14th Amendment – Page 88 – immigrationcourtside.com

THE NDPA STRIKES BACK: ACLU Sues In DC To End The Regime’s Bogus “Safe Third Country” Abuse Of Human Rights & The Rule Of Law! — Regime’s Actions Could Be Characterized As “Crimes Against Humanity!”

https://apple.news/ALbDFozeyQemj7zT-zO0VUA

Camilo Montoya-Galvez reports for CBS News:

ACLU files lawsuit to halt Trump policy of sending asylum-seekers to Guatemala

Washington — The American Civil Liberties Union on Wednesday mounted the first legal challenge against the Trump administration’s policy of sending migrants who seek protection at the U.S.-Mexico border to Guatemala, a country with a skeletal asylum regime that has seen an exodus of hundreds of thousands of its own citizens in the past two years because of extreme poverty and endemic violence.

The lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., seeks to halt the implementation of a controversial asylum agreement with the Guatemalan government. Under the deal forged last summer, the U.S. has sent more than 150 asylum-seekers from Honduras and El Salvador to Guatemala, denying them access to America’s asylum system and requiring them to choose between seeking refuge in the Central American country or returning home.

The agreement, the ACLU said in its 54-page complaint, amounts to “a deadly game of musical chairs that leaves many desperate asylum-seekers without a safe haven, in violation of U.S. and international law.”

“If this rule remains in effect, it means that the U.S. can completely wash their hands of any responsibility to provide safe haven for people fleeing persecution,” Lee Gelernt, the ACLU’s top immigration litigator, told CBS News. “It would end asylum at the southern border, plain and simple.”

A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security told CBS News that while it cannot comment on litigation, “the U.S. Government and the Government of Guatemala remain committed to the asylum cooperative agreement and stand behind the integrity of the program.”

For lead plaintiff, returning home isn’t an option

As of last week, 158 Honduran and Salvadoran migrants have been rerouted by the U.S. to Guatemala, including dozens of families and at least 43 children, according to the Guatemalan migration institute. Nine people initially chose to request protection in Guatemala, but five of them have since abandoned their claims, the institute said. The rest have asked for help returning to their home countries.

The lead plaintiff in the ACLU’s lawsuit is a gay man from El Salvador who was sent by the U.S. to Guatemala after asking for asylum at the southern border. The man, identified only by the initials U.T., says he was sexually abused as a child, disowned by his family because of his sexuality and threatened by a gang member who solicited him for sex in El Salvador.

When he arrived at the U.S.-Mexico border, he was told he would be sent to Guatemala. He told Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officials, who make the initial determination about whether migrants should be subject to the U.S.-Guatemala deal, that he feared being sent to Guatemala. His concerns fell on deaf ears.

He was then referred for an interview with an asylum officer and again expressed fear of persecution in Guatemala. Nonetheless, he was deported to the country shortly afterward.

During these types of interviews, migrants must affirmatively say they fear being sent to Guatemala. Even if they do, they have to meet a fear of persecution threshold that is much higher than that of the typical “credible fear” interviews most asylum-seekers at the southern border are subject to.

The ACLU says the man applied for asylum once in Guatemala, but officials there advised him to seek protection in Mexico instead, since Guatemala is “unsafe for gay people.” The State Department warns of “societal discrimination” and police abuse against LGBTI people in Guatemala.

Returning to El Salvador is not an option for the asylum-seeker, who is currently in Mexico, since he “fears that he will be attacked or killed for his sexual orientation if he tries to live openly as a gay man,” according to the ACLU.

“A way for the U.S. to simply pass the buck”

There are five other individual plaintiffs in the ACLU’s lawsuit, including a woman and two families who were sent to Guatemala by the U.S. The Tahirih Justice Center and Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center, two organizations that provide legal services to asylum-seekers, are also named as plaintiffs in the lawsuit — which the National Immigrant Justice Center, Center for Gender & Refugee Studies and Human Rights First joined the ACLU in filing.

The group is asking the court to prohibit officials from enforcing a regulation the administration unveiled in November to implement the Guatemala deal and similar agreements that the U.S. brokered with Honduras and El Salvador which have not yet been implemented. The suit also challenges a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) guidance document for asylum officers carrying out the agreement.

The ACLU alleged that both measures violate U.S. statutes designed to prevent officials from sending asylum-seekers to places where they may face persecution and that provide legal safeguards for migrants the government seeks to deport quickly. The group also said the policy violates administrative law, since the administration did not give the public a chance to comment on it and failed to provide “reasoned explanations” for dramatically changing the asylum system at the southern border.

The administration maintains that its agreements with Guatemala and the other countries in Central America’s Northern Triangle will foster the “distribution” of asylum claims among nations in the region and provide protection to migrants “closer to home.” But the ACLU says the so-called “Asylum Cooperative Agreements” represent a dramatic departure from the “safe third country” provision in U.S. law that the administration is using to defend their legality.

In 1996, President Bill Clinton signed into law an act that codified the “safe third country” concept, allowing the U.S. to enter into bilateral or multilateral agreements to send asylum-seekers to third countries, as long as the U.S. government made sure those asylum-seekers would not face persecution based on a protected ground under U.S. asylum law and would have access to a “full and fair” process to request protection in those nations.

Gelernt and his group believe the accords with Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras violate this law because the countries do not have fully functioning asylum regimes, unlike Canada — the only nation which has an official “safe third country” agreement with the U.S.

“There is no way the administration can plausibly claim that Guatemala can provide a safe, fair and full asylum process. This administration has simply thumbed their nose at Congress,” Gelernt said, noting that Canada, a developed country with a robust asylum system, is a safe place for refugees.

“This is not a way to provide people with a fair asylum process but a way for the U.S. to simply pass the buck,” he added.

Guatemala has experienced moderate economic growth since the end of a bloody civil war in the 1990s, but it continues to grapple with high homicides rates, drug trafficking, political instability and widespread poverty, especially among its large indigenous communities in the Western highlands of the country. Only about 262 migrants sought refuge in Guatemala in 2018, according to the United Nations.

The ACLU also noted in its lawsuit that the Trump administration hasn’t publicly revealed any designations certifying that the Northern Triangle countries have the capacity to take in migrants rerouted there by the U.S., despite a requirement that such a certification be included in the government regulation to enforce the asylum agreements.

Sweeping implications for asylum-seekers

All three agreements the U.S. made last year suggest that they could grant the U.S. the power to reroute most asylum-seekers from any country in the world, barring a few exceptions, like unaccompanied children, to Central America. The ACLU underscored the sweeping nature of the deals in its suit, saying that in practice, the U.S. could send asylum-seekers from Afghanistan to one of the Northern Triangle countries, even if they did not travel through there to get to the U.S. southern border.

The administration believes it can include “all populations” in the agreements, and it recently announced it was planning to send Mexican asylum-seekers to Guatemala. The move sparked scathing criticism at home and abroad, with Mexico’s government objecting to the proposal.

Unlike migrants from Honduras and El Salvador, Mexican asylum-seekers do not travel through Guatemalan territory to reach the U.S.-Mexico border. A plan to subject Mexicans to the U.S.-Guatemala accord could, in practice, lead to the U.S. flying a Mexican asylum-seeker from Tijuana, San Diego’s neighboring city, some 1,500 miles away, asking her to seek protection in Guatemala.

How Guatemala continues to implement its “Asylum Cooperative Agreement” with the Trump administration will now be decided by conservative government of President Alejandro Giammattei, who took office on Tuesday.

The asylum agreements with countries in Central America are part of a series of policies the administration rolled out over the past year to restrict asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border. These also include a sweeping rule that renders most non-Mexican migrants ineligible for asylum and the Migrant Protection Protocols program, which has required more than 57,000 asylum-seekers from Central America to wait in dangerous Mexican border cities for the duration of their U.S. immigration proceedings.

First published on January 15, 2020 / 4:19 PM

© 2020 CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved.

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

The bogus “Safe Third Country Agreements” with Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras, clearly unsafe countries without functioning asylum systems, in violation of U.S. and international laws, are daunting acts of malicious fraud. This fraud is undertaken, in the open, by a neo-fascist regime that has contempt for humanity and human rights, believes itself above the law, and has no fear of being held accountable by the Federal Courts or Congress (notwithstanding Trump’s impeachment).

The regime’s unlawful fraudulent actions are defended in court by DOJ lawyers who believe the obligation of truthfulness before tribunals and other ethical requirements simply don’t apply to them. And, that’s probably with good reason.

The Trump regime has been peddling lies, false narratives, and bad faith legal arguments to the Federal Courts, all the way up to the Supremes, for nearly three years now with no consequences to the lawyers or their political clients. Indeed, Wilbur Ross lied under oath in the “Census Case,” but continues to be the Secretary of Commerce; to my knowledge, the Government lawyers who tried to present, defend, and rationalize. Ross’s census fraud are still on the payroll. A few Supremes even voted to sweep it all under the rug. It took an unusual display of backbone by Chief Justice Roberts to prevent the fraud from being perpetrated on American voters, particularly targeting voters of color.

Private lawyers who conducted themselves in a similar manner would likely be facing state disciplinary proceedings. A private executive who lied under oath like Ross probably would have been referred for a perjury prosecution or held in contempt of court.

But, Federal Judges, who are used to giving U.S. government lawyers pretty much a “free pass,” don’t seem to “get” that they are now dealing with a willfully corrupt, thoroughly dishonest, neo-fascist regime, not “just another Administration.”

When the laws, rules, and our Constitution don‘t apply to our Government, and nobody is held accountable for outrageous official wrongdoing (arguably “crimes against humanity” in the “Safe Third Country Fraud”) we all lose!

Due Process Forever! Complicity In The Face Of Tyranny, Never!

PWS

01-16-20

BAD NEWS FOR TEX. GOV. “GREG THE BIGOT” ABBOTT: U.S. District Judge Blocks Trump’s Illegal Anti-Refugee Order — But, Will Often Complicit Appellate Courts Uphold The Rule Of Law Or “Toady Up” To The Trump Regime’s White Nationalist Agenda?

Michelle Hackman
Immigration Reporter
Wall Street Journal

https://www.wsj.com/articles/federal-judge-blocks-trump-executive-order-on-refugees-11579108138?emailToken=575893ec6fe4b185f88708c59e175ef6CwUCcHqk/fEL6ReRFZZtuTxDwMXs7aS/qFBj8SMDh/g7NCEloF0znbPD48wkR6yiC0BZsPXe7V5mlXkbIptEUFTrxSHC0xOnxMYTwzWXscuGXaA/C7v5DN5I0vAE+Hef&reflink=article_email_share

Brent Kendall and Michelle Hackman report for the WSJ:

A federal judge in Maryland blocked President Trump’s executive order giving state and local governments the ability to say no to having refugees placed in their communities.

