street to see what the trouble was. A fire had broken out in a garment factory on the upper floors of a building on Washington Square, and the blaze ripped through the lint in the air. The only way out was down the elevator, which had been abandoned at the base of its shaft, or through an exit to the roof. But the factory owner had locked the roof exit that day because, he later testified, he was worried some of his workers might steal some of the blouses they were making.
“The people had just begun to jump when we got there,” Perkins later recalled. “They had been holding until that time, standing in the windowsills, being crowded by others behind them, the fire pressing closer and closer, the smoke closer and closer. Finally the men were trying to get out this thing that the firemen carry with them, a net to catch people if they do jump, the[y] were trying to get that out and they couldn’t wait any longer. They began to jump. The… weight of the bodies was so great, at the speed at which they were traveling that they broke through the net. Every one of them was killed, everybody who jumped was killed. It was a horrifying spectacle.”
By the time the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire was out, 147 young people were dead, either from their fall from the factory windows or from smoke inhalation.
Perkins had few illusions about industrial America: she had worked in a settlement house in an impoverished immigrant neighborhood in Chicago and was the head of the New York office of the National Consumers League, urging consumers to use their buying power to demand better conditions and wages for workers. But even she was shocked by the scene she witnessed on March 25.
By the next day, New Yorkers were gathering to talk about what had happened on their watch. “I can’t begin to tell you how disturbed the people were everywhere,” Perkins said. “It was as though we had all done something wrong. It shouldn’t have been. We were sorry…. We didn’t want it that way. We hadn’t intended to have 147 girls and boys killed in a factory. It was a terrible thing for the people of the City of New York and the State of New York to face.”
The Democratic majority leader in the New York legislature, Al Smith—who would a few years later go on to four terms as New York governor and become the Democratic presidential nominee in 1928—went to visit the families of the dead to express his sympathy and his grief. “It was a human, decent, natural thing to do,” Perkins said, “and it was a sight he never forgot. It burned it into his mind. He also got to the morgue, I remember, at just the time when the survivors were being allowed to sort out the dead and see who was theirs and who could be recognized. He went along with a number of others to the morgue to support and help, you know, the old father or the sorrowing sister, do her terrible picking out.”
“This was the kind of shock that we all had,” Perkins remembered.
The next Sunday, concerned New Yorkers met at the Metropolitan Opera House with the conviction that “something must be done. We’ve got to turn this into some kind of victory, some kind of constructive action….” One man contributed $25,000 to fund citizens’ action to “make sure that this kind of thing can never happen again.”
The gathering appointed a committee, which asked the legislature to create a bipartisan commission to figure out how to improve fire safety in factories. For four years, Frances Perkins was their chief investigator.
She later explained that although their mission was to stop factory fires, “we went on and kept expanding the function of the commission ’till it came to be the report on sanitary conditions and to provide for their removal and to report all kinds of unsafe conditions and then to report all kinds of human conditions that were unfavorable to the employees, including long hours, including low wages, including the labor of children, including the overwork of women, including homework put out by the factories to be taken home by the women. It included almost everything you could think of that had been in agitation for years. We were authorized to investigate and report and recommend action on all these subjects.”
And they did. Al Smith was the speaker of the house when they published their report, and soon would become governor. Much of what the commission recommended became law.
Perkins later mused that perhaps the new legislation to protect workers had in some way paid the debt society owed to the young people, dead at the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire. “The extent to which this legislation in New York marked a change in American political attitudes and policies toward social responsibility can scarcely be overrated,” she said. “It was, I am convinced, a turning point.”
But she was not done. In 1919, over the fervent objections of men, Governor Smith appointed Perkins to the New York State Industrial Commission to help weed out the corruption that was weakening the new laws. She continued to be one of his closest advisers on labor issues. In 1929, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt replaced Smith as New York governor, he appointed Perkins to oversee the state’s labor department as the Depression worsened. When President Herbert Hoover claimed that unemployment was ending, Perkins made national news when she repeatedly called him out with figures proving the opposite and said his “misleading statements” were “cruel and irresponsible.” She began to work with leaders from other states to figure out how to protect workers and promote employment by working together.
In 1933, after the people had rejected Hoover’s plan to let the Depression burn itself out, President-elect Roosevelt asked Perkins to serve as Secretary of Labor in his administration. She accepted only on the condition that he back her goals: unemployment insurance; health insurance; old-age insurance, a 40-hour work week; a minimum wage; and abolition of child labor. She later recalled: “I remember he looked so startled, and he said, ‘Well, do you think it can be done?’”
She promised to find out.
Once in office, Perkins was a driving force behind the administration’s massive investment in public works projects to get people back to work. She urged the government to spend $3.3 billion on schools, roads, housing, and post offices. Those projects employed more than a million people in 1934.
In 1935, FDR signed the Social Security Act, providing ordinary Americans with unemployment insurance; aid to homeless, dependent, and neglected children; funds to promote maternal and child welfare; and public health services.
In 1938, Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act, which established a minimum wage and maximum hours. It banned child labor.
Frances Perkins, and all those who worked with her, transformed the horror of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire into the heart of our nation’s basic social safety net.
“There is always a large horizon…. There is much to be done,” Perkins said. “It is up to you to contribute some small part to a program of human betterment for all time.”
Aftermath of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire (1911) ILGWU Archives Public Realm
Get more from HCR at the above link!
Perkins is one of the most important and under-recognized heroes of modern American history. Perkins believed that Government was there to promote the public good.
But, it wasn’t just a hollow slogan like those spouted by many of today’s politicos. She actually “walked the walk,” using her powerful intellect, energy, talent, advocacy skills, persistence, and influence with FDR to make America a much better place.
Just think of it: “unemployment insurance; health insurance; old-age insurance, a 40-hour work week; a minimum wage; and abolition of child labor.” An amazing list of accomplishments for which she has received far, far too little credit from historians. Today, most Americans probably think of Perkins, if at all, as the “first female Cabinet Secretary.” But she was more than that. Much more!
Perkins also used her position as Labor Secretary (prior to WW II the cabinet officer with responsibility for immigration) creatively in an attempt to save Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany. Although she won a major legal battle on the positive use of “charge bonds” to assist refugees, the actual effects of her humanitarian efforts appear to have been unfortunately limited.
In the xenophobic, anti-Semitic, isolationist America of the 1930s, she also became a target of the far right for her strong commitment to human rights. In 1939, Congressional xenophobes initiated an unsuccessful impeachment attempt.
In 1940, FDR transferred responsibility for immigration from the Labor Department to the Department of Justice. That spelled not only the end of Perkins’s efforts to help Jewish refugees, but also was a death sentence for many who might have been saved.
The DOJ threw up a powerful combination of restrictive requirements and bureaucracy to guarantee the death of more European Jews in the Holocaust. Indeed, the DOJ went one better by putting Japanese-American U.S. citizens in concentration camps based on “national security” claims that have since been shown to be both bogus and racially motivated. Sound familiar?
You can read all about this disgraceful chapter in American history and Perkins’s largely fruitless attempts to “swim against the tide” here, in this article by Rebecca Brenner Graham in Contingent Magazine: https://contingentmagazine.org/2019/08/23/no-refuge/.
Dr. Rebecca Brenner Graham Teacher, Author, Historian PHOTO: Rebeccabrennergraham.com
I really enjoyed Rebecca’s very lively, accessible historical writing that brings to life one of the ugliest episodes in modern American history, now largely swept under the carpet by today’s nativist revisionists. It’s also covered in the a Holocaust museum, an exhibit that contains much of the same bogus “America is full” xenophobic rhetoric spouted by too many of today’s GOP nativists.
This really horrible response by Western democracies to lives in peril was what gave rise to the Geneva Refugee Convention, the basis for the Refugee Act of 1980 and our current refugee and asylum system! How quickly we forget! The Trump Administration, with help from the Supremes, basically abrogated the legal system for refugees and asylees, without legislation. Despite promises to restore the rule of law, the Biden Administration has basically allowed most of Trump’s illegal and immoral policies to continue damaging humanity and diminishing us as a nation.
What would Frances Perkins have done? Certainly more than Garland and Mayorkas! At any rate, I enjoyed Rebecca’s historical writing and look forward to more!
A few years ago, Cathy and I had the pleasure of touring the Perkins Family Homestead, near Damariscotta, Maine, now owned by the Frances Perkins Center, with our dear, now departed Boothbay Harbor neighbor Sue Bazinet. It certainly opened my eyes to what true progressive values, lived and acted upon, were and still are!
Frances Perkins Homestead Damariscotta, ME PHOTO: Francis Perkins Center
We could use more leaders like Perkins today! Many thanks to the always-fabulous HCR for highlighting this great American!
Torture? What torture? It’s merely “enhanced fact-finding!”