U.S. District Judge Peter J. Messitte issued a preliminary injunction Wednesday that barred the administration from implementing the president’s order. He said refugee-resettlement organizations that sued to challenge the policy “are clearly likely to succeed in showing, that, by giving states and local governments veto power over the resettlement of refugees within their borders, the order is unlawful.”

Giving states the power to determine whether refugees will be received “flies in the face of clear congressional intent,” Judge Messitte, a Clinton appointee, said in the opinion.

. . . .

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

Those with WSJ access can read the complete article at the above link.

This “victory” might be little more than symbolic for refugee advocates. In an unprecedented action, the Trump Administration has slowed the flow of legal refugees to a trickle and could simply use the “bureaucratic veto” to prevent any more from coming, as they have gotten away with in other areas.

Certainly, this should give lie to the Trump Administration’s inevitable argument to Federal Appeals Courts that this is an “emergency” requiring them to intervene prior to the completion of District Court proceedings. But, up until now, neither law nor reality has been much of a factor when it comes to the Supremes, and sometimes the Circuits, going “belly up” and allowing the regime to run roughshod over human lives and the rule of law in the immigration and refugee areas.

Chief Justice Roberts wonders why the judiciary is treated with contempt by the regime and is losing respect from the large majority of the legal community not subservient to Trump. The answer is all too often pretty obvious.

Per MKL, Jr.: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” It’s an important message that all too many Federal Judges and other (supposedly responsible) public officials seem to have forgotten in the “Age of Trump” and his corrupt and overtly White Nationalist regime.

PWS

01-15-20

WHEN ARTICLE III COURTS FAIL: U.S. “Orbits” Refugee Families To Dangerous Chaos In Guatemala Under Clearly Fraudulent “Safe Third Country” Arrangements As Feckless U.S. Courts Fail To Enforce Constitutional Due Process & U.S. Asylum Laws In Face Of Trump Regime’s Contemptuous Scofflaw Conduct!

yhttps://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/the-us-is-putting-asylum-seekers-on-planes-to-guatemala–often-without-telling-them-where-theyre-going/2020/01/13/0f89a93a-3576-11ea-a1ff-c48c1d59a4a1_story.html

Kevin Sieff reports from Guatemala for WashPost:

By

Kevin Sieff

Jan. 14, 2020 at 4:21 p.m. EST

GUATEMALA CITY — The chartered U.S. government flights land here every day or two, depositing Honduran and Salvadoran asylum seekers from the U.S. border. Many arrive with the same question: “Where are we?”

For the first time ever, the United States is shipping asylum seekers who arrive at its border to a “safe third country” to seek refuge there. The Trump administration hopes the program will serve as a model for others in the region.

But during its first weeks, asylum seekers and human rights advocates say, migrants have been put on planes without being told where they were headed, and left here without being given basic instruction about what to do next.

When the migrants land in Guatemala City, they receive little information about what it means to apply for asylum in one of the hemisphere’s poorest countries. Those who don’t immediately apply are told that they must leave the country in 72 hours. The form is labeled “Voluntary Return.”

“In the U.S., the agents told us our cases would be transferred, but they didn’t say where. Then they lined us up to get on the plane,” said a woman named Marta, 43, from Honduras. She sat in a migrant shelter here with her 17-year-old son, who nursed a gunshot wound in his left cheek — the work, both say, of a Honduran faction of the MS-13 gang.

“When we looked out the window, we were here,” she said. “We thought, ‘Where are we? What are we supposed to do now?’ ”

After the volcano, indigenous Guatemalans search for safer ground — in Guatemala, or the United States

Human rights organizations in Guatemala say they have recorded dozens of cases of asylum seekers who were misled by U.S. officials into boarding flights, and who were not informed of their asylum rights upon arrival. Of the 143 Hondurans and Salvadorans sent to Guatemala since the program began last month, only five have applied for asylum, according to the country’s migration agency.

“Safe third country” is one of the Trump administration’s most dramatic initiatives to curb migration — an effort to remake the U.S. asylum system. President Trump has called it “terrific for [Guatemala] and terrific for us.”

But an Asylum Cooperation Agreement is bringing migrants to a country that is unable to provide economic and physical security for its own citizens — many of whom are themselves trying to migrate. In fiscal 2019, Guatemala was the largest source of migrants detained at the U.S. border, at more than 264,000. The country has only a skeletal asylum program, with fewer than a dozen asylum officers.

Trump wants border-bound asylum seekers to find refuge in Guatemala instead. Guatemala isn’t ready.

As the deal was negotiated, it drew concerns from the United Nations and human rights organizations. But its implementation, advocates say, has been worse than they feared.

“It’s a total disaster,” said Thelma Shau, who has observed the arrival of asylum seekers at La Aurora International Airport in her role overseeing migration issues for Guatemala’s human rights ombudsman.

“They arrive here without being told that Guatemala is their destination,” she said. “They are asked, ‘Do you want refuge here or do you want to leave?’ And they have literally minutes to decide without knowing anything about what that means.”

President Trump and first lady Melania Trump meet in the Oval Office last month with then-President Jimmy Morales of Guatemala. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

The Guatemalan government says that it explains asylum options and that migrants are simply choosing to leave voluntarily.

“Central American people are given comprehensive attention when they arrive in the country, and respect for their human rights is a priority,” said Alejandra Mena, a spokeswoman for Guatemala’s migration agency. “The information provided is complete for them to make a decision.”

In Guatemala, lenders that were supported by USAID and the World Bank are now funding illegal migration.

The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to requests for comment. The United States has signed similar “safe third country” agreements with El Salvador and Honduras, but they have not yet been implemented. In recent days, Trump administration officials have said they are considering sending Mexican asylum seekers to Guatemala to seek refuge.

Human rights groups in Guatemala that have observed the process say migrants here are not given key information about their options — such as what asylum in Guatemala entails and where they would stay while their claims are being processed. Many migrants are aware that Guatemala suffers from the same gang violence and extortion that forced them from their home countries.

Migrants from Guatemala disembark from a raft in Ciudad Hidalgo, Mexico, in June. (Rebecca Blackwell/Associated Press)

Paula Arana observed the orientation as child protection liaison for the human rights ombudsman.

“It’s clear that the government is not providing enough information for asylum seekers to make a decision, especially in the three minutes they are given,” she said. “Instead, they are being pushed out of the country.”

The United States had suggested that it would begin implementing the agreement by sending single men to Guatemala. But less than a month after it began, families with young children are arriving on the charter flights. Last week, Arana said, a 2-year-old arrived with flulike symptoms.

On Thursday, a man named Jorge, 35, his wife and two daughters, ages 11 and 15, landed here. A day later, they were clustered together at the Casa del Migrante, a shelter in Guatemala City where government officials took them in a bus. They had been given the papers with 72 hours’ notice to leave Guatemala, and couldn’t figure out what to do.

The family had fled multiple threats from gangs in Honduras, which started with an interpersonal dispute between Jorge’s wife and one of the gang’s leaders. Jorge was certain that going back would mean certain death. Like Marta, Jorge did not want his last name to be published out of fear for his family’s safety.

“We’re thinking about our options. We know we can’t stay here. What would I do? Where would we stay?” he said. “Maybe we need to try to cross to the United States again.”

In western Guatemala, cultivating coffee was once a way out of poverty. As prices fall, growers are abandoning their farms for the United States.

The Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees is not participating in the program. But officials say they’re aware of problems with its implementation.

“UNHCR has a number of concerns regarding the Asylum Cooperation Agreement and its implementation,” said Sibylla Brodzinsky, UNHCR’s regional spokeswoman for Central America and Mexico. “We have expressed these concerns to the relevant U.S. and Guatemalan authorities.”

Human rights advocates who have interviewed the asylum seekers, known locally as “transferidos,” say many have decided that their best option is to migrate again to the United States. Smugglers often offer their customers three chances to make it across the border.

Migrants at the Casa del Migrante described spending a week in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody in the United States, where they had intended to make their asylum claims. Many carried binders full of evidence they assumed would bolster their cases. On her phone, Marta saved avideo of her son being tortured by MS-13 gang members.

But in their brief conversations with U.S. immigration officials, they were told they would not be given a chance to apply for asylum in the United States.

“We had all this information to show them,” Marta said, leafing through photos of her son’s scars and Honduran court documents. “They said, ‘That’s not going to help you here.’ ”

This school aims to keep young Guatemalans from migrating. They don’t know it’s funded by the U.S. government.

In interviews with The Washington Post, some migrants said they were told vaguely that their cases were being “transferred.” Others were told they were going to be returned to their countries of origin.

“One agent told me, ‘You’re going back to Honduras,’ ” Marta said. But then they arrived in Guatemala City.

“When we looked out the window, we just assumed it was a stop,” her son said.

Marta thought Guatemala might be even more dangerous. They had no connection to the country and nowhere to stay beyond their first few days. When she left the migrant shelter to buy food Friday morning, she said, she stumbled upon a crime scene with a dead body a few blocks away.

During their nine-day detention at an ICE facility in Texas, she said, the family shared a cell with a Guatemalan family that was fleeing violence perpetrated by a different MS-13 group based here.

Agronomy students, some hooded, block a street outside a Guatemala City hotel before lawmakers voted on the deal that made Guatemala a “safe third country” for migrants seeking asylum in the United States. (Oliver De Ros/Associated Press)

“Why would they send us to a country where the same gangs are operating?” she asked.

In the absence of a thorough explanation of their asylum rights in Guatemala, El Refugio de la Niñez is offering a short tutorial to the asylum seekers. So far, 45 have attended.

“The Guatemalan government is completely absent in this whole process,” said Leonel Dubon, the director of the U.N.-funded center. “It sends a clear message. The government isn’t here to offer shelter, it’s here to push people out as quickly as possible.”

The Trump administration negotiated the “safe third country” agreement last year with lame-duck Guatemalan President Jimmy Morales.

As Guatemala pursues war criminals, a dark secret emerges: Some suspects are living quiet lives in the U.S.

Guatemala’s constitutional court initially blocked the deal. Then Trump threatened tariffs on the country and taxes on remittances sent home by Guatemalans living in the United States. It was eventually signed in July.

The new Guatemalan president, Alejandro Giammattei, was sworn in Tuesday. He has raised concerns about the agreement, saying he hadn’t been briefed on its details.

At the signing ceremony, Trump said it would “provide safety for legitimate asylum seekers, and stop asylum fraud and abuses [of the] system.”

U.S. asylum officers do not vet the cases of migrants before they are sent to Guatemala.

In her brief conversations with U.S. immigration agents, Marta tried to get them to look at her binder full of documents and photos.

“They weren’t interested,” she said. “They just kept saying that your case will be transferred to an institution that can handle it.”

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

Kevin writes about a tragically absurd situation that seems to have fallen “below the radar screen” of public outrage or even discourse. This is wrong! Most days I can’t believe that the county that I proudly served for more than 35 years is engaging in this type of abusive behavior that would be below the level of even some Third World dictatorships.