Public realm“They all want to voluntarily waive further hearings and take final orders!” Amazing StoriesArtist Unknown, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
The phrase appears in multiple 9/11 volumes, usually uttered by top officials adamant that they were going to get things done, laws and rules be damned. Anti-terrorism efforts were always “lawyered to death” during the Clinton administration, Tenet complains in “Bush at War,” Bob Woodward’s 2002 book on the debates among the president and his national security team. In an interview with Woodward, Bush drops the phrase amid the machospeak — “dead or alive,” “bring ’em on” and the like — that became typical of his anti-terrorism rhetoric. “I had to show the American people the resolve of a commander in chief that was going to do whatever it took to win,” Bush explains. “No yielding. No equivocation. No, you know, lawyering this thing to death.” In “Against All Enemies,” Clarke recalls the evening of Sept. 11, 2001, when Bush snapped at an official who suggested that international law looked askance at military force as a tool of revenge. “I don’t care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass,” the president retorted.
The message was unmistakable: The law is an obstacle to effective counterterrorism. Worrying about procedural niceties is passe in a 9/11 world, an annoying impediment to the essential work of ass-kicking.
Except, they did lawyer this thing to death. Instead of disregarding the law, the Bush administration enlisted it. “Beginning almost immediately after September 11, 2001, [Vice President Dick] Cheney saw to it that some of the sharpest and best-trained lawyers in the country, working in secret in the White House and the United States Department of Justice, came up with legal justifications for a vast expansion of the government’s power in waging war on terror,” Jane Mayer writes in “The Dark Side,” her relentless 2008 compilation of the arguments and machinations of government lawyers after the attacks. Through public declarations and secret memos, the administration sought to remove limits on the president’s conduct of warfare and to deny terrorism suspects the protections of the Geneva Conventions by redefining them as unlawful enemy combatants. Nothing, Mayer argues of the latter effort, “more directly cleared the way for torture than this.”
To comprehend what our government can justify in the name of national security, consider the torture memos themselves, authored by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel between 2002 and 2005 to green-light CIA interrogation methods for terrorism suspects. Tactics such as cramped confinement, sleep deprivation and waterboarding were rebranded as “enhanced interrogation techniques,” legally and linguistically contorted to avoid the label of torture. Though the techniques could be cruel and inhuman, the OLC acknowledged in an August 2002 memo, they would constitute torture only if they produced pain equivalent to organ failure or death, and if the individual inflicting such pain really really meant to do so: “Even if the defendant knows that severe pain will result from his actions, if causing such harm is not his objective, he lacks the requisite specific intent.” It’s quite the sleight of hand, with torture moving from the body of the interrogated to the mind of the interrogator.
After devoting dozens of pages to the metaphysics of specific intent, the true meaning of “prolonged” mental harm or “imminent” death, and the elasticity of the Convention Against Torture, the memo concludes that none of it actually matters. Even if a particular interrogation method would cross some legal line, the relevant statute would be considered unconstitutional because it “impermissibly encroached” on the commander in chief’s authority to conduct warfare. Almost nowhere in these memos does the Justice Department curtail the power of the CIA to do as it pleases.
In fact, the OLC lawyers rely on assurances from the CIA itself to endorse such powers. In a second memo from August 2002, the lawyers ruminate on the use of cramped confinement boxes. “We have no information from the medical experts you have consulted that the limited duration for which the individual is kept in the boxes causes any substantial physical pain,” the memo states. Waterboarding likewise gets a pass. “You have informed us that this procedure does not inflict actual physical harm,” the memo states. “Based on your research . . . you do not anticipate that any prolonged mental harm would result from the use of the waterboard.”
You have informed us. Experts you have consulted. Based on your research. You do not anticipate. Such hand-washing words appear throughout the memos. The Justice Department relies on information provided by the CIA to reach its conclusions; the CIA then has the cover of the Justice Department to proceed with its interrogations. It’s a perfect circle of trust.
Yet the logic is itself tortured. In a May 2005 memo, the lawyers conclude that because no single technique inflicts “severe” pain amounting to torture, their combined use “would not be expected” to reach that level, either. As though embarrassed at such illogic, the memo attaches a triple-negative footnote: “We are not suggesting that combinations or repetitions of acts that do not individually cause severe physical pain could not result in severe physical pain.” Well, then, what exactly are you suggesting? Even when the OLC in 2004 officially withdrew its August 2002 memo following a public outcry and declared torture “abhorrent,” the lawyers added a footnote to the new memo assuring that they had reviewed the prior opinions on the treatment of detainees and “do not believe that any of their conclusions would be different under the standards set forth in this memorandum.”
In these documents, lawyers enable lawlessness. Another May 2005 memo concludes that, because the Convention Against Torture applies only to actions occurring under U.S. jurisdiction, the CIA’s creation of detention sites in other countries renders the convention “inapplicable.” Similarly, because the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment is meant to protect people convicted of crimes, it should not apply to terrorism detainees — because they have not been officially convicted of anything. The lack of due process conveniently eliminates constitutional protections. In his introduction to “The Torture Memos: Rationalizing the Unthinkable,” David Cole describes the documents as “bad-faith lawyering,” which might be generous. It is another kind of lawyering to death, one in which the rule of law that the 9/11 Commission urged us to abide by becomes the victim.
Years later, the Senate Intelligence Committee would investigate the CIA’s post-9/11 interrogation program. Its massive report — the executive summary of which appeared as a 549-page book in 2014 — found that torture did not produce useful intelligence, that the interrogations were more brutal than the CIA let on, that the Justice Department did not independently verify the CIA’s information, and that the spy agency impeded oversight by Congress and the CIA inspector general. It explains that the CIA purported to oversee itself and, no surprise, that it deemed its interrogations effective and necessary, no matter the results. (If a detainee provided information, it meant the program worked; if he did not, it meant stricter applications of the techniques were needed; if still no information was forthcoming, the program had succeeded in proving he had none to give.)
“The CIA’s effectiveness representations were almost entirely inaccurate,” the Senate report concluded. It is one of the few lies of the war on terror unmasked by an official government investigation and public report, but just one of the many documented in the 9/11 literature.
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Sound painfully familiar? It should, to those of us “DOJ vets” who lived through this period. The use of the “third person,” “double and triple negatives,” “weasel words” like “you have given us to understand that,” “decision by committee” where a memo is routed through so many layers of bureaucracy that the original author or authors don’t even appear on its face — are all “devices” to diffuse and obscure responsibility and avoid clear accountability for controversial(and too often wrong) decisions!
During our time at the BIA, my fellow U.W. Badger, Judge Mike Heilman and I were often at odds on the law, particularly when it came to asylum. Anybody who doubts this should read Mike’s remarkable and famous (or infamous) “rabbi dissent” in Matter of H-, 21 I&N Dec. 337, 349 (BIA 1996) (Heilman, Board Member, dissenting). Nevertheless, one thing we agreed upon was requiring any decisions written for us to use the first person to reflect whose decision it actually was!
“Lawyers enable lawlessness.” How true! In 2002, DOJ lawyers (hand-chosen by the politicos) “tanked” and enabled, even encouraged, gross law violations by the CIA.
Fast forward to 2018. Then, White Nationalist AG Jeff Sessions exhorted his wholly-owned “judges” at EOIR not to treat DHS enforcement as a party before the court, but rather as a worthy “partner” in combatting the largely-fabricated “scourge” of illegal immigration (that actually, as we can now see, was propping up Trump’s economy). Is it surprising that precedent decisions by Sessions, Whitaker, and Barr favored DHS nearly 100% of the time and the BIA thereafter issued almost no precedents where the individual prevailed (not that there were many of those following “the Ashcroft purge,” even before Sessions)?
Asylum grant rates in Immigration Court tumbled precipitously, while both the trial, and particularly appellate, levels at EOIR were “packed” with judges whose main qualification appeared to be an expectation that they would churn out large numbers of removal orders without much analysis or consideration of the factors favoring the individual. Misogyny and anti-asylum, anti-private-lawyer attitudes (those “dirty lawyers”) were encouraged by Sessions as part the “culture” at EOIR, sometimes visibly rewarded by “elevation” to the BIA.
Interestingly, at the same time in 2002 that the group of DOJ attorneys was furiously working in secret to justify torture, in clear violation of the Convention Against Torture (“CAT”), another group in the DOJ, the BIA, was struggling to make the CAT work in “real world” litigated cases. A number of us dissented from the majority of our BIA colleagues’ wrong-headed and rather transparent attempt to “neuter” CAT protection from the outset. Unlike the “secret lawyers” at the DOJ, our work was public and had consequences not only for the humans involved, but for those of us who had the audacity to stand up for their rights under domestic and international law!
Here’s an excerpt from my long-forgotten dissenting opinion in Matter of J-E-, 22 I&N Dec. 291, 314-15 (BIA 2002) (Schmidt, Board Member, dissenting):
The majority concludes that the extreme mistreatment likely to befall this respondent in Haiti is not “torture,” but merely “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.” The majority further concludes that conduct defined as “torture” occurs in the Haitian detention system, but is not “likely” for this respondent. In short, the majority goes to great lengths to avoid applying the Convention Against Torture to this respondent.
We are in the early stages of the very difficult and thankless task of construing the Convention. Only time will tell whether the majority’s narrow reading of the torture definition and its highly technical approach to the standard of proof will be the long-term benchmarks for our country’s implementation of this international treaty.
Although I am certainly bound to follow and apply the majority’s constructions in all future cases, I do not believe that the majority adequately carries out the language or the purposes of the Convention and the implementing regulations. Therefore, I fear that we are failing to comply with our international obligations.
I conclude that the respondent is more likely than not to face officially sanctioned torture if returned to Haiti. Therefore, I would grant his application for deferral of removal under the Convention Against Torture and the implementing regulations. Consequently, I respectfully dissent.
Within a year of that decision, my dissenting colleagues and I were among those “purged” from the BIA by Ashcroft because of our views. I’d argue that EOIR has continued to go straight downhill since then, and is now in total free fall! Surely, any “facade” of quasi-judicial independence at the BIA has long-since crumbled. Yet, AG Garland pretends there is no problem. Garland’s apparent belief that this is still Judge Bell’s or Ben Civiletti’s or even Ed Levi’s DOJ is simply, demonstrably, wrong.
Today’s DOJ has been part and parcel of a highly inappropriate “weaponization” of the law and “Dred Scottification” directed against individual civil rights, migrants, voters, women, people of color, and a host of “others” who were on the far right “hit list” of the Trump kakistocracy. Nowhere has that been more evident than at the dysfunctional and institutionally biased EOIR. The problems plaguing American justice today have increased since 9-11. They will continue to fester and grow unless and until Garland faces reality and makes progressive leadership and judicial changes at EOIR to addresses the toxic culture of complicity and abusive use of the law to degrade individual and human rights. And, some real accountability at the rest of the badly-damaged DOJ should not be far behind.
REYNOSA, Mexico — When Joe Biden was running for president, he promised to close a squalid border tent camp in Mexico where thousands of migrants had been left to await the outcome of their immigration cases by the Trump administration.
Last spring, Biden emptied the camp, allowing most of the migrants to claim asylum and enter the U.S. even as his administration continued enforcing a Trump pandemic policy that effectively barred most other asylum seekers.
Soon after the Matamoros camp was bulldozed last March, a new camp formed about 55 miles west across from the border bridge to the more dangerous, Gulf crime cartel stronghold of Reynosa. Now that camp and another in Tijuana are home to thousands of asylum seekers, many with spouses and children in the U.S. They’re expected to grow after federal courts reinstated Trump’s so-called Remain in Mexico program last week, making it even harder for asylum seekers to enter the U.S. legally.
“We all thought this would get better when Biden got the presidency,” said Brendon Tucker, who works at the camp clinic run by the U.S.-based nonprofit Global Response Management, which also ran a clinic at the Matamoros camp.
Instead, he said, Biden’s pandemic ban on asylum claims, “is creating worse conditions in Mexico.”
About 2,000 migrants were living at the camp in Reynosa, Mexico, last week.(Molly Hennessy-Fiske / Los Angeles Times)
A White House spokesman declined to comment about the migrant camps, referring questions to the Department of Homeland Security.
Homeland Security said in a statement that, “This administration will continue to work closely with its interagency, foreign, and international organization partners to comply in good faith with the district court’s order [on Remain in Mexico] while continuing our work to build a safe, orderly, and humane immigration system that upholds our laws and values.”
In Reynosa, where about 2,000 migrants were living last week, conditions are in many ways worse than they were in Matamoros, Tucker said. There’s less potable water, fewer bathrooms, showers and other sanitation that U.S.-based nonprofits spent months installing in Matamoros. Mexican soldiers circle in trucks with guns mounted on top. Migrants face not only cartel extortion and kidnapping, but also COVID-19 outbreaks and pressure to leave from Mexican authorities. Fewer U.S. volunteers, including immigration lawyers, are willing to cross the border to help due to security concerns. Few at the camp understand their rights and U.S. pandemic restrictions, although they say they asked U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents about them before they were expelled.
“They didn’t tell us anything, they just left us here,” said Salvadoran migrant Emerita Alfaro Palacios, 34, who’s been living at the camp with her 17-year-old daughter Pamela since June, hoping to join her brother in Houston.
Migrants call the camp Plaza Las Americas, the name of the park it occupies. The first to arrive last spring holed up inside the central gazebo. Those who followed pitched tents outside, their warren of droopy tarps and clotheslines expanding daily. Gone were the mariachis who used to congregate in the park, in the shade of a dilapidated casino that still draws throngs on weekends. Last week, only the gazebo’s spindly roof was visible, like the center of an enormous, patched circus tent. Taxis and vendors still circled, selling fruit popsicles, tacos, pupusas and other dishes catering to hungry migrants, mostly Central Americans. Many said they came to the border hoping Biden would allow them to claim asylum. Some had seen reports about how he helped those at the camp in Matamoros.
Many Reynosa residents and officials consider the camp an eyesore.
Standing on the roof of a nearby building overlooking the camp last week, maintenance worker Hector Hernandez Garrido, 33, said it was the responsibility of the U.S. to accept the asylum seekers. He said he feared the camp was contaminated by COVID-19 and other diseases.
Two weeks ago, Reynosa authorities removed cook stoves from the camp kitchen, citing safety risks. They pressured U.S. volunteers to stop cordoning off a section of the camp for migrants who had tested positive for COVID-19, and have threatened to cut the camp’s electricity and water supply.
“They want us out,” said Gina Maricela, a Honduran single mother and nurse at the GRM clinic.
It’s not clear where the migrants would go. Last month, Reynosa officials also launched a legal battle to demolish the city’s primary nonprofit migrant shelter, already home to hundreds, arguing it lies in a floodplain. Felicia Rangel-Samponaro, who has been crossing the border daily to help migrants at the Reynosa camp through her nonprofit Sidewalk School, said they rented a 20-room hotel for those who are COVID-positive to quarantine. They may build a new camp, she said, but that would take weeks and cost tens of thousands of dollars.
“It’s exactly like Matamoros, but with less support,” Rangel-Samponaro said. “Cut what you like, that’s not going to stop the encampment.”
As in Matamoros and other border cities in the surrounding Tamaulipas state, it’s not city officials or even migrants who ultimately control the plaza — it’s the cartel. Migrants who enter or leave the city without paying a smuggler risk getting kidnapped and held for ransom. So do those who leave the camp, even for a few hours to shop or look for work.
Honduran migrant Lesly Pineda, a factory worker, said she and her 11-year-old son Joan were kidnapped with eight other migrants in July and released only after she paid a $2,000 ransom. A single mother, Pineda, 33, then took her son to the border and sent him across the Rio Grande with a smuggler. He remained at a federal shelter in Texas last week, she said. She had left her two oldest children, ages 15 and 14, with her mother in Honduras.
. . . .
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“Floaters — How The World’s Richest Country Responds To Asylum Seekers” — Will U.S. policy makers ever get beyond this jaundiced view of the “proper place” for asylum seekers in modern society? So far, despite Biden’s and Harris’s campaign rhetoric, the “reality on the ground” (or “in the river,” as the case might be) has remained disturbingly unchanged! EDS NOTE: GRAPHIC CONTENT – The bodies of Salvadoran migrant Oscar Alberto Mart??nez Ram??rez and his nearly 2-year-old daughter Valeria lie on the bank of the Rio Grande in Matamoros, Mexico, Monday, June 24, 2019, after they drowned trying to cross the river to Brownsville, Texas. Martinez’ wife, Tania told Mexican authorities she watched her husband and child disappear in the strong current. (AP Photo/Julia Le Duc)
Read Molly’s full report at the link.
The Trump kakistocracy considered the legal asylum system to be a “loophole” in their White Nationalist agenda. So, they just overtly violated the law. Thanks to an indulgent “Dred Scott” Supremes’ majority, they largely got away with it!
The Biden Administration considers complying with asylum laws, due process, and the rule of law, essentially a “political option” that they are working on (slowly, and incompetently).
In the meantime, they simply continue the Trump Administration’s illegal policies. Because, hey, it’s not real humans whose rights, lives, and humanity are being stomped upon here. Just “foreign nationals” and mostly “people of color” at that. Let ‘em continue to twist in the wind, while the Administration gets its act together. That’s particularly convenient if it’s happeningsouth of the border where, except for a few courageous folks like Molly and some NGOs and religious workers, the human trauma is largely “out of sight out of mind.”