And, it isn’t just “occasional abuse” — it’s systemized, institutionalized abuse and dehumanization on a global and regular basis — all approved or de facto enabled by feckless and spineless Federal Appellate Courts, all the way up to the Supremes! These are folks who should know better and really have no other meaningful function in our “separation of powers” system other than to protect our individual rights. Authoritarian governments and dictators hardly need “courts” to enforce their will, even if some find it useful to “go through the motions” of creating and employing complicit “judges.” As one of my Round Table colleagues succinctly put it “there appears to be no bottom!”

Clearly, the “Safe Third Country” exception was never intended by Congress, nor does the statutory language permit it, to be used to “orbit” asylum applicants to some of the most dangerous refugee sending countries in the world with thoroughly corrupt governments and non-existent asylum systems. So, why does the Trump regime have confidence that it can and will get away with these atrocities? Because they believe, correctly so far, that the Article III Federal Courts, many of them now stacked with Trump’s hand-selected “toady judges,” are afraid to stand up to tyranny and protect the rights of desperate, mostly brown-skinned, asylum seekers.

Obviously, from an institutional standpoint, the Article III Courts are saying:

“Who cares what happens to a bunch of brown-skinned foreigners. Let ‘em die, rot, or be tortured. Human rights, due process, and human dignity simply don’t matter when they don’t affect us personally, financially, or socially. That’s particularly true because the results of our abuses are taking place, thankfully, in foreign nations: out of sight, out of mind. Not our problem.”

Apparently, many Americans agree with this immoral and illegal approach. Otherwise, the “black robed, life tenured ones” would be pariahs in their communities, churches, and social interactions. They wouldn’t be offered those cushy teaching positions at law schools or a chance to expound before public audiences.

But, not speaking out against bad judges and not insisting on integrity and courage in the Article III courts could ultimately prove fatal for all of our individual rights. Judges who use their privileged positions to turn a blind eye to the oppression of others, particularly the most vulnerable humans among us, and the catastrophic failure of the rule of law and Due Process in the U.S. immigration system can hardly be expected to stand up for the individual rights of any of us against Government oppression.

After all, why should an exulted Federal Appellate Judge or a Supreme Court Justice care about what happens to you, unless your blood is about to spatter his or her pristine black robe? Many of those supportive of or complicit in Trump’s tyranny will personally experience the costs of a feckless Federal Judiciary when their “turn in the barrel” comes. And, the Trump regime’s list of those who’s “lives and rights don’t matter” is very, very long and continually expanding.

All I can say now is that some day, the full truth about what happens to those unlawfully and immorally turned away at our borders will “out.” Then, many Articles III judges will try to disingenuously protect their reputations by saying, similar to many judges of the Third Reich, “Gee, who knew,” or “I was powerless,” or “It was a political problem beyond our limited jurisdiction.”

My charge to the New Due Process Army: Don’t let the complicit judges get away with it in the “Court of History.” You see, know, and experience first-hand every day the results of Article III judicial complicity. Don’t ever forget what those judges have done and continue to do to human lives from their protected and “willfully clueless” ivory towers! Ultimately, you aren’t as powerless as the “complicit ones” think you are!

Due Process Forever; Feckless, Complicit, Immoral Federal Judges Never!

PWS

01-14-20

US DISTRICT JUDGE DANA SABRAW REJECTS ACLU CLAIM THAT DHS HAS RETURNED TO POLICY OF “SYSTEMATICALLY SEPARATING” FAMILIES AT BORDER

Mica Rosenberg
National Immigration Reporter, Reuters

Kanishka Singh
Political News Journalist
Reuters

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-immigration-children/judge-rules-in-favor-of-trump-administration-in-family-separation-case-idUSKBN1ZD1LY?il=0

Judge rules in favor of Trump administration in family separation case

(Reuters) – A U.S. federal judge has ruled that the Trump administration’s ongoing separations of families at the U.S.-Mexico border based on parents’ criminal history or health exclusions are being carried out with proper discretion.

Mexican asylum seekers camping near the Paso del Norte international border crossing bridge while waiting to apply for asylum to the U.S. are evicted by the local government, who will move them to a local shelter, in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico January 7, 2020. REUTERS/Jose Luis Gonzalez

The ruling, by U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw in San Diego, California, on Monday, was a rare victory for the government in a case that has been ongoing since 2018.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) first brought the case over President Donald Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy of criminally prosecuting all border crossers, which led to the separation of hundreds of families and sparked national outrage. Sabraw had ordered the administration to find and reunite separated families.

Trump officially halted the practice with an executive order on June 20, 2018. But the ACLU claimed in court that since then, the government has continued the practice and separated more than 1,000 families in violation of Sabraw’s order.

The government has said it separates families when it suspects the parent has a criminal record, a communicable disease, or when there are questions about the relationship between the adult and the migrant child. It claimed its current practice is no different than prior administrations.

The rights group argued, however, that the administration was taking children from parents when they had only minor infractions like traffic violations or previous illegal border crossings.

Sabraw found government officials were “generally exercising their discretion to separate families at the border” in a manner consistent with migrants’ “rights to family integrity and the Court’s orders.”

The judge added there was no evidence before the court that the government has “returned to systematically separating families at the border.”

Sabraw did say that the government should use its rapid DNA testing technology to confirm parentage and not separate families based on “subjective concerns” alone.

The ACLU highlighted that part of the ruling in a statement: “The court strongly reaffirmed that the Trump administration bears the burden if it attempts to separate families based on an accusation that the adult is not the child’s parent,” ACLU attorney Lee Gelernt said.

The group said it was considering its next move in the case.

The U.S. Department of Justice did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Reporting by Kanishka Singh in Bengaluru and Mica Rosenberg in New York; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Matthew Lewis

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

While most news commentators to date have viewed this as a “victory” for the Trump Administration,” Judge Sabraw did reaffirm the principles of his original injunction that had forced a change in Government policy. He did, however, reject the ACLU’s request for expanded injunctive relief, except for timely DNA testing. He found no evidence that the DHS had failed to comply with the terms of the prior injunction on a systemic basis.

PWS

01-14-20

ADOLFO FLORES @ BUZZFEED: More On The EOIR “Tent Court” Farce!

See below Buzzfeed’s latest story about tent court access.

Immigration “Tent Courts” Aren’t Allowing Full Public Access, Attorneys Say

Observers and reporters can’t watch what some consider to be the most important part of an immigration proceeding.

Adolfo FloresBuzzFeed News Reporter

Posted on January 13, 2020, at 4:23 p.m. ET

The Trump administration recently agreed to open its “tent courts,” makeshift tribunals where immigrants made to wait in Mexico attend hearings, but lawyers and legal observers say the set up still fails to give the public full access.

Attorneys and advocates said the government is still keeping the public out of what some consider to be the most important part of immigration court proceedings by using judges located inside a Fort Worth, Texas, facility that is closed to the public. The hearings are where immigrants get the opportunity to present arguments and evidence as to why they should be allowed to stay in the US.

Judges at the Fort Worth Immigration Adjudication Center, which the public has no access to, are overseeing the individual merits hearings via video that’s beamed into “tent courts” in Brownsville, Texas. At the same time, the public has also been barred from attending the hearings in person at the “tent court,” effectively closing off public access.

“It’s highly problematic,” said Laura Lynch, senior policy counsel at the American Immigration Lawyers Association. “Using these adjudication centers and judges is clearly intentional. The agency is trying to operate these cases in secret.”

The facilities in Falls Church, Virginia, and Fort Worth were created by the Justice Department’s Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR), which oversees the nation’s immigration courts, as a way to reduce its growing case backlog.

Denying public access is especially concerning because most immigrants in “Remain in Mexico,” formally known as the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), are not represented by an attorney, Lynch said. An analysis of 56,004 MPP hearings found that only 4% of immigrants are represented by a lawyer, the rest are having to make their case on their own.

“Many immigrants are walking into these tent courts unrepresented,” Lynch said. “And there’s no way to observe them.”

EOIR refused to confirm whether judges at the adjudication center were listening to merits hearings in Brownsville. But attorneys with clients at the Brownsville “tent court” confirmed to BuzzFeed News that they’ve had cases before judges at the Fort Worth adjudication center and have been rescheduled to judges there in the future.

“All immigration judges hear all case types. Due to pending litigation, we have no further comment,” said Kathryn Mattingly, a spokesperson for EOIR.

The Department of Homeland Security and Customs and Border Protection did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

In September, DHS opened two temporary court facilities along the Texas border, one in Brownsville and another in Laredo for immigrants in the “Remain in Mexico” program. Judges in brick and mortar courts throughout the US, officials said, would hear their cases and make rulings via video.

When the “tent courts” started their first hearings, they were immediately criticized for its lack of transparency because reporters, legal observers, and the public couldn’t attend hearings from inside.

Instead, DHS and EOIR said the public could attend the hearings by going to the courtroom where the immigration judges, who would be video conferenced into the “tent courts,” were physically at. But that’s not possible when immigration judges hear merits hearings from adjudication centers closed to the public.

In general, immigration courts are open to the public, although according to the Justice Department, immigrants can request that merits hearings be closed.

At the Brownsville “tent courts,” however, merits hearings are closed automatically by design, said Andrew Udelsman, a fellow in the Texas Civil Rights Project’s racial and economic justice program.

“The case right now appears to be a blanket rule that the public has no access to MPP merits proceedings and that is illegal,” Udelsman told BuzzFeed News. “There is a First Amendment right of public access to court proceedings. That right is being violated by this blanket denial of access to merit proceedings.”

Demonstators, all part of a grassroots group called Witness at the Border supported by ACLU Texas and Children’s Defense Fund Texas, gather to protest outside the Brownsville “tent courts.”

Last week, Reynaldo Leaños Jr., a reporter with Texas Public Radio, tried to attend a merits hearing at the Brownsville “tent court” after a Cuban asylum-seeker invited him to attend. Yet private security contracted by the government told Leaños no one was allowed into the hearings.

Asked by BuzzFeed News why that was the case, a security guard with Ahtna at the facility, who declined to give his name, said it was because the shipping containers the merits hearings are held in were too small to accommodate additional members of the public.

Norma Sepulveda, an immigration attorney who had a hearing last week in Brownsville with a judge located in Fort Worth, said it was “ridiculous” that the merits hearings were being held inside small shipping containers that only fit seven people.

“I don’t know why they put us in these tiny rooms to hold the hearings other than to say there’s no space for anyone else to be present,” Sepulveda told BuzzFeed News. “These hearings are being scheduled with these judges intentionally to be able to conduct them without any oversight.”

Sepulveda said her client’s son, a resident of the US, was initially listed as a witness in the case and was allowed into the room. However, when Sepulveda said she was no longer going to call him to testify he was removed from the room by private security.

“It’s clear to me that the policy is no spectators, if you will, and no family support for individual hearings,” Sepulveda said.

Private security at the “tent courts” in Brownsville also enforcing different rules from one day to the next, that legal observers and attorneys said don’t make sense.