If all else fails, we can always blame Trump. Like Trump, Biden has largely ceded control of southern border policies and migration from Latin America to cartels, smugglers, and traffickers. When the legal system fails, the underground and the black market take over.
I don’t think that there is any doubt that restoring the legal asylum system and actually, for perhaps the first time,administering it fairly, lawfully, generously, and with competent expert Asylum Officers and Immigration Judges (“new blood” required) would result in a substantial number of border arrivals being granted legal asylum or other forms of protection.
We’d actually be able to screen individuals, know who we have admitted, where they are going, have them in possession of legal work authorization, in a position to pay taxes, and in many cases have them on a path to eventual full integration into our society. And, by all legitimate accounts, after four years of Trump’s legal immigration disaster and a falling birth rate, we certainly can use more legal immigration.
Instead of looking at asylum seekers as a self-defined “problem,” why not look at saving them and integrating their skills and undoubted courage, energy, and perseverance into our society in a constructive manner as an “opportunity?” Because, that’s exactly what it is!
Human migration will continue, as it always has been, to be a major force in the 21st Century. “Smart money” is on the countries that best learn how to adapt and take advantage of its realities and embrace its opportunities as the “winners of the future.”
Given a fair, functional, generous system, many asylum seekers would be motivated to apply in an orderly fashion at ports of entry, or even abroad (if we actually had a robust functioning refugee program for Latin America, which we don’t). With an honest system that treats them fairly, listens carefully, and provides reasoned understandable decisions, even those who don’t qualify would be more likely to accept the result and consider constructive alternatives.
If the U.S. stepped up, fulfilled our legal obligations, and set a good example, other countries in a position to accept refugees and asylum seekers might also be motivated to improve their performance.
But, what we’re doing right now to those we falsely promised to treat fairly won’t be swept under the carpet forever. Historians are likely to highlight the cowardly abrogation of our legal duties to refugees and asylum seekers, by Administrations of both parties, as alow point in the American story.
Here’s the ugly truth about what two Administrations and some really bad Federal Judges have done to our vulnerable fellow humans seeking legal refuge at our borders:
I refer to this as the “harsh reality that the nativist Ted Cruz ‘let ‘em enjoy the beaches in Cancun’ crowd doesn’t get!”
And, here’s the truth about migrants helping our nation thrive and who are a key component of our hopes for the future. Progressives and their allies must double down and act upon these truths to combat the type of ridiculous, dangerous, anti- American nativist lies and myths that were driving some of the misinformed callers, also pushed by the “insurrectionist wing” of the GOP:
Significantly, this article came from the George W. Bush Institute, hardly a “left wing think tank.”
“Geoffrey’s 40 minutes” shows that there is, indeed, an imminent threat to American democracy, leadership, and future prosperity out there. But, it definitely does not come from migrants! A nation where about 98% of the population came from immigrant lineage can’t afford to turn our backs on today’s immigrants.
Trumpy nativists, posing as fiscal conservatives, want you to question whether the United States can afford to take in Afghan allies and refugees.
The better question is whether we can afford not to.
The Republican Party has cleaved in recent weeks over the issue of Afghan refugees, specifically those who served as military interpreters or otherwise aided U.S. efforts. On the one hand, Republican governors and lawmakers around the country have volunteered to resettle Afghan evacuees in their states. Likewise, a recent CBS News/YouGov poll found that bringing these allies to the United States is phenomenally popular, garnering support from 76 percent of Republican respondents. Influential conservative constituencies are invested in this issue, too, including veterans’ groups and faith leaders.
On the other hand, the Trump strain within the GOP has been fighting such magnanimous impulses with misinformation.
Xenophobic politicians and media personalities have been conspiracy-theorizing about the dangers of resettling Afghan allies here — even though we had previously entrusted these same Afghans with the lives of U.S. troops and granted them security clearances. And even though they go through additional extensive screening before being brought to our shores.
No matter; if you listen to Tucker Carlson and his ilk, you’ll hear that these Afghans are apparently part of a secret plot to replace White Americans, and that untamed Afghan hordes are going to rape your wife and daughter.
Often these demagogues try to disguise their racist objections to refugee resettlement (and immigration more broadly) as economic concerns. Their claim: that however heartbreaking the footage from the Kabul airport, compassion for Afghan refugees is a luxury Americans simply cannot afford.
Refugees are somehow responsible for existing housing shortages, proclaims Carlson. (This is demonstrably false; the reason we have too little affordable housing is primarily because people like Carlson oppose building more and denser housing.) More refugees would sponge up precious taxpayer dollars, according to Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.). And in general, refugees — like all immigrants — are a massive drain on the U.S. economy, alleges Stephen Miller.
This is nonsense.
. . . .
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Read Catherine’s complete op-ed at the link!
Thanks, Catherine, for once again standing up to and speaking truth against disgraceful, neo-Nazi, nativist racists like Stephen Miller, Tucker Carlson, and Marjorie Taylor Greene!
By contrast, one might well ask what “value added” folks like Stephen Miller and his buddies, (Miller has largely sponged off of taxpayer funds while looking for ways to inflict misery on others and destroy America) bring to the table. None, that I can see!
Moreover, even beyond the undoubted value of robust refugee admissions, there is good reason to believe that large-scale migration presents our best opportunity for salvation and prosperity, rather than the “bogus threat” posited by Miller & Co.
As Deepak Bhargava and Ruth Milkman recently, and quite cogently, wrote in American Prospect:
. . . .
A “Statue of Liberty Plan” for the 21st century could make the United States the world’s most welcoming country for immigrants. Right now, the foreign-born share of the U.S. population lags behind that of Canada, Australia, and Switzerland. In order to surpass them, the United States would have to admit millions more people each year for a decade or longer. We currently admit immigrants to promote family integration, meet economic needs, respond to humanitarian crises, and increase the diversity of our population from historically underrepresented countries. Under this plan, we could dramatically expand admissions in all four categories and add a fifth category to recognize the claims of climate migrants. As a civic project of national renewal, with millions of people playing a role in welcoming new immigrants, such a policy could reweave frayed social bonds and create a healthier, outward-looking, multiracial national identity.
The politics of immigration, however, lag far behind the moral and economic logic of the case for a pro-immigration policy. The immigrant threat narrative has become so pervasive that many liberals have embraced it, if only because they hope to fend off threats from right-wing nationalists. President Obama not only deprioritized immigration reform in his first term but deported record numbers of immigrants, hoping that such a display of “toughness” might win support for legalization of the undocumented immigrants already here. Hillary Clinton advocated liberal immigration policies in her 2016 presidential campaign but later tacked toward restrictionism. Liberals and leftists across the global North, from Austria to France to the U.K., have offered similar concessions to nativism. But mimicking right-wing appeals is a losing gamble that only serves to legitimize the anti-immigrant agenda and its standard-bearers.
There are promising signs of potential for shifting the debate, however, if progressives lean in. Polling shows that Americans increasingly reject the immigrant threat narrative, largely due to Trump’s shameless cruelty. Last year, for the first time since Gallup began asking the question in 1965, more Americans supported increased levels of immigration than supported reduced levels. A telling barometer of how the sands are shifting is that President Biden’s proposed immigration bill is far to the left of what Obama proposed.
The work of shifting gears toward a more welcoming policy can begin right now by fully welcoming immigrants who already reside in our country. A crucial starting point would be to include a path to citizenship for essential workers, Dreamers, farmworkers, and Temporary Protected Status holders in the American Jobs Plan Congress is considering. This is not only a humane approach, but it also will stimulate economic growth and thus help finance other parts of the plan. A separate campaign by the Biden administration (not requiring congressional action) to simplify the naturalization process for nine million eligible green-card holders would help make the nation’s electorate more reflective of its population.
Getting the politics of immigration right isn’t just important for immigrants. Nativism, built upon the sturdy foundation of racism, remains among the most potent tools in the arsenal of right-wing authoritarians. Any program for economic equity or democracy will be fragile in the absence of a coherent immigration agenda. The antidote to authoritarianism is not to duck, cower, or imitate the nativists, but rather to make the case for opening the door to millions more immigrants.
If slavery and genocide were the country’s original sins, its occasional and often accidental genius has been to renew itself through periodic waves of immigration. Once we expose the immigration threat narrative as the Big Lie that it is, it becomes plain that immigration is not a problem to be solved but an opportunity and necessity to be embraced.
This, of course, also casts doubt on the wisdom of our current, wasteful and ultimately ineffective, policy of illegally rejecting legal asylum applicants at our Southern Border, rather than attempting in good faith to fit as many as qualify under our current system, as properly and honestly administered (something that hasn’t happened in the past). Additionally wise leaders would be looking for ways to expand our legal immigration system to admit, temporarily or permanently, those whose presence would be mutually beneficial, even if they aren’t “refugees” within existing legal definitions. In this respect, the proposal to modernize our laws to admit climate migrants is compelling.
Remember, as stated above:
Getting the politics of immigration right isn’t just important for immigrants. Nativism, built upon the sturdy foundation of racism, remains among the most potent tools in the arsenal of right-wing authoritarians. Any program for economic equity or democracy will be fragile in the absence of a coherent immigration agenda. The antidote to authoritarianism is not to duck, cower, or imitate the nativists, but rather to make the case for opening the door to millions more immigrants.
NDPA members, keep listening to Catherine and the other voices of progressive wisdom, humanity, practicality, and tolerance. The key to the future is insuring that the “Stephen Millers of the world” never again get a chance to implement their vile, racist propaganda in the guise of “government policy.”
Happily, many Northern Virginians have listened to our “better angels.” Humanitarian aid and resettlement opportunities for Afghan refugees are pouring in, as shown by this report from our good friend Julie Carey @ NBC 4 news:
Julie Carey NOVA Bureau Chief, NBC4 Washington PHOTO: Twitter
The local couple interviewed by Julie emphasized the impressive “human dignity” of the Afghan refugees! (I also observed this during many years of hearing asylum cases in person at the Arlington Immigration Court.) Compare that with the lack thereof (not to mention absence of empathy and kindness) shown by the nativist naysayers!
Garland’s “right hand man” on EOIR matters is eerily familiar, in a Himmleresque way! Attribution: Stephen Miller Monster by Peter Kuper, PoliticalCartoons.com“Miller’s Mob” is still alive and well at Garland’s EOIR. Legal asylum seekers — not so well, not so alive! https://www.flickr.com/photos/rasputin243/ Creative Commons LicenseBIA Asylum Panel In Action — At Garland’s BIA, a “Miller-trained and inspired” Asylum Panel can, and does, kill dozens of unarmed asylum seekers in a single day to “make quota.” Despite being thoroughly discredited for judicial use, Garland has inexplicably continued due-process-denying, corner-cutting, quality-killing “production quotas” for his assembly line worker/judges in Immigration Courts! Albrecht Dürer, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
Dan Kowalski reports for LexisNexis Immigration Community:
“Ms. Munyuh’s case concerns us. From our reading of the record, the IJ seemed determined to pick every nit she could find. Besides erring procedurally, the IJ discounted probative evidence on flimsy grounds and displayed a dubious understanding of how rape survivors ought to act. Although we give great deference to the IJ as factfinder, substantial-evidence review does not require us to credit the credibility finding of an IJ who cherry-picks from—or misconstrues—the record to reach it. The IJ must consider the “totality of the circumstances, and all relevant factors.” 8 U.S.C. § 1158(b)(1)(B)(iii) (emphasis added). At the very least, the two legal errors we have identified warrant remand. The IJ erred by failing to give specific, cogent reasons for rejecting Ms. Munyuh’s reasonable, plausible explanations for the discrepancies tied to her declaration that the police truck broke down after only four or five kilometers. And she further erred by discounting the supporting documentation without giving Ms. Munyuh adequate notice and opportunity to provide corroborative evidence. We therefore vacate the removal order and remand the case to the Board for further proceedings consistent with this opinion. PETITION GRANTED; VACATED and REMANDED.”
Congrats to Attorney Ronald D. Richey, who appeared before me many times at the Arlington Immigration Court.
Ronald D. Richey, Esquire Rockville, MD
Here’s a quote from the opinion by Senior Circuit Judge Danny Boggs, a Reagan appointee “on loan” from the 6th Cir., that shows the appallingly unprofessional performance of the Immigration Judge and the BIA in this “life or death” case:
On this point, the IJ made findings with which no reasonable factfinder could agree. She found Ms. Munyuh’s testimony that “the truck had traveled over two hours” to conflict with her earlier estimate that it had traveled “over an hour.” And she found Ms. Munyuh’s redirect testimony that “the truck [had] traveled approximately four to five hours before breaking down” to be “clearly in conflict with each of [Ms. Munyuh]’s prior estimations.”
But these time estimates are all consistent with each other. Indeed, assuming the truck really had traveled for four to five hours, Ms. Munyuh had no other choice but to give those answers. The IJ asked her if the truck had traveled more or less than an hour, to which Ms. Munyuh said more than an hour. Then the IJ asked whether the truck had traveled at least two hours, to which Ms. Munyuh answered in the affirmative.
No reasonable factfinder could find those two statements to conflict with Ms. Munyuh’s later testimony that the truck traveled for four to five hours. The IJ’s contrary finding is therefore unsupported by substantial evidence.
Wow! Is this what constituted “acceptable performance” when Judge Garland was on the D.C. Circuit? And, don’t forget, OIL actually defended this garbage product in May 2021, well after Garland took office and after experts had advised him to “clean house.”
The bad judges at EOIR whose lack of competence and/or bias unfairly condemn asylum seekers to persecution, torture and death, or all three, do NOT have life tenure and should NOT be on the Immigration Bench. Period! It’s not rocket science!
“No reasonable fact finder.” Isn’t that a problem in life or death cases? So-called “judges” who time after time stretch and misinterpret facts, ignore due process, and misapply basic asylum law to unfairly sentence asylum seekers to death! Why isn’t this grounds for removal from the bench? Or at least removing them from all asylum cases!
While Judge Boggs and his colleagues are rightfully “concerned” with EOIR’s performance in this case, Garland doesn’t appear to share those concerns. This is “business as usual” at Garland’s EOIR, just as it was when Stephen Miller was calling the shots! Obviously, Garland isn’t taking the human lives at stake here with even a modicum of seriousness. That’s totally unacceptable! Maybe Judge Boggs needs to pick up pen ✒️ and paper 📜 and express his outrage in writing to his former Circuit Court colleague, attaching an annotated copy of the garbage being turned out by his EOIR Star Chambers!
Just look the other way, it’s the Garland way! “Justice” Star Chamber Style
Also, don’t think that cases like this are an “aberration.” No, they aren’t! The only “aberration” is that this is one of a tiny sliver of injustices that was actually caught and corrected by the Article IIIs. How many unrepresented or under-represented individuals do you think that this judge and this BIA panel “railroad” in a week?
🏴☠️⚰️THEATER OF THE ABSURD: Incredibly, Garland & Mayorkas are now proposing to put this “Miller-Lite” EOIR infested with many incompetent, poorly trained, asylum-denying “judges,” with no credible leadership, totally lacking in professionalism and quality control, “in charge” of establishing precedents, insuring, and enforcing due process in their proposed “streamlined” asylum system! In other words, the solution for those who have repeatedly demonstrated an outrageous inability to conduct fair hearings and whose ignorance of asylum law and best practices is often stunning is to put them in charge of doing “paper reviews” of applications denied by Asylum Officers!
Good luck with that! Could there be a more insane proposal under current conditions? Making Stephen Miller the new “Asylum Czar” at EOIR? Perhaps, don’t be surprised!
Of course, in the nutsos world of Garland and Mayorkas, their fatally flawed proposal arguably would be a better than the current illegal and immoral use of Miller’s bogus Title 42 scheme to return legal asylum seekers to torture or death WITHOUT ANY PROCESS WHATSOEVER.
It’s simple. A complete “housecleaning” at EOIR, starting with the BIA, new progressive leadership and professional expert training at EOIR and the Asylum Office, new progressive asylum precedents and guidance, and an operating program for universal representation of asylum seekers are ABSOLUTE PREREQUISITES for fair and efficient regulatory reform of the asylum system! In the meantime, allow Asylum Officers to grant asylum to those who pass credible fear, but continue to give full Immigration Court hearings to any who can’t be granted. Get rid of Title 42 and start processing legal asylum seekers in an orderly fashion through ports of entry!
More than seven months into the Administration, Garland and Mayorkas could, and should, have had these needed progressive personnel, leadership, and structural changes in place, producing due process, and most important, actually saving lives! Instead, they have wasted time and squandered goodwill by continuing to run Stephen Miller’s White Nationalist system with Miller’s personnel in place! Simply incredible!
And, the bumbling, highly predictable weakness of the team of DOJ lawyers trying to defend the Administration’s few humanitarian immigration initiatives has become patently obvious. How can you expect lawyers who have spent the last four years misrepresenting asylum seekers as less than human and a threat to society suddenly start setting the record straight and effectively advocating for their human and legal rights? Obviously, they can’t! While EOIR is clearly the most glaringly dysfunctional part of DOJ, it’s obviously not the only problem and the only place Team Garland needed to (but didn’t) “clean house.”
I “get” that this isn’t Judge Bell’s, Ben Civiletti’s, or Janet Reno’s DOJ any more! But, remarkably, and tragically for the poor souls and their lawyers involved, Garland doesn’t!