On the first day the public was allowed into the Brownsville facilities, private security agents said reporters weren’t allowed to attend hearings with a pen and notepad. Yet, on the second day they did allow journalists to take notes, but not observers like Udelsman of the Texas Civil Rights Project.

Private security officials are also only allowing the public to view master calendar hearings, the first time people see a judge, which tend to be short preliminary hearings. Requests to attend different master calendar hearings, other than the one room made available, were denied.

“They’re preventing anybody from being able to explain in the most accurate manner possible, what’s happening,” Udelsman said. “You’re prohibiting the public from knowing what’s happening in the courtroom and making life as difficult as possible for the few people who are able to report on what’s happening.”

Laura A. Lynch, Esq.

Senior Policy Counsel

Direct: 202.507.7627 I Email: llynch@aila.org

American Immigration Lawyers Association

Main: 202.507.7600 I Fax: 202.783.7853 I www.aila.org

1331 G Street NW, Suite 300, Washington, DC 20005

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

Thanks for passing this along and for all you do, Laura!

“Secret proceedings” and lack of transparency are key steps toward any neo-fascist state!

Due Process Forever!

PWS

01-14-20

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

Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse

Asylum Decisions Vary Widely Across Judges and Courts – Latest Results

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

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

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

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

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

View the entire report at:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Follow us on Twitter at

https://twitter.com/tracreports

or like us on Facebook:

https://facebook.com/tracreports

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PWS

01-13-20

ROGER ALGASE @ ILW.COM: How The Trump Regime’s Gross Immorality, Inhumanity, & Illegality Have Replaced America’s Moral Leadership On The World Stage!

https://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=BXLvi&m=fxzs.sAL1oeaGWA&b=YSYqSh1DOxFOlVXvkRos2A

ImmigrationLawBlogs started a blog post As asylum-seeker kills himself at the border, leading Jewish cleric condemns administration’s inhumanity toward desperate immigrants. Meanwhile, Trump ramps up hate for 2020 election By Roger Algase

01-10-2020, 09:08 AM

Share
Tweet

Update: January 11 1:42 pm:

For another viewpoint on the urgency of defeating Trump’s politics of hate against immigrants and other minorities in he upcoming election this November, see Kristian Ramos in The Hill (January 11):

We can’t let ‘white nativism’ politics cloud 2020 election

We can’t let ‘white nativism’ politics cloud 2020 election

Update: January 11 at 9:15 am:

Two late-breaking January 10 news stories show that Trump and his Republican allies are ramping up the hate against legal non-European immigrants in preparation for this November’s election.

The Washington Post reports that Texas has become the first state to bar resettlement of refugees under Trump’s executive order giving them the authority to do so. Admission to the UIS of legal refugees this year is already at an historic low under the agenda of Trump and Miller. Miller reportedly didn’t want to any refugees at all to be admitted this year.

For more on this latest show of bigotry by Texas Republican governor Greg Abbot, see:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/2020/01/10/texas-becomes-first-state-publicly-reject-refugees-under-trump-order

On the same day, The Guardian reports that Trump is planning to add unspecified additional countries to his infamous Muslim ban order.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jan/10/trump-travel-ban-expansion

Both of these developments, which involve barring legal immigrants whose ethnicity or religion doesn’t happen to fit in with Trump’s avowed goal of admitting only immigrants from “Countries like Norway” and with Miller’s goal (expressed in almost 1,000 recent emails) of taking America’s immigration system back to the openly racist 1924 regime (which Adolf Hitler expressed so much admiration for in Mein Kampf) show that exploiting and stirring up more hate against nonwhite immigrants, including those eligible to come to the US legally, will be the order of the day for Trump’s re-election campaign.

My earlier comment follows below:

While the media remain focused on Donald Trump’s apparently now-abandoned threat to commit a war crime by blowing up cultural heritage sites in Iran, as an end result of his dehumanizing 2017 Muslim Ban order; or on the travesty that Senate Republicans are planning in order to “acquit” Trump of cravenly timid Democratic impeachment charges which entirely ignore his High Crimes and Misdemeanors against the basic human rights of nonwhite immigrants, what could very arguably be considered a Crime Against Humanity that the Trump administration is carrying out against desperate asylum seekers at the Mexican border in service of Stephen Miller’s white supremacist agenda is growing worse and worse.

The Guardian reports on January 9 that an obviously desperate Mexican asylum-seeker killed himself on the international bridge after being refused entry to the United States.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/09/mexico-asylum-seeker-refused-us-entry

This may be less surprising than it seems in light of the appalling, inhuman conditions that legitimate asylum seekers fleeing gang violence and other life-threatening conditions in Central America are forced to endure as a result of Trump’s racist and inhuman (as well as almost certainly illegal) “Remain in Mexico” asylum policy. See Vox (December 20, 2019):

In camps on the US-Mexico border, asylym-seekers have been abandoned

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/12/20/20997299/asylum-border-mexico-us-io,-unhcr-usaid-migration-international-humanitarian-aid-m…

See also: Slate:

Trump’s tent cities are on the verge of killing immigrant children

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/12/trump-tent-cities-mpp-killing-immigrant-children.html

This horrendous display of inhumanity by the Trump administration as led to a protest by a leading Jewish religious leader, Arnold Eisen, Chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary (in New York City) America’s leading institution for the Conservative branch of Judaism against what he calls America’s failure to carry out its moral obligation toward desperate asylum seekers and immigrants and other immigrants. See, The Hill, January 9:

https://the hill.com/opinion/immigration/477577/-our-moral-obligation-to-us-migrants-and-asylum-seekers

After visiting overcrowded immigrant border shelters , an ICE detention center and an asylum hearing courtroom along with other Jewish clergy, Eisen writes:

“What we saw was profoundly sobering. The predicament of those trapped at the Mexican border looks increasingly bleak as the federal government enacts more restrictive policies in the name of protecting Americans from the alleged invasion.”

Eisen then explains what motivated him to write:

“When people asked me why I was making this journey, my answer was simple: ‘Because I am a Jew.’ My grandparents arrived in this country seeking a better life, in some cases fleeing pogroms and persecutions, and the Torah’s command to care for the stranger summons me in a voice I dare not ignore. The Bible tells us that Jews are not permitted to stand by in the face of suffering and injustice.”

He then explains that this is not only a Jewish issue.:

“But the crisis at the border is a non-denominational issue and it should be non-partisan.”

Unfortunately, in today’s America, the crisis caused by the Trumps administration’s egregious violations of essential human rights of nonwhite immigrants is anything but non-partisan. One party is blindly following its Leader into making hatred of non-European immigrants, both legal and “irregular”, as the centerpiece of its agenda, while the other party’s leaders are too cowardly to mount an effective defense of immigrants’ human rights which are being trampled on.

Ironically, the driving force of this agenda of anti-immigrant persecution, Stephen Miller, is also the grandchild of a Jewish immigrant. What kind of understanding of the Jewish heritage of care and compassion for the suffering of the stranger in our midst is he showing?

And how much understanding of this tradition of essential humanity does Miller’s boss Donald Trump, who claims to be a great friend of Israel and the Jewish people, show in his immigration policy, which includes drastic measures against even the most highly skilled and educated legal immigrants, not only asylum seekers and unauthorized immigrants?

Roger Algase

Attorney at Law

Last edited by ImmigrationLawBlogs; 01-11-2020, 01:43 PM.

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

Unfortunately, for America and the world, Roger has it pegged exactly right. Humanity, compassion, decency, and equal justice for all have disappeared from U.S. foreign and domestic policy under Trump. That’s the essence of a White Nationalist kakistocracy. And, as Roger also recognizes, there is more than a little anti-semitism and racism mixed in and driving these policies. It just so happens that Hispanics and folks with brown skins are the current “target of the day.”

But, actually, nobody is safe in the “Age of Trump” as his sycophants and supporters have found out (see., e.g., Jeff “Gonzo Apocalypto” Sessions, Kristjen Nielsen, Steve Bannon, John Bolton, Michael Cohen, et al.). The only thing or person that Donald Trump has ever cared about is (surprise): Donald Trump. Everybody else, including our nation, the environment, and world civilization, is expendable.

I also appreciate Roger’s “outing” of bigoted Texas Gov. Greg Abbott for his ridiculous and disingenuous attempt to “bar” refugee resettlement in Texas. For the record, quite contrary to Abbott’s racist whining, few states have benefitted more than Texas from migrants, whether they be refugees, asylum recipients, documented, or undocumented. See, e.g., https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/research/immigrants-in-texas

In the “race to the bottom,” never count out Donald Trump and his GOP stalwarts!

PWS

01-13-20

AILA POLICY BRIEFING: EOIR Still Playing “Hide The Ball” On Tent Court Access!

20011061-AILA Policy Briefing

Policy Brief: Public Access to Tent Courts Now Allowed, but Meaningful Access Still Absent January 10, 2020

Contact: Laura Lynch (Llynch@aila.org) or Leidy Perez-Davis (LPerez-Davis@aila.org)

In September 2019, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) opened massive temporary tent facilities in Laredo and Brownsville, Texas, that function as virtual immigration courtrooms for vulnerable asylum seekers subject to Remain in Mexico. During the hearings, asylum seekers are held in tents at the ports of entry while judges appear remotely via video teleconference (VTC).

Unlike in other immigration courts, the government barred attorney observers, press, and the public from accessing these facilities, in violation of U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) regulations requiring immigration hearings to generally be open to the public. Access to the tent courts is critical to ensuring due process, and AILA, along with several other organizations and numerous members of Congress, repeatedly voiced concerns about the lack of transparency. In response, and after months of public demand for access, the Wall Street Journal reported on December 29, 2019, that DHS directed component agencies to open the tent courts to the public.1

The DHS acknowledgement that transparency is both necessary and required is a vital first step toward upholding due process in tent courts. However, thus far, DHS and DOJ have operationalized this directive in a way that fails to allow meaningful access to the tent court facilities and imposed new hurdles to transparency by assigning immigration judges from the Ft. Worth Immigration Adjudication Center.

Tent Court Access Prior to December 29, 2019, Public Access Announcement

When DHS initially opened the tent courts in September 2019, it allowed only asylum seekers and their attorneys of record into the facilities. At one time, even support staff for attorneys of record such as interpreters and paralegals were restricted from entering the tents, though they were later allowed to accompany the attorneys. Attorney observers, press, and members of the public were categorically barred from the tent facilities while hearings were taking place. Representatives from AILA and other court observers were permitted to observe Master Calendar Hearings and Individual Merits Hearings only at the brick-and-mortar courtrooms where the judges appearing by VTC were located. However, remote observation is not an adequate substitute for access to the tent courts because observers are not able to assess how the proceedings are operating from the vantage point of the individual respondent, who is the most gravely impacted by these proceedings.