ELIE MYSTAL, Justice Correspondent, writes in The Nation:
. . . .
The opinion is thorough and well-reasoned, and Judge Du’s arguments are so obvious in retrospect that it’s kind of amazing they aren’t a staple of the immigration debate in this country. But this is where Judge Du’s background perhaps becomes important.
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Miranda Du was born in Ca Mau, Vietnam, in 1969. Her family fled the nation after the Vietnam War when she was 9, first to Malaysia, before eventually making its way to Alabama. She went to Berkeley for law school and was an employment lawyer in Nevada when Harry Reid and Barack Obama made her a federal district judge in 2011. I would imagine that Judge Du looks at the US immigration system with a fresh perspective, at least as compared to a person like me, who was born here and has been taught to just accept a background level of bigotry as an immutable fact of immigration law. One of the more striking parts of her opinion in this case is the section in which she calls out other courts for not doing this sooner. She essentially says that courts in other jurisdictions that have looked at Section 1326 have blindly accepted the government’s reasoning that the 1952 reauthorization cleansed the statute of its racial bias, without really looking at the 1952 Congress.
The opinion is brilliant, and I’m going to print it out so I’ll still have a copy of it when Justice Samuel Alito and the other conservatives on the Supreme Court reverse it and order Du’s opinion to be nuked from orbit. There is, practically speaking, no chance this ruling survives Supreme Court review. The high court will skate over the disparate impact analysis by saying that any person, regardless of race, who crosses the southern border will experience the same over-enforcement. Or the court will reverse the ruling of racist intent by finding, as other courts have, that the 1952 Congress did cleanse the statute of racism. Or they’ll find that the government does have a legitimate and permissible interest in discriminating against southern border crossers. After all, the Supreme Court found bigotry to be okay in Trump v. Hawaii, which upheld the Muslim ban, so finding a reason to uphold Section 1326 will be child’s play for the conservatives who like a little bigotry in their immigration rulings.
And that’s if the case even makes it to the Supreme Court, which it probably won’t. Judge Du’s ruling will first be appealed to the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, and I could see it getting reversed there. It’s unlikely that other liberal judges will even want to open this can of worms. As I said, Judge Du relies on a disparate impact analysis, and I can think of at least three Supreme Court justices who might be in the mood to overturn disparate impact analysis altogether.
Judge Du is right about the bigotry inherent in our immigration laws, but conservatives like the bigotry and liberals will be afraid that trying to stop it will just piss off the conservatives.
But at least this opinion exists now. It’s out there, and future lawyers and judges can read it and maybe think differently about the core assumptions at the heart of our immigration system. A lone federal judge cannot stop 100 years of bigoted policies, but if you want to know what a truly progressive legal analysis looks like, Judge Du just spelled one out.
Now, President Biden just needs to read it and go out and nominate 100 judges who agree.
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Read the full article at the link.
Biden could start by telling Garland to “redo” the U.S. Immigration Courts with well-qualified, expert, progressive judges in the “ Chief Judge Miranda Du” image!
Different backgrounds and new, “real life” perspectives! That’s why two decades of appointments of almost exclusively prosecutors and government bureaucrats, to the exclusion of human rights experts and advocates, to the Immigration Judiciary has produced such unfair and disastrous results for humanity and American law! Similar to other “blind spots” in American law, it has also created misery and cost innocent lives.
For the most part, judges of all philosophies hate being confronted with “ugly truths” about the system they are a part of. Consequently, the impetus to sweep historical truth and logical legal reasoning under the carpet when it produces uncomfortable, unpopular, and highly controversial results is overwhelming on all sides of the judicial spectrum, with the exception of a few “brave souls” like Chief Judge Du.
One of the most obvious and disgraceful of these “dodges,” is the abject failure of the Article IIIs to confront head on the clear Fifth Amendment unconstitutionality of the Executive’s “captive Immigration Courts,” particularly as currently staffed and still operating in “Miller Lite, White Nationalist mode.”
But, courageous decisions like this will be a part of our permanent legal history and come back to haunt today’s go along to get along Federal Judges, at all levels!
Kevin Robillard and Rowaida Abdelaziz report for HuffPost:
. . . .
There are currently more than 17,000 Afghan nationals — as well as an estimated 53,000 of their family members — awaiting visa approval through the Special Immigrant Visas (SIV) program. The U.S. brought over approximately 2,300 Afghans as part of the program from January to July, and another 2,000 over the last week.
The White House says it has cut the time necessary to approve SIV visas in half, and has issued more than 5,500 between April and July. But advocates say it needs to move faster.
“They seem to be afraid. They seem to be operating out of fear that being a bit bolder on issues with refugees, asylees and migrants will somehow cost them politically,” said former Housing Secretary Julian Castro, who made improving the country’s refugee system a central part of his 2020 presidential campaign. “This is an area where there’s growing disappointment and impatience ― and the stirrings of real anger ― towards the administration.”
. . . .
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Read the full article at the link.
Julian Castro should have been given a major role by the Biden Administration on cleaning house and straightening out the human rights disaster and dysfunction left behind by Trump and Miller. But, at this point, would he really want the job?
“Floaters — How The World’s Richest Country Responds To Asylum Seekers” — Beneath the disingenuous legal blather of the 5th Circuit’s tone-deaf judges, this is the sentence that they are pronouncing on the world’s most vulnerable, without any due process or concern for human dignity. EDS NOTE: GRAPHIC CONTENT – The bodies of Salvadoran migrant Oscar Alberto Mart??nez Ram??rez and his nearly 2-year-old daughter Valeria lie on the bank of the Rio Grande in Matamoros, Mexico, Monday, June 24, 2019, after they drowned trying to cross the river to Brownsville, Texas. Martinez’ wife, Tania told Mexican authorities she watched her husband and child disappear in the strong current. (AP Photo/Julia Le Duc)
Here’s the decision denying the Administration’s request for stay in Texas v. Biden:
Although this was only a stay application, the tone of the decision left little doubt about the court’s Trumpist ideology and intention to block rational humanitarian human rights initiatives by the Administration. Not surprisingly, the 3-judge panel was all GOP appointees — two Trump, one Bush II
I wouldn’t expect any help from the Supremes. So, we’ll see whether right wing Federal Judges and GOP AGs can conduct a war on human rights and communities of color by taking over the immigration enforcement apparatus and re-instating Trump’s racist policies.
The Administration is not entirely blameless here. The extreme problems with MPP, including how it caused needless deaths, torture, kidnapping, extortion, rape, and other grotesque mistreatment for those returned, were well-documented going into the 2020 election. Indeed, Biden and Harris campaigned on a promise to reverse them!
Yet, not having a viable plan for restoring the legal asylum system and dealing humanely with new border arrivals “ready for prime time” by inauguration, and still not really having one, is problematic. Although some have “touted” the just-released asylum NPR as the “solution,” that system is not, by any stretch of the imagination, “ready for prime time” either, given the disastrous operational, personnel, “cultural, and “quality control” issues at both the Asylum Offices and EOIR, which could and should have been addressed before now and which could actually become worse if the NPR goes into effect without major internal and leadership changes at these dysfunctional agencies.
Moreover, it appears that DOJ Attorneys did a substandard job of documenting the many problems, adverse effects, and operational issues with MPP and the injustices and abuses it inflicted upon legal asylum seekers.
As opposed to the rather contrived interests of the states in furthering oppression, endorsed by the Fifth Circuit, the human interests of those seeking asylum under what was supposed to be a fair and functional legal system have fallen off the radar screen. The law still says that any individual arriving at the border, regardless of status, has a right to apply for asylum. That right, as well as the humanity of refugees and the legal and moral obligations of our nation, has been entirely abrogated by the Fifth Circuit.
In a well-functioning democracy, Congress could reform the law, bring the righty judges back under control, and restore Constitutional protections and human and civil rights, But, that would probably take a party different from today’s Dems. And, of course, with the support of the Supremes, the GOP is working furiously to suppress minority votes and insure GOP minority rule stretches long into the future.
Michelle Rindels & Riley Snyder report for The Nevada Independent:
A federal judge in Nevada has ruled that a nearly 70-year-old section of law that makes it a felony to reenter the U.S. after being deported is unconstitutional, saying it was enacted with discriminatory intent against Latinos and therefore violates the Equal Protection Clause.
Judge Miranda Du issued an order on Wednesday dismissing a case against Gustavo [Carrillo]-Lopez, who was indicted last summer for being in the U.S. in spite of being deported in 1999 and 2012. It appears to be the first time a court has made such a decision, even though the statute known as Section 1326 has been under consideration by several district courts.
“Because Carrillo-Lopez has established that Section 1326 was enacted with a discriminatory purpose and that the law has a disparate impact on Latinx persons, and the government fails to show that Section 1326 would have been enacted absent racial animus … the Court will grant the Motion,” Du wrote.