1 “In an effort to ensure consistency, clarity, and transparency, the acting secretary directed [component agencies] to formalize guidance for public access to these facilities, consistent with immigration courts across the country.” – DHS spokeswoman, Heather Swift. See Michelle Hackman, Wall Street Journal, U.S. Opens Immigration ‘Tent Courts’ to Public, Dec. 29, 2019.

1

Laredo and Brownsville Tent Court Setup from September 2019 through December 2019

Laredo Tent Court Brownsville Tent Court

Laredo tent court proceedings, including both Master Calendar Hearings and Individual Merits Hearings, were conducted via VTC by immigration judges located at the brick-and-mortar San Antonio immigration court, which is nearly 200 miles away. Brownsville tent court proceedings, including both Master Calendar Hearings and Individual Merits Hearings, were conducted by immigration judges located at the Harlingen and Port Isabel immigration courts, as well as the El Paso SPC, which is nearly 800 miles away from the Brownsville tent court.

● Respondents appeared in person at the Laredo tent court.

● Immigration judges from the San Antonio Immigration Court appeared via VTC.

● Attorneys of record appeared either (1) at the Laredo tent court or (2) via VTC from the San Antonio brick-and-mortar courtrooms.

● ICE trial attorneys located at the San Antonio Immigration Court appeared via VTC.

● Interpreters interpreted remotely from the San Antonio Immigration Court.

● Witnesses appeared either (1) at the Laredo tent court or (2) via VTC from the San Antonio brick-and-mortar courtrooms.

● Court observers were only permitted to observe Master Calendar Hearings and Individual Merits Hearings at the brick-and-mortar courts

● Respondents appeared in person at the Brownsville tent court.

● Immigration judges from Harlingen, Port Isabel, or El Paso SCP appeared via VTC.

● Attorneys of record appeared either (1) at the Brownsville tent court or (2) via VTC from the immigration judge location.

● ICE trial attorneys appeared via VTC from the immigration judge location.

● Interpreters interpreted remotely from the immigration judge location.

● Witnesses appeared either (1) at the Brownsville tent court or (2) via VTC from the immigration judge location.

● Court observers were only permitted to observe Master Calendar Hearings and Individual Merits Hearings at the brick-and-mortar courts.

Tent Court Access After December 29, 2019, Public Access Announcement

Master Calendar Hearings

Reports indicate that members of the press and public have been permitted to observe Master Calendar Hearings at the Brownsville and Laredo tent court facilities, in addition to the brick-and-mortar courts where the judges sit. However, this access has not been consistent with access allowed at other immigration courts across the country. For example, Master Calendar Hearings are generally open to the public, but in the tent courts, DHS personnel dictate particular Master Calendar Hearings the public is permitted to observe. Reporters and court observers have encountered other logistical hurdles, such as DHS prohibiting pens and notepads in the tents, which impede their ability to accurately observe and document the hearings.

Access to Individual Merits Hearings2

DOJ and DHS recently imposed significant new barriers that block the public’s ability to observe Individual Merits Hearings taking place at the Laredo and Brownsville tent courts. DOJ recently began assigning individual merits hearings to the Ft. Worth Immigration Adjudication Center (IAC) judges. The Ft. Worth IAC opened in October 2018 and is a remote-only facility that is closed to the public.3 Immigration judges

2 In order to observe asylum hearings, court observers need to obtain permission from the Respondent. See EOIR Immigration Court Practice Manual, Chapter 4.9, Public Access.
3 For more background information about IACs, please see the following materials: AILA’s Policy Brief: FOIA Reveals EOIR’s Failed Plan for Fixing the Immigration Court Backlog, Feb. 21, 2019 (pgs. 4-5); The American Bar

2

AILA Doc. No. 20011061. (Posted 1/10/20)

stationed at these centers adjudicate cases from around the country via VTC. The public has not been permitted to observe hearings at the IAC. Previously, court observers have been able to watch IAC proceedings by video in courtrooms where the respondent and ICE attorney are located.

However, reports indicate that DHS has blocked access to Individual Merits Hearings at the tent courts. If that continues, it would mean that there is no location for court observers or the media to watch the Individual Merits Hearings of respondents in tent courts assigned to IAC judges. For example, an AILA member reported earlier this week that DHS prevented her client’s adult son who is a lawful permanent resident from attending his mother’s Individual Merits Hearing at the Brownsville tent court that was assigned to a judge located at the Ft. Worth IAC. The son was initially permitted to enter the hearing in the tent court because he was listed as a witness in the case. Once the hearing started, the AILA member informed the immigration judge that she did not intend to call the son as a witness and would instead rely on his declaration. Despite empty chairs in the hearing room, security made the son sit in the waiting area for the duration of the hearing because the policy does not permit observers to attend Individual Merits Hearings.

At best, utilizing Ft. Worth IAC immigration judges to adjudicate Individual Merits Hearings at tent courts introduces additional operational complexities. At worst, it will block all public access. See below for more information on how using IAC judges to adjudicate hearings at the tent courts is functioning. AILA is still gathering additional information.

Merits Hearings at Brownsville Tent Court Adjudicated by IAC Judges

● Respondents appear in person at the Brownsville tent court.

● Immigration judges from the Ft. Worth IAC appear via VTC.

● Attorneys of record appear at the Brownsville tent court.

● ICE trial attorneys from an unknown location appear via VTC.

● Interpreters interpret in person at the Brownsville tent court.

● Witnesses appear in person at the Brownsville tent court.

● AILA is still gathering more information on whether DHS and DOJ are

taking steps to facilitate court observers’ access to these hearings.

What Don’t We Know?

DHS and DOJ’s lack of transparency continues to create chaos for court observers at these two tent courts. Below are a few of the many key outstanding questions regarding access to the tent court facilities.

DHS indicated that it has developed formal guidance on public access to tent court facilities but has not yet shared this guidance publicly. Will DHS share this guidance with the public?

What steps are DHS and DOJ taking to ensure meaningful public access to observe both Master Calendar Hearings and Individual Merits Hearings conducted at the tent court facilities, consistent with access allowed at other immigration courts across the country?

In situations where immigration judges from an IAC are assigned to adjudicate Individual Merits Hearings at the tent courts, how will DOJ facilitate public access? Does DOJ have plans to open the IACs to the public in the future?

Association’s 2019 Update Report, Reforming the Immigration System (pgs. 81-82); and The American Immigration Council Blog, The Judicial Black Sites the Government Created to Speed Up Deportations, Jan. 7, 2019.

3

AILA Doc. No. 20011061. (Posted 1/10/20)

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

Shouldn’t surprise anyone familiar with EOIR’s “Trump Era” user unfriendly policies, misinformation, xenophobia, and anti-Due-Process agenda.

I appreciate “NDPA superstars” Laura and Leidy keeping “on” this story. But, with Congress and the Article III courts taking a “pass” on their Constitutional functions (but, still collecting their paychecks), those “true patriots” like Laura and Leidy defending our Constitution and trying to preserve our democratic institutions face constant unnecessary “uphill battles” because of the dereliction duty by those charged with protecting the public good.

Due Process Forever!

PWS

01-11-20

VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN @ LA TIMES: Yes, Trumpism Is a Cult: “To see Trumpism as a cult is not to refuse to engage with its effects, the crimes committed in its name or the way it has awakened and emboldened the cruelest and most destructive beliefs and practices in the American playbook.”

http://enewspaper.latimes.com/infinity/article_share.aspx?guid=c7eff502-0fc6-4c15-a5a9-4fd8adb62bb5

Trumpism deserves to be called a cult

VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN

The comparisons have come hard and fast, at least since 2015. Trump is like Silvio Berlusconi, like Adolf Hitler, like Boris Johnson. A 2018 film called “The Trump Prophecy” took the evangelical route, comparing Trump to Cyrus the Great, the 6th century BC Persian monarch chosen by God to free Jewish captives in Babylon.

But maybe it’s time to stop searching for the exact analogy for Trump, be he Cyrus or Boris, Adolf or a Silvio. What demands analysis is less the arrogant 73-year-old mediocrity in the Oval Office, but the worshipful attitude so many Americans have toward him.

A lot of nut jobs have peddled lies to Americans before, and even styled themselves as messianic. But at no time in history have so many Americans been drawn to what’s looking increasingly like a cult. I don’t use the term recklessly.

When Steven Hassan, an expert in cults and an ex-Moonie (as in the Unification Church, founded by a Korean businessman, the Rev. Sun Myung Moon), published “The Cult of Trump” last spring, some reviewers objected to his use of the cult framework as incendiary and not all that useful.

Indeed, for Trump critics to call his admirers cult members might be just another salvo in our nasty political warfare. It’s similar to the Trump psychologizing over the years that often doubles as name-calling: He’s a baby, a psychopath, a stone-cold narcissist.

The discourse around cults partakes of some woolly theories. “Mind control” and “brainwashing” are shibboleths from the 1950s, when the coinages were used to describe what Chinese Communists did to convert freethinkers to their cause. The implicit suggestion is that unsavory ideas and ideologies can only win adherents using extreme and witchy measures.

All that put me off the notion of Trumpism as a cult. But then in August, Trump looked heavenward and called himself “the chosen one.”

Suddenly, among evangelicals, it wasn’t enough to make comparisons with Cyrus or even King David. He had to be the savior himself. The far-right radio host Wayne Allyn Root called Trump “the second coming of God.” Then former Energy Secretary Rick Perry straight up affirmed Trump’s craziness, telling him, “You are here in this time because God ordained you.”

As 2019 drew to a close, my doubts about Trumpism as a cult dissolved. And I’m not alone.

Republican lawyer George Conway reportedly described his wife, Trump’s presidential counselor Kellyanne Conway, as a member of a cult. Former GOP strategist John Weaver has used the term. Anthony Scaramucci, Trump’s onetime communications director, concurs. Also news vet Dan Rather, conservative political scientist Norman Ornstein, science journalist Steve Silberman, pastor John Pavlovitz and academic and journalist Jared Yates Sexton.

What the cult diagnosis may lack in scholarly rigor, it makes up for in explanatory power. When polled, far too many Republicans come across as having abandoned their commitment to libertarianism, family values or simple logic in favor of Trump worship. They’re lost to paranoia and factually unmoored talking points, just the way Hassan was lost to Sun Myung Moon.

It can be heartbreaking when loved ones succumb to Trumpism. (It’s a double whammy when your grief is dismissed as liberal tears.) A true believer undergoes a “radical personal change,” as Hassan puts it. The person you once knew seems somehow … not there.

Journalists Luke O’Neil and Edwin Lyngar, as well as Jen Senko in “The Brainwashing of My Dad,” have compiled stories of Americans who have gone over. O’Neil summarized the transformation this way: “A loved one … sat down in front of Fox News, found some kind of deep, addictive comfort in the anger and paranoia, and became a different person.”

Sounds about right.

Hassan — who remembers, during his Moonie days, shouting, “I don’t care if Moon is like Hitler. I’ve chosen to follow him, and I’ll follow him to the end” — broke free, and became an expert on cults and how to leave them. He has spent his career proving it’s possible.

To see Trumpism as a cult is not to refuse to engage with its effects, the crimes committed in its name or the way it has awakened and emboldened the cruelest and most destructive beliefs and practices in the American playbook. Instead, the cult framework should relieve the pressure many of us feel to call Trumpites back to themselves, to keep arguing with them. They are stuck in a bad relationship with a controlling figure.

Understanding Trump is a fool’s errand. He’s sui generis, and far too erratic and finally insubstantial to reward close attention. Trump zealots are another matter. They are part of the tradition of radical converts in American history who elected to forfeit their authentic personalities and principles rather than refine or strengthen them. We need to stay focused on how so many Americans came to this pass and took this destructive course. The Trump cult will define American politics for decades to come, even after its dear leader is gone.

Twitter: @page88

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

Heffernan’s analysis leads to the conclusion that it’s naive for Dems to keep wishing, hoping, and thinking that they can just speak truth and advance facts and thereby expect Trump’s followers to wake up, discover decency, and suddenly embrace humanity and rationality again.

No, the way the Democratic majority takes back the White House is by making sure that they get maximum turnout among the majority of Americans not enthralled by Trump and, particularly, that they fight through concerted GOP voter suppression efforts to appeal to, register, and get out the many new and younger voters who don‘t identify with Trump’s dark, White Nationalist view of America and the unfailingly false, cruel, and negative values that he so arrogantly projects to his cult followers.

PWS

01-11-20

FLRA HEARING OFFICER APPEARS TO “HOME IN” ON DISINGENUOUS ABSURDITY OF EOIR’S ARGUMENT FOR “DECERTIFYING” IMMIGRATION JUDGES’ UNION! — In Reality, Immigration “Judges” Have Been Reduced To The Status Of “Deportation Clerks” With All Meaningful Precedents & Policies Set By Unqualified & Biased Politicos On The 5th Floor Of The DOJ!

https://www.govexec.com/management/2020/01/trump-administration-makes-its-case-break-immigration-judges-union/162288/

Eric Katz reports for Government Executive:

Justice Department “simply does not want to deal with a vocal union that asserts its rights,” labor group argues at hearing.

ERIC KATZ | JANUARY 7, 2020

IMMIGRATION

UNIONS

The Trump administration argued in an executive branch court on Tuesday that the duties of immigration judges housed within the Justice Department have grown more important in the last two decades, elevating the judges to management and therefore rendering them ineligible to form a union.

The Justice lawyers and their first witness—James McHenry, the director of the Executive Office of Immigration Review, which employs the nation’s 400 immigration judges—faced pointed questions from an attorney with the Federal Labor Relations Authority who oversaw the hearing and questioned whether the judges actually set department policy. The administration first announced in August it would attempt to decertify the National Association of Immigration Judges, bringing the case to FLRA to argue the employees are not eligible to collectively bargain.

Union representatives argued at Tuesday’s hearing that their members’ duties have not fundamentally changed since 2000, when the Justice Department last attempted to decertify the union. FLRA rejected the Justice Department’s argument that year that immigration judges make policy through the issuance of decisions, noting the judges do not set precedent and their rulings are often appealed and reviewed. FLRA also said the immigration court system was established specifically so judges do not maintain any management duties to enable them to focus on hearings.

The arguments followed a similar path on Tuesday, though Justice attorneys and McHenry said several changes to Executive Office of Immigration Review policy and relevant precedents created an opening for a new FLRA ruling. William Krisner, the regional attorney for FLRA’s Washington office who presided over the hearing, said Tuesday morning the authority would first have to determine if anything had changed since 2000 before ruling on the merits of the case. William Brill, a Justice attorney, pointed to a 1999 streamlining effort by the department that enabled the immigration appeals board within the review office to simply affirm a judge’s ruling without issuing a separate opinion as one such change. The change was not presented during the previous FLRA case, Brill said, and was amplified in 2002 when EOIR again shifted course to allow just one board member to affirm a judge’s ruling.

Facing Brill’s questioning, McHenry said the “factual day-to-day” of immigration judges’ work has not changed since 2000 but the “legal significance of those duties” had been overhauled.

Legal changes have “fundamentally recast the nature and importance of immigration judge duties,” McHenry said.

Richard Bialczak, an attorney for the union, rejected the argument, saying Justice’s claims were nothing more than a retread.

The Trump administration is “raising the same arguments and hoping for a different outcome,” Bialczak said. “There’s no factual basis for it. The Department of Justice simply does not want to deal with a vocal union that asserts its rights.”

Brill also argued immigration judges’ workload increasingly involves issuing decisions that cannot be appealed to the Executive Office of Immigration Review’s board. While immigrants can appeal those cases to the federal circuit, Brill and McHenry said the judge’s initial ruling represents the department’s official position. Immigration judges collectively issued about 280,000 decisions in fiscal 2019, about 38% of which could not be appealed to the Board of Immigration Appeals.

Justice also pointed to Lucia v. SEC—a 2018 Supreme Court case that dictated that administrative law judges must be appointed by the president or a designated official, rather than hired normally—as relevant to immigration judges. The Executive Office of Immigration Review employees are administrative judges, not administrative law judges, but McHenry said their “duties and functions are very similar.”

“It’s difficult to conceive someone who needs to be appointed by the head of an agency but does not make management decisions,” Brill said.

Margaret Tough, another attorney for the union, countered that Lucia had no bearing on immigration judges, who are appointed by the attorney general and have been dating back prior to 2000. She and Bialczak said the judges are now under stricter oversight by management, facing new performance evaluations, quotas for their annual caseload and a restriction on speaking publicly. On cross examination, McHenry noted the judges can face discipline if their rulings are not up to acceptable standards and the board can remand cases back to them. Under their performance standards, judges cannot exceed a pre-set remand rate.

Upon follow-up questioning from Kirsner, the FLRA attorney, McHenry conceded the judges “are not supervisors.”

“Immigration judges are at the bottom of the org chart so they don’t supervise anything,” McHenry said, noting they cannot hire or fire anyone.

Tough highlighted that the Executive Office of Immigration Review has hired additional supervisory judges and under McHenry created the Office of Policy, which the agency director said was launched to “ensure better coordination of policy making within the agency.” He added, however, that adjudicatory policy making remained the sole power of immigration judges and their supervisors cannot influence the judges’ rulings.

Kirsner repeatedly sought more information on immigration judges’ power to set precedent. Generally speaking, their rulings do not influence more than the case at hand. Kirsner also clarified that unless there is a remand, their work on a case is finished after they issue a decision. Justice attorneys noted various statements in which the union suggested immigration judges should be removed from the executive branch and placed into an independent court, but Kirsner rejected them as irrelevant.

FLRA is expected to continue to hear from witnesses through Thursday before issuing a decision on the union’s fate later this year.

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

Many thanks to my long-time friend, fellow retired judicial colleague, member of the Round Table, and former NAIJ President Judge Joan Churchill for passing this along.

“Immigration judges are at the bottom of the org chart so they don’t supervise anything,” McHenry said, noting they cannot hire or fire anyone.

FLRA also said the immigration court system was established specifically so judges do not maintain any management duties to enable them to focus on hearings.

The above quotes “say it all” about the absurd position being argued by the DOJ. But, since neither administrative nor Article III courts hold the regime accountable for dishonesty before tribunals and engaging in frivolous litigation, like private parties would be, there is no incentive for the regime and its toadies at DOJ to stop flooding the courts with lies, misrepresentations, and meritless litigation.

Indeed, the Article IIIs unwillingness to deal “head-on” with the clearly unconstitutional nature of the Immigration Courts and their grotesque and unethical mismanagement by the DOJ have lead to an absurd growing backlog of 1.3 million cases (each involving real human lives) and the impending collapse of one of the largest sectors of the American justice system. What will it take for the “life-tenured ones in their ivory towers” to get out of the clouds and engage in the fray before it’s too late for our nation?

As I say over and over: Imagine if we had an honest Administration and Article III courts with integrity that forced the Government and private parties to work together to solve pressing legal and policy problems, particularly in the field of immigration, rather than squandering time and resources on Government-generated meritless litigation and schemes intended to collapse our entire justice system?

Worse yet, Article III Courts like the Supremes and the Fifth Circuit regularly reward the regime for its scofflaw performances, thus showing contempt for their own judicial roles, our Constitution, the rule of law, and, worst of all, for the human lives destroyed by invidiously motivated and illegal policies of the Trump regime. It also encourages this scofflaw behavior to continue and escalate.

That’s why the feeble and feckless complaints by Chief Justice Roberts about loss of respect for the courts and the ugly tenor of public discourse encouraged and engendered by the Trump regime are so discouraging and annoying. Actions speak louder than words, Chiefie! And, Trump has figured out that you’re all bluster and no backbone when it comes to standing up and speaking out in real cases about his all-out assault on American democracy!

Finally, let’s not forget that while DOJ/EOIR “management” is squandering everyone’s time on wasteful and frivolous efforts like “decertification,” here are just a few of the real management problems facing the Immigration Court system:

No e-filing system;
Growing 1.3 million case backlog, notwithstanding almost doubling the number of Immigration Judges, with no coherent plan for addressing it effectively for the foreseeable future;
Inaccurate and deficient record keeping as documented by TRAC;
Defective hearing notices;
Rock bottom judicial and staff morale, resulting in premature departure of some of the “best and brightest;”
“Single source” judicial selection process that effectively excludes non-Governmental candidates from the Immigration Judiciary;
Huge discrepancies among judges in asylum decision-making;
Continuing quality control problems with both Immigration Judges and BIA Judges misapplying basic legal standards and established precedents, as noted by Circuit Court decisions;
Problems in providing qualified in-person interpreters for hearings;
Inadequate training of Immigration Judges.

Seems like we’d all be better off if the NAIJ, rather than what passes for “EOIR management” were in charge of our Immigration Courts. And, while the FLA’s Krisner quite properly ruled it irrelevant to the proceedings before him, it’s more obvious than ever that the myriad of problems plaguing the Immigration Courts can’t and won’t be solved until there is an independent, Article I U.S. Immigration court established outside the Executive Branch!

PWS

01-10-20

HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE: CLYDE W. FORD @ LA TIMES: “Opinion: The immigration crisis and the racism driving it have roots in Hitler’s ‘bible’”

https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-01-07/great-race-passing-trump

Ford writes:

OPINION

Opinion: The immigration crisis and the racism driving it have roots in Hitler’s ‘bible’

By CLYDE W. FORD

JAN. 7, 2020

3:01 AM

The images horrify.

On the banks of the Rio Grande, a child floats lifelessly, her arm around her father, both drowned while trying to cross from Mexico into the United States. Refugees crossing the Mediterranean from Africa into Europe regularly drown. A Honduran mother dragging children flees from tear gas at the U.S. border. Children in cages.