The case is a blow for the Department of Justice (DOJ), which initially filed the charge during the Trump administration — an era of hardline immigration policies — but has since switched hands to the Biden administration. Left-leaning groups have asserted that the Trump administration had “weaponized” Section 1326 and other decades-old immigration laws as part of their “zero tolerance” immigration strategy.
Julian Castro, a former Democratic presidential candidate and secretary of the Housing and Urban Development Administration, tweeted that “this law has an incredibly racist history. I doubt the Biden DOJ will want to defend it in the appellate court.”
. . . .
The order notes that the law has a disparate impact on Latinos, noting that 87 percent of people apprehended at the border in 2010 were of Mexican descent. While the federal government argued those statistics are a function of geography and Mexico’s proximity to the U.S. rather than discrimination, Du said the argument was unpersuasive.
“The federal government’s plenary power over immigration does not give it license to enact racially discriminatory statutes in violation of equal protection,” Du wrote.
. . . .
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Read the complete article at the link,
Great decision! Notable for you “liberal artists” that historical analysis of racism and eugenics in America presented by Kelly Lytle Hernández, a history professor at UCLA, helped make the record and carry the day!
Just the kind of interdisciplinary interaction that permeates judging, particularly in immigration and human rights, and argues for more liberal arts grads with backgrounds in history, the humanities, linguistics, demographics, and social sciences on the Immigration Bench and the Article IIIs.
I’ve long criticized the “ahistorical” sometimes “anti-historical” approach taken by the BIA and other Federal Courts! For example, promoting the fiction that treaties, laws, ombudpersons, and even elections magically change centuries’ old animuses and make everything “hunky dory” for long-persecuted social, political, ethnic, religious, or racial groups.
Now, if we can only get the Article IIIs to do their job and hold the entire EOIR system, as currently operating, which has fatal racial bias, fairness, impartiality, expertise, and operational problems that make it a “walking violation of due process,” unconstititional, we could be on the way to the change America needs to bring an end to the present national disgrace in our Immigration Courts which is diminishing justice for everyone in America.
Additionally, despite life tenure, most Federal Courts have been reluctant to enforce the Constitution against the many Executive and Legislative abuses in the area of immigration and human rights. So, I would be disappointed, but not surprised, if this ruling is reversed on appeal.
Nevertheless, it’s an important step in exposing racism, connecting it with immigration, establishing truth, and fighting the Executive’s unconscionably bad and often illegal performance on immigration and race! While Garland might incorrectly think that immigration and human rights are “back burner” issues, by the time the NDPA is done with him they might well be issues that consume most of his time and irreparably damage his reputation. That’s why a wise Attorney General would be “leading the bandwagon for Article I” while immediately bringing in the progressive experts necessary to re-establish due process and efficiency at EOIR.
At any rate, this is exactly the kind of “creative disruption” that needs to happen until the system wakes up and makes the necessary progressive, due process, equal justice reforms long overdue at EOIR and other parts of the immigration bureaucracy.
Anna Marie Gallagher, Esquire Executive Director CLINIC PHOTO: CLINIC website
Here’s a statement from CLINIC condemning this Judge’s decision to reinstate the misnamed “Migrant Protection Protocols,” better known as “Remain in Mexico,” or more accurately as “Let ‘Em Die In Mexico:”
A Statement From the ED: CLINIC Condemns Federal Ruling to Resume Migrant Protection Protocols
SILVER SPRING, Maryland — The following is a statement from CLINIC Executive Director Anna Gallagher:
“CLINIC staff and volunteers have accompanied and provided legal counsel to thousands of men, women and children who sought safety at our doors, only to be stranded in Mexico in inhumane conditions through MPP. They desperately waited for protection and admission to one of the richest countries in the world, in increasing danger, by design of the U.S. government.
MPP is a national shame.
Jesus said, ‘whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’ Judge Kacsmaryk’s decision is contrary to man’s law and God’s law and must be overturned. We now call on President Biden to act on his faith and once again, end this policy that is so contrary to our values and who we aspire to be.”
CLINIC advocates for humane and just immigration policy. Its network of nonprofit immigration programs — 400 organizations in 48 states and the District of Columbia — is the largest in the nation.
In case you miss the irony, think of this: At the very moment we are pleading with the international community to help extricate us from the humanitarian disaster in Afghanistan, we are illegally and arbitrarily turning away legal asylum applicants at our border, many of them women and children with claims just as compelling as those from Afghani women and girls, and returning them to dangerous areas with NO PROCESS AT ALL!
And, Judge K would like to support his GOP White Nationalist buddies in Texas and Missouri by unlawfully reimplementing “Remain in Mexico” — a much-studied, vigorously and rightfully criticized program deemed a practical, human rights, legal, and humanitarian disaster by every credible human rights organization.
CLINIC is right: “Shame!”
The above statement is, of course, not the only cogent criticism I have received at Courtside about this decision. It just happens to be the one that appeared first in my Courtside inbox, courtesy of my good friend and NDPA stalwart Anna Marie Gallagher, Executive Director of CLINIC!
As the human rights situations in Afghanistan, Haiti, and the Northern Triangle continue to unravel, the lack of a coherent, operational, legally sound, properly generous refugee and asylum program will continue to haunt the Administration;
In particular, the disgraceful failure to establish a strong, consistent, humane, and protection-oriented interpretation of gender-based asylum to protect women, who are disproportionately targeted for persecution, torture, and other violence, will cost lives of the most vulnerable and be a lasting stain on our nation. (I just listened to Peter Baker, NBC WH Correspondent, on Meet the Press, characterize Afghanistan under the Taliban as a “nation of spouse beaters!”)
The need to fix our our refugee and asylum systems immediately was obvious on January 20, 2021. Why, after 7 months it still is nowhere close to being accomplished is less obvious!
The turmoil in Afghanistan and Haiti and the ongoing human rights disasters in Latin America, all reasonably predictable, are going to increase the human and political problems flowing from a failure to take human rights seriously and to bring the practical human rights experts necessary to solve these issues constructively into the Government power structure! In the end, human rights are everyone’s rights! We ignore that at our peril!
Ironically, while protecting women from persecution and improving their lives was used as a justification by Administrations of both parties for our continuing military presence in Afghanistan, now, as the “end game” plays out in real time, it appears to have been largely reduced to a “talking point” (or a “news feature”) without any discernible plan for protecting or saving Afghan female refugees. Sadly politicos and officials from both parties seem more interested in using women’s lives as “cover” for two decades of ultimately futile presence there than with actually saving any lives now. Indeed, if we treat Afghan women refugees with the inhumane indifference we have continued to heap on female refugees seeking legal asylum at our Southern Border, their outlook is beyond grim.
“Floaters — How The World’s Richest Country Responds To Asylum Seekers” — Some Life-tenured Federal Judges abuse their privileged positions to insure that this is what “due process” will look like for asylum seekers of color! EDS NOTE: GRAPHIC CONTENT – The bodies of Salvadoran migrant Oscar Alberto Mart??nez Ram??rez and his nearly 2-year-old daughter Valeria lie on the bank of the Rio Grande in Matamoros, Mexico, Monday, June 24, 2019, after they drowned trying to cross the river to Brownsville, Texas. Martinez’ wife, Tania told Mexican authorities she watched her husband and child disappear in the strong current. (AP Photo/Julia Le Duc)
Here’s the decision from U.S. District JudgeMATTHEW J. KACSMARYK in Texas v. Biden:
Judge Kacsmaryk was appointed to the bench by Trump & McConnell in 2019. He is a former Federal prosecutor, deputy general counsel of a right wing religious group, and member of the Federalist Society. His nomination was (obviously unsuccessfully) opposed by more than 200 prominent civil rights, religious tolerance, and human rights groups.
Here’s an excerpt from their letter in opposition addressed to the Senate:
On behalf of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, a coalition of more than 200 national organizations committed to promoting and protecting the civil and human rights of all persons in the United States, I write in strong opposition to the confirmation of Matthew Kacsmaryk to be a U.S. District Judge for the Northern District of Texas.
Nominees to the federal courts must be committed to respecting the law, Constitution, and core American values of justice, fairness, and inclusivity. Mr. Kacsmaryk does not meet this standard. He is an anti-LGBT activist and culture warrior who does not respect the equal dignity of all people. His record reveals a hostility to LGBT equality and to women’s health, and he would not be able to rule fairly and impartially in cases involving those issues.
Interestingly, the letter was signed by none other than Vanita S. Gupta, then President & CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights and currently the Associate Attorney General of the U.S.
Gupta and her colleagues had Judge K “pegged” as an unqualified righty bigot then! But, with the lineup currently in place at the 5th and the Supremes, it remains to be seen whether there is any effective short-term remedy for his grotesque abuses of power and human rights.
Judicial appointments are important! Maybe it’s time for Gupta and others at DOJ to treat Immigration Judge and BIA appointments as such!
🇺🇸Due Process Forever! Better Federal Judges for a better America!
Immigration Law Professor Named Senior Counselor on Immigration Policy in Biden’s Justice Department
Monday, August 2, 2021
By Immigration Prof
Good immigration news from Washington D.C.!Immigration law professor Lucas Guttentag has been named senior counselor on immigration policy and report to the Department of Justice’s Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco. Guttantag served in the Obama administration as a senior adviser on immigration policy, including as senior counselor to the secretary of Homeland Security.Anita Kumar for Politico states that “Guttentag will not only help dismantle Trump-era policies but will coordinate Biden policy among various agencies and departments.”
Kumar writes that “[p]rior to entering the administration, Guttentag served as law professor at Stanford Law School and lecturer at Yale Law School. He launched the Immigration Policy Tracking Project in 2017 to develop and maintain a complete record of Trump administration immigration actions.
In total, Trump made more than 400 alterations to immigration policy during his time in office, according to the Migration Policy Institute, a think tank with staffers across the political spectrum that provides data and analysis on immigration policy. The Immigration Policy Tracking Project put that number closer to 1,000.”
If you are an immigrant requesting asylum or fighting deportation before the federal immigration court in San Francisco, it’s likely to take nearly three years for your case to be resolved — the average processing time, as of June, was 1,057 days.
That’s because the San Francisco court’s 26 judges are working their way through close to 76,000 cases — the third highest number of pending cases in the country, after New York and Miami. Nationwide, the backlog has grown to an unprecedented 1.3 million cases, more than twice what it was when President Donald Trump took office.
What’s at stake, says Doris Meissner, a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute in Washington DC, is the credibility of the entire immigration system — both for the individuals whose futures are on the line, and for broader public confidence.
. . . .
The epic case backlog results from a convergence of factors.
Immigration enforcement, which had increased under President Barack Obama, ballooned during the presidency of Donald Trump. Trump ended Obama-era prosecution priorities that focused on immigrants with serious criminal histories, and instead pursued deportation of any undocumented immigrant. As of last December, more than 98% of the cases in immigration court were for people whose only charge was an immigration violation, according to an analysis by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University.
Also in the past several years, a much larger share of the migrants arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border are people requesting asylum, rather than trying to evade border authorities to come work or join family in the U.S. And if migrants can establish a “credible fear” of persecution in a screening interview with an asylum officer, they can’t be quickly removed from the country. Instead, their cases go straight into the immigration court system.
But that court system is chronically underfunded, with not enough judges or support staff, according to a 2019 report by the American Bar Association. While the Trump administration hired more judges and imposed a case completion quota on judges meant to speed up their work, neither made a dent in the backlog. Meanwhile the ABA report found that hiring practices became politicized and the administration’s policies threatened due process.
On top of all of that came the COVID-19 pandemic, which led to months of closed courts, suspended hearings and delayed processing.
While many state and federal courts moved quickly to conduct hearings over video conference calls, the Executive Office of Immigration Review, as the immigration court system is known, was behind the curve, according to longtime San Francisco immigration judge, Dana Leigh Marks, who is the executive vice president of the National Association of Immigration Judges.
“What the pandemic and quarantine restrictions revealed is just how abysmally prepared EOIR has been from the technology aspect,” said Marks, speaking in her role with the NAIJ, the judge’s union. “And we do not have universal electronic filing… so there’s roughly a million cases or more that are still paper-based. And that really makes hearings from a judge’s home much more problematic.”
. . . .
Advocates for asylum seekers are also looking forward to seeing new regulations from the Biden administration in another area: establishing clear eligibility standards for asylum so as to prevent future instances where an attorney general can override decades of case law, as Sessions did in the case of a Salvadoran woman fleeing domestic violence, known as the Matter of A-B-.
Karen Musalo, director of the Center on Gender and Refugee Studies at UC Hastings in San Francisco, said she was relieved when Garland reversed that ruling in June, but she called that just a first step in restoring fairness to the asylum system.
“What is much more important is asylum regulations that specifically look at aligning U.S. law with international norms,” she said. “We need to get the law back on track.”
‘What is much more important is asylum regulations that specifically look at aligning U.S. law with international norms. We need to get the law back on track.’Karen Musalo, Center on Gender and Refugee Studies at UC Hastings
That regulation is being drafted jointly by the departments of Justice and Homeland Security and is expected by late October, she said.
Musalo also called on the Biden administration to improve training and oversight for immigration judges, who are appointed to the bench by the U.S. attorney general. The fact that asylum grant rates vary wildly between judges suggests that rulings can be influenced by political leanings more than an impartial application of the law, she said.
“You could have very good rules and laws, but if you don’t have fair, unbiased, competent, professional individuals applying the rules in the law, you don’t solve the problems,” she said. “How can you have a fair game when the referee is unfair?”
. . . .
Legal organizations including the American Bar Association, the American Immigration Lawyers Association and NAIJ, the judges’ union, have long called on Congress to overhaul the immigration courts by taking them out of the Department of Justice altogether. And this summer there’s a move to do just that.
Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-San Jose, the chair of the House immigration subcommittee, will soon introduce a bill to make the immigration court system a so-called Article I court, akin to federal tax court or bankruptcy court. Staff involved in drafting the bill say the new system would better protect due process of law and would be shielded from political pressure from presidents, be they Democratic or Republican.
Some observers, including Meissner and Musalo, say such a change is needed but they aren’t convinced the bill could win enough support to pass.
But Marks, the immigration judge, says the current dysfunction shows how badly the immigration courts are compromised and how urgently they need independence from the Department of Justice.
“It’s an uncomfortable and inappropriate placement for a neutral court system. And that’s the inherent structural flaw that we need Congress to fix,” she said. “I really feel like it is an idea whose time has come… now.”
*********************
You can read Tyche’s complete article at the link.
With deep experience in advocacy, Government, academics, senior management, and scholarship, Lucas is definitely the person for this job! A proven problem solver, to be sure! Many congrats, Lucas! Your appointment is like a breath of fresh air at what has been a mostly “stale show” at Justice so far!
Professor Karen Musalo Director, Center for Gender & Refugee Studies, Hastings Law
Nevertheless, as ProfessorKaren Musalo cogently points out, without better judges and leaders at EOIR — high caliber, proven progressive experts “in theGuttentag-Musalo mold,” — any favorable regulatory or even legislative changes willlikely founder. As currently staffed and led, EOIR simply lacks the expertise, independence, moral/intellectual leadership, courage, and “judicial firepower” to achieve a progressive, practical, due-process-compliant immigration and human rights system. Due process, fundamental fairness, and a correct application of U.S. asylum law — one that honors Cardoza-Fonseca and Mogharrabi — can only be realized by replacing “Club Denial @ EOIR” — actively encouraged and promoted by Sessions and Barr, with competent, expert, progressive judges committed to fair and humane treatment of asylum seekers and other migrants under law.
Simply adding more judges to an incredibly broken system, without correcting the legal, personnel, and judicial administration issues that led to this massive (largely self-created) dysfunction will not solve the problem! Lucas knows this as well as anyone! So does Judge Dana Marks, who actually litigated and won the landmark “well-founded fear” case INS v. Cardoza-Fonseca before the Supremes!
Hon. Dana Leigh Marks U.S. Immigration Judge San Francisco Immigration Court Past President, National Association of Immigration Judges
But even with experts like Lucas at DOJ, Ur Jaddou, John Trasvina, and Judge Ashley Tabaddor in place at DHS, it’s going to take a huge additional infusion of progressive expertise at EOIR, DHS, HHS, and throughout Government to get immigration and refugee policy under control.
GOP Administrations have proved willing to make the bold, often-criticized personnel and policy moves necessary to carry out a nativist, restrictionist, anti-immigrant agenda. Their “response” to criticism has basically been: “We’re in power, you’re not! So, go pound sand!”
Will the Biden Administration “break the Dem mold” and be bold and visionary enough to make the available, necessary, yet potentially controversial, moves to restore and improve due process and efficiency to the Government immigration bureaucracy? Will Lucas finally be able to get Team Garland to see and realize the cosmic importance of developing a progressive Immigration Judiciary: One that will eventually provide the “Article III ready” judicial candidates who will bring balance and quality to the Article III system perverted by four years of Trump-McConnell extremest right-wing, ideological, far out of the mainstream, judicial picks? Contrary to the timid, ineffective, ultimately destructive Obama Administration approach, EOIR is “a boat that needs to be rocked” — big time!
It’s an ambitious task to be sure. But, those with the vision and courage to accomplish it might well go down in history as the saviors ofAmerican democracy. It’s that important!
From “Letters From An American:”