The policies terrify. A border wall. Family separation. The purgatory of waiting for asylum in a third country.

In December, the Washington Post reported that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement wants to use migrant children in detention as bait. Adults who show up to claim them would be targeted for arrest and deportation.

The words incite fear. “Bad hombres.” “Rapists.” “Criminals.” “Shithole countries.” When uttered by a U.S. president, they carry even greater weight.

Britain, Poland, Italy, the United States. Around the world, countries once proud of welcoming immigrants seem determined to find ever more devious ways to keep them out. Are these signs of a newly ascendant nationalism? Or the last gasps of existential fear?

The worldwide immigration crisis — and the racism apparently driving it — can trace its roots in part to a century-old book, Madison Grant’s “The Passing of the Great Race.”

In publishing a centenary edition of the 1916 work, white nationalist Ostara Press praised the book as a “call to American whites to counter the dangers both from non-white and non-north Western European immigration.” Grant proposed a “Nordic race,” loosely centered in Scandinavia, as principally responsible for human social and cultural development. He feared immigration and intermarriage would dilute this race, dooming it to extinction.

Grant’s fears of his “great race” passing are very much alive today.

The Southern Poverty Law Center’s ongoing study of emails sent by Stephen Miller to Breitbart News in the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election document his affinity for white nationalism. Miller, an architect of the Trump administration’s immigration policies, lauds former President Calvin Coolidge for signing the Immigration Act of 1924, which hardened non-white immigration and eased white immigration from Western Europe. It also established the U.S. Border Patrol, the predecessor of Customs and Border Protection and ICE.

Grant’s writing is credited as part of the inspiration for the creation and passage of that 1924 Act. Hitler called Grant’s book, “my bible.” Grant’s ideas defined apartheid. His book fueled the U.S. eugenics movement.

Eugenics is a pseudoscience of race that seeks to breed and maintain a “Nordic stock” of human beings, while culling undesirables — blacks, Jews, Asians, South Americans, homosexuals, the physically and mentally ill, and others — through measures ranging from forced sterilization to death.

In Grant’s day, eugenics attracted the rich and famous — Carnegies, Rockefellers, and the Kelloggs of Corn Flakes fame. Eugenicist Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, saw birth control work as eliminating “human weeds” and Alexander Graham Bell presided over the scientific directors of the Eugenics Records Office, a research institute in Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y.

Eugenics is very much in vogue among white nationalists and far-right groups worldwide, though refashioned now into broader conspiracies like “replacement theory,” which originated in France with the writings of Renaud Camus and proposes that U.S. and European whites are being intentionally “replaced” through low birth rates and liberal immigration policies.

“We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies,” tweeted U.S. Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) in 2017. A gunman in Norway who murdered 80 people in 2011 portrayed the act as a defense of the Nordic race from the scourge of Islamic immigration. Similar “replacement theory” fears influenced mass shooters in Christchurch, Pittsburgh, El Paso and Charleston.

Surprisingly, Grant was as an early conservationist who saw in the fate of endangered species — the moose, the buffalo, the redwood tree — a similar fate awaiting his “Nordics.” He helped establish the U.S. National Park system. Modern-day environmental and climate movements have roots in Grant’s work, leading to a convoluted, bizarre specter:

The U.S. and European countries that Grant lauded manufacture the “greenhouse gases” threatening the environment that Grant sought to protect. Meanwhile, the climate crisis produces refugees from countries that Grant abhorred, seeking shelter in countries with draconian immigration policies that Grant helped to create.

Yet Grant was right. His “great race” is passing. Studies cite 2050 as the tipping point, when U.S. whites will become a statistical minority, and most Americans will be people of color. Whether crafted in overtly racist language or couched in covertly racist immigration policies, fear of the “great race” passing is used to win elections, cling to power, manipulate public opinion and grow organizational membership.

Immigrants built America. This new wave is no different. They are the face of the future, deserving new lives in a country that helps them succeed.

Yes, the “great race” is passing. Good riddance. And we should turn to finding ways to help everyone accept this inevitability — and thrive from it.

Clyde W. Ford is the author of “Think Black,” a memoir about his father, the first black software engineer in America.

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

Like those who were behind or “went along to go along” with horrible parts of our history like Dred Scott, Plessy v. Ferguson, the Chinese Exclusion Laws, or Jim Crow, Trump’s supporters and enablers eventually will have much to answer for in the “court of history.”

“Fake news.” “alternative facts,” false narratives, and internet myths might be gospel to Breitbart, Fox News, GOP sycophants, and Trump voters, but eventually, particularly in an age of information and documentation, “truth will out.” And, it won’t be pretty for the “Modern Day Jim Crows” any more than it was for the segregationists and other racists who preceded them.

PWS

01-10-20

INSIDE THE NUMBERS: My “Quick & Dirty” Takeaways From TRAC’s Latest Immigration Court Asylum Stats

Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse

Record Number of Asylum Cases in FY 2019

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Immigration judges decided a record number of asylum cases in FY 2019. This past year judges decided 67,406 asylum cases, nearly two-and-a-half times the number from five years ago when judges decided 19,779 asylum cases. The number of immigrants who have been granted asylum more than doubled from 9,684 in FY 2014 to 19,831 in FY 2019. However, the number of immigrants who have been denied asylum or other relief grew even faster from 9,716 immigrants to 46,735 over the same time period.

More Chinese nationals were granted asylum than any other nationality. Next came El Salvadorian nationals, followed by asylum seekers from India.

Six-nine percent of asylum seekers were denied asylum or other relief in 2019. Nevertheless, 99 out of 100 attended all their court hearings.

Access to an attorney impacted the asylum outcomes. Only 16 percent of unrepresented asylum applicants received asylum or other forms of deportation relief. In contrast, twice the proportion (33%) of asylum applicants with an attorney received asylum or other relief.

Overall, asylum applicants waited on average 1,030 days – or nearly three years – for their cases to be decided. But many asylum applicants waited even longer: a quarter of applicants waited 1,421 days, or nearly four years, for their asylum decision.

To read the full report go to:

https://trac.syr.edu/immigration/reports/588/

To examine these results in greater detail by nationality and court location, TRAC’s free asylum app is now updated with data through the end of November 2019 at:

https://trac.syr.edu/phptools/immigration/asylum/

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

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

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

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

Follow us on Twitter at

https://twitter.com/tracreports

or like us on Facebook:

https://facebook.com/tracreports

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

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

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

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

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

SOME INTERESTING TAKEAWAYS:

Contrary to regime false narratives, non-detained asylum seekers continued to show up for their hearings approximately 99% of the time.
Contrary to recent EOIR claims, representation of asylum seekers continued to make a huge difference: twice as many represented asylum seekers received relief.
Nearly 20,000 individuals were granted asylum in FY 2019, twice as many as in FY 2014, although the number of cases denied grew even faster by 4.5x, to 46,735.
The three “Northern Triangle” countries, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras ranked among the top five in number of asylum claims granted.
Session’s biased decision in Matter of A-B- appears to have been responsible for artificially depressing asylum grant rates starting in June 2018.
Even with extraordinary efforts by the regime to “game” the asylum system against applicants, 31% of the applicants still were successful in gaining relief in FY 2019.
The New Due Process Army continues to “take the battle” to the regime: despite regime efforts to inhibit and discourage representation, nearly 85% of asylum applicants were represented in FY year 2019, a slight increase over the previous FY.
Unrepresented asylum applicants are “railroaded” though the system at a much higher rate than represented applicants: nearly half of the unrepresented asylum cases that started in 2019 were completed, as opposed to approximately 10% of the represented ones.
Non-detained, represented asylum applicants wait an average of three years for a merits hearing in Immigration Court.
The number of asylum cases decided by Immigration Judges has risen 250% over the past five fiscal years.
Asylum cases were 22.6% of the Immigration Court final decisions in FY 2019, as opposed to 10.7% in FY 2014.
Deciding more asylum cases while intentionally “stacking” the system against asylum seekers has not stopped the mushrooming Immigration Court backlogs.

PWS

01-09-20

FRANK RICH @ NY MAGGIE: TRUMP TOADIES WILL FACE A RECKONING — “With time, the ultimate fates of those brutalized immigrant and refugee families will emerge in full. And Trump’s collaborators, our Vichy Republicans, will own all of it . . . .”

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/01/what-will-happen-to-trumps-republican-collaborators.html

What Will Happen to The Trump Toadies? Look to Nixon’s defenders, and the Vichy collaborators, for clues.

By Frank Rich

@frankrichny

Photo: Getty Images

This article was featured in One Great Story, New York’s reading recommendation newsletter. Sign up here to get it nightly.

Irony, declared dead after 9/11, is alive and kicking in Trump’s America. It’s the concepts of truth and shame that are on life support. The definition of “facts” has been so thoroughly vandalized that Americans can no longer agree on what one is, and our president has barreled through so many crimes and misdemeanors with so few consequences that it’s impossible to gainsay his claim that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and get away with it. Donald Trump proves daily that there is no longer any penalty for doing wrong as long as you deny everything, never say you’re sorry, and have co-conspirators stashed in powerful places to put the fix in.

No wonder so many fear that Trump will escape his current predicament scot-free, with a foregone acquittal at his impeachment trial in the GOP-controlled Senate and a pull-from-behind victory in November, buoyed by a booming economy, fractious Democrats, and a stacked Electoral College. The enablers and apologists who have facilitated his triumph over the rule of law happily agree. John Kennedy, the Louisiana senator who parrots Vladimir Putin’s talking points in his supine defense of Trump, acts as if there will never be a reckoning. While he has no relation to the president whose name he incongruously bears, his every craven statement bespeaks a confidence that history will count him among the knights of the buffet table in the gilded Mar-a-Lago renovation of Camelot. He is far from alone.

If we can extricate ourselves even briefly from our fatalistic fog, however, we might give some credence to a wider view. For all the damage inflicted since Inauguration Day 2017, America is still standing, a majority of Americans disapprove of Trump, and the laws of gravity, if not those of the nation, remain in full force. Moral gravity may well reassert its pull, too, with time. Rather than being the end of American history as we know it, the Trump presidency may prove merely a notorious chapter in that history. Heedless lapdogs like Kennedy, Devin Nunes, and Lindsey Graham are acting now as if there is no tomorrow, but tomorrow will come eventually, whatever happens in the near future, and Judgment Day could arrive sooner than they think. That judgment will be rendered by an ever-more demographically diverse America unlikely to be magnanimous toward cynical politicians who prioritized pandering to Trump’s dwindling all-white base over the common good.

All cults come to an end, often abruptly, and Trump’s Republican Party is nothing if not a cult. While cult leaders are generally incapable of remorse — whether they be totalitarian rulers, sexual Svengalis, or the self-declared messiahs of crackpot religions — their followers almost always pay a human and reputational price once the leader is toppled. We don’t know how and when Donald Trump will exit, but under any scenario it won’t be later than January 20, 2025. Even were he to be gone tomorrow, the legacy of his most powerful and servile collaborators is already indelibly bound to his.

Whether these enablers joined his administration in earnest, or aided and abetted it from elite perches in politics, Congress, the media, or the private sector, they will be remembered for cheering on a leader whose record in government (thus far) includes splitting up immigrant families and incarcerating their children in cages; encouraging a spike in racist, xenophobic, and anti-Semitic vigilantes; leveraging American power to promote ethnic cleansing abroad and punish political opponents at home; actively inciting climate change and environmental wreckage; and surrendering America’s national security to an international rogue’s gallery of despots.

That selective short list doesn’t take into account any new White House felonies still to come, any future repercussions here and abroad of Trump’s actions to date, or any previous foul deeds that have so far eluded public exposure. For all the technological quickening of the media pulse in this century, Trump’s collaborators will one day be viewed through the long lens of history like Nixon’s collaborators before them and the various fools, opportunists, and cowards who tried to appease Hitler in America, England, and France before that. Once Trump has vacated the Oval Office, and possibly for decades thereafter, his government, like any other deposed strongman’s, will be subjected to a forensic colonoscopy to root out buried crimes, whether against humanity or the rule of law or both. With time, everything will come out — it always does. With time, the ultimate fates of those brutalized immigrant and refugee families will emerge in full. And Trump’s collaborators, our Vichy Republicans, will own all of it — whether they were active participants in the wrongdoing like Jared Kushner, Stephen Miller, Kirstjen Nielsen, Mike Pompeo, and William Barr, or the so-called adults in the room who stood idly by rather than sound public alarms for the good of the Republic (e.g., Gary Cohn, John Kelly, Rex Tillerson), or those elite allies beyond the White House gates who pretended not to notice administration criminality and moral atrocities in exchange for favors like tax cuts and judicial appointments (from Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan to Franklin Graham and Jerry Falwell Jr.).

. . . .

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

Read the rest of Rich’s article at the link.

“Tomorrow will come, eventually.” Yup!

Just yesterday, the usually reliable “Trump Toadies” Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) and Rand Paul (R-KY) were whining and sputtering upon learning what toadyism really means after being “treated like Democrats” during an insulting and clownish “after the fact briefing” on Iran. https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/09/politics/impeachment-watch-january-8/index.html .

But, that moment of lucidity and outrage will pass quickly, and they will undoubtedly rejoin their colleagues like Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), Sen. Teddy Cruz (R-TX), Sen. John “Vladimir” Kennedy (R-LA), Lindsey “Braindead” Graham (R-SC), and the rest of the “Party of Putin” in groveling before their Clown-in-Chief.

I would include the Article III judges who tanked in the face of tyranny and failed to protect the legal and human rights of the most vulnerable in the list of those whose misdeeds, spinelessness, and complicity in the face of tyranny eventually will be “outed.”

PWS

01-09-20

FINALLY, AN APPEALS COURT WITH SOME GUTS: 2D CIRCUIT STANDS UP TO REGIME ON “PUBLIC CHARGE” INJUNCTION!

https://apple.news/AxXENbYxMRByBiI8k3J3MQQ

DEEPTI HAJELA, reports for AP:

Appeals court keeps block of Trump immigration rule in place

A federal appeals court in New York on Wednesday rejected a motion from the Trump administration that would have allowed it to implement a policy connecting the use of public benefits with whether immigrants could become permanent residents.

The ruling from the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals denied the administration’s motion to lift a temporary national injunction that had been issued by a New York district court in October after lawsuits had been filed against the new policy.

The new rule would potentially deny green cards to immigrants over their use of public benefits including Medicaid, food stamps and housing vouchers, as well as other factors.

The New York injunction was one of several that were issued around the time the rule had been scheduled to go into effect in October.

But a regional injunction issued in California and another national injunction issued in Washington have already been lifted by other federal appeals courts. That left New York’s as the only nationwide bar to the Trump administration putting the new rule into practice. An injunction in Illinois also is in effect, but applies only to that state.

The three-judge panel of the 2nd Circuit had heard arguments over the motion to lift the injunction on Tuesday.

Judges questioned the government’s attorney on the timing — why the injunction needed to be lifted at this point when the lawsuit itself would be heard by a judge in coming months.

Immigrants applying for permanent residency must show they wouldn’t be public charges, or burdens to the country.

The new policy significantly expands what factors would be considered to make that determination, and if it is decided that immigrants could potentially become public charges at any point in the future, that legal residency could be denied.

Roughly 544,000 people apply for green cards annually. According to the government, 382,000 are in categories that would make them subject to the new review.

Immigrants make up a small portion of those getting public benefits, since many are ineligible to get them because of their immigration status.

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

Compare this with recent decisions by the 9^th and 4^th circuits that “rolled over and caved” to the regime’s disingenuous arguments that there was a pressing public interest in lifting the injunction. https://immigrationcourtside.com/2019/12/10/complicit-court-update-4th-circuit-joins-9th-in-tanking-for-trump-on-public-charge-rule-judges-harvie-wilkinson-paul-niemeyer-go-belly-up-for-trump-while-judge-pame/;https://immigrationcourtside.com/2019/12/06/complicit-9th-circuit-judges-continue-to-coddle-trump-this-time-legal-immigrants-are-the-victims-of-trumps-judicially-enabled-white-nationalist-agenda-judges-jay-bybee-sandra-i/.

The individual impact of these new policies could potentially be devastating to immigrants and their families: however, the overall public financial impact of throwing up new bars to permanent immigration would be minuscule, as pointed out in this article. The lack of any real emergency reason for exempting the Government from going through the full litigation process at the District Court level (where preliminary injunctions had been issued), as others must, was noted by dissenting judges in both circuits that “rolled” for Trump.

PWS

01-08-20

EXILED: HOW THE TRUMP REGIME’S JUDICIALLY-ENABLED TRASHING OF ASYLUM LAW & DUE PROCESS HAS LEFT AN INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY OF LEGAL ASYLUM SEEKERS MAROONED IN A STRANGE & DANGEROUS LAND — “With The List’s queue regularly stretching longer than six months, many migrants fall victim to predatory robbery, kidnapping or murder before they can find refuge; others find the wait in one of the most dangerous cities in the world simply unendurable. . . . But for many people . . . going home is not an option.”

Jack Herrera
Independent Reporter covering Migration & Human Rights

Someone using POLITICO for iOS wants to share this article with you:

How Trump Created a New Global Capital of Exiles

By Jack Herrera

TIJUANA, Mexico—If you go early in the morning to the plaza in front of El Chaparral, the border crossing where a person can walk from Mexico into the state of California, you’ll hear shouts like “2,578: El Salvador!” and “2,579: Guatemala!”—a number, followed by a place of origin. Every day, groups of families gather around, waiting anxiously underneath the trees at the back of the square. The numbers come from La Lista, The List: When a person’s number is called, it’s their turn to ask for asylum in the United States.…

READ FULL ARTICLE ON POLITICO.COM »

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

“Going home is not an option.” My friend and colleague on the Round Table of Retired Immigration Judges, Judge Jeffrey S. Chase used a similar observation as the lead in his recent blog: https://immigrationcourtside.com/2019/12/23/hon-jeffrey-s-chase-crime-refugee-protection-the-implication-that-refugees-should-either-stay-or-return-home-ignores-the-impossibility-of-such-request-as-refugees-by/.

We should never forget the life-tenured Article III judges, mostly on the appellate level including the Supremes, whose abandonment of both their oaths of office and their humanity has enabled the Trump Regime’s all-out assault on the rule of law and our democratic institutions to succeed to the extent it already has.

Trump’s dismantling of the U.S. justice system and all the laws he doesn’t like or doesn’t want to follow counts heavily on the complicity or the outright assistance off Article III Federal Judges. To date, notwithstanding some wimpy disingenuous protests from Chief Justice Roberts, bemoaning the predictable lack of respect for the judicial system that he and his colleagues enabled by their complicity, the higher level Article IIIs haven’t disappointed Trump. That’s how the regime’s scofflaws can, without any legislative action, create “exile cities” in “unsafe third countries” right at our border, in violation of both the guarantees of our asylum laws and the Constitutional right to Due Process!

I spent many years of my career dealing daily with the results of failed states, authoritarian regimes, and fallen democracies. I know a lot about how oppression works and how democracies and constitutional republics fail.

I have some very bad news for the “life-tenured ones” in their ivory towers: failed states, authoritarian regimes, and failed democracies ultimately have no use for anything approaching an independent judiciary. Maybe those Article III appellate judges should think and reflect before they cast their next votes to empower autocracy over democracy.

Due Process Forever!

PWS

01-07-20

Laredo Tent Court	Brownsville Tent Court
Laredo tent court proceedings, including both Master Calendar Hearings and Individual Merits Hearings, were conducted via VTC by immigration judges located at the brick-and-mortar San Antonio immigration court, which is nearly 200 miles away.	Brownsville tent court proceedings, including both Master Calendar Hearings and Individual Merits Hearings, were conducted by immigration judges located at the Harlingen and Port Isabel immigration courts, as well as the El Paso SPC, which is nearly 800 miles away from the Brownsville tent court.
● Respondents appeared in person at the Laredo tent court. ● Immigration judges from the San Antonio Immigration Court appeared via VTC. ● Attorneys of record appeared either (1) at the Laredo tent court or (2) via VTC from the San Antonio brick-and-mortar courtrooms. ● ICE trial attorneys located at the San Antonio Immigration Court appeared via VTC. ● Interpreters interpreted remotely from the San Antonio Immigration Court. ● Witnesses appeared either (1) at the Laredo tent court or (2) via VTC from the San Antonio brick-and-mortar courtrooms. ● Court observers were only permitted to observe Master Calendar Hearings and Individual Merits Hearings at the brick-and-mortar courts	● Respondents appeared in person at the Brownsville tent court. ● Immigration judges from Harlingen, Port Isabel, or El Paso SCP appeared via VTC. ● Attorneys of record appeared either (1) at the Brownsville tent court or (2) via VTC from the immigration judge location. ● ICE trial attorneys appeared via VTC from the immigration judge location. ● Interpreters interpreted remotely from the immigration judge location. ● Witnesses appeared either (1) at the Brownsville tent court or (2) via VTC from the immigration judge location. ● Court observers were only permitted to observe Master Calendar Hearings and Individual Merits Hearings at the brick-and-mortar courts.

Due Process Forever! Complicity In The Face Of Tyranny, Never!

Related posts:

Related posts:

Due Process Forever; Feckless, Complicit, Immoral Federal Judges Never!

Related posts:

Related posts:

Related posts:

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

Related posts:

Related posts:

Due Process Forever!

Related posts:

Related posts:

Related posts:

Ford writes:

Opinion: The immigration crisis and the racism driving it have roots in Hitler’s ‘bible’

Related posts:

Related posts:

Related posts:

Related posts:

Due Process Forever!

Related posts: