Undocumented Individuals – Page 60 – immigrationcourtside.com

INSIDE TRUMP’S “NEW AMERICAN GULAG” (“NAG”): Where So-Called “Civil Immigration Detainees” Asserting Their Legal Rights Are Punished In Ways That Would Be “Cruel & Unusual” If Applied To Convicted Criminals!

https://edition.pagesuite.com/popovers/dynamic_article_popover.aspx?guid=6efdc532-da2a-4e07-8ea4-f1876c153c07&v=sdk

Tom K. Wong writes in the LA Times:

The Trump administration has attempted to close the door on asylum seekers who are looking for refuge in the United States. But even as it blocks entry — and sends tens of thousands of asylum seekers to Mexico to wait out their immigration proceedings — thousands of families with children are also being held in federal immigration detention facilities.

Because the administration has prohibited advocacy groups, journalists, immigration attorneys and even congressional staff from entering detention facilities to document conditions and interview detainees, the public has had only anecdotal glimpses into how detainees were treated. Now we have systematic evidence to support accounts of the harsh conditions that asylum seekers experience in immigration detention. In many ways, it is worse than we thought.

From October 2018 through June 2019, the San Diego Rapid Response Network (SDRRN) assisted approximately 7,300 asylum-seeking families at their shelters. These families, who were processed and then admitted into the U.S., totaled more than 17,000 people, including 7,900 children 5 years old or younger. My team and I at the U.S. Immigration Policy Center (USIPC) at UC San Diego independently analyzed intake data collected by the SDRRN for all of these families.

In a report released last week, we found that approximately 35% of the asylum-seeking heads of households we studied reported problems related to conditions in immigration detention, treatment in immigration detention, or medical issues. This finding is alarming since it’s very likely an underestimate, because the SDRRN was focused on providing needed services to the asylum-seeking families, not administering questionnaires. Moreover, abuses or problems in detention may be underreported by asylum seekers who are afraid that raising complaints may negatively affect their asylum case.

Of those who reported issues related to conditions in detention, approximately 6 out of 10 reported food and water problems, including not having enough to eat, being fed frozen food, being fed spoiled food, not being given formula for infants, not being given water, and having to drink dirty or foul-tasting water. Approximately half reported having to sleep on the floor, having to sleep with the lights on, overcrowded conditions, confinement, and the temperature being too cold in “la hielera,” the detention facilities known as the “iceboxes.” Approximately 1 out of every 3 reported not having access to clean or sanitary toilets, being able to shower or being able to brush their teeth.

About 1 out of 10 of the asylum-seeking heads of households — or more than 700 of them — reported verbal abuse, physical abuse or some form of mistreatment in immigration detention. Examples of verbal abuse include being told “we don’t want your kind here” and “you’re an ape,” among others. Examples of physical abuse include being thrown against the wall when attempting to get a drink of water.

The data also showed the great diversity of those who arrive at the southern border to seek refuge. The majority of the asylum-seeking families came from the “Northern Triangle” of Central America — Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador. However, many also came from other continents, 28 in all, including the Democratic Republic of Congo, Russia, Kazakhstan, India, China and Vietnam, to name a few. Any changes to U.S. asylum policies meant to deter Central Americans from entering at the southern border will affect asylum seekers from all over the world who are also looking to the U.S. for safety.

We also found that just over 1 out of 5 of these families do not speak Spanish as their primary language. The languages spoken range from indigenous Central American languages — including K’iche’, Q’eqchi’ and Mam — to Creole, Mandarin, Portuguese, Russian, Hindi, Vietnamese and Romanian, among others. This linguistic diversity presents another set of challenges.

When asylum seekers are released from detention, they are given detailed instructions on a form called the “Notice to Appear,” including instructions about their immigration court dates, times and locations. On the notice, immigration officials indicate the language that the asylum seeker was given these instructions in. For those whose primary language is not Spanish, nearly 9 out of every 10 were nevertheless given instructions in Spanish. If these families are not provided instructions about their immigration proceedings in a language they can understand, they will not be able to navigate an extremely complex legal process, which may infringe on their basic rights to due process.

From substandard conditions in immigration detention to verbal and physical abuse to serious due process concerns, the data show that the Trump administration is not abiding by its obligations under U.S. and international asylum and refugee law to treat humanely those who are seeking protection from persecution.

With the administration now determined to hold asylum-seeking families for potentially as long as it takes for their immigration proceedings to play out (which could be years), conditions may get worse. Cruelty, after all, may very well be the point.

Tom K. Wong is associate professor of political science and director of the U.S. Immigration Policy Center at UC San Diego.

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What kind of country allows its leaders to impose these types of abuses on vulnerable individuals whose “crime” is seeking protection under our laws and the international conventions that they implement?

Why are “Big Mac” and other Trump sycophants at DHS allowed to lie with impunity about what is really happening in DHS detention, the real inhuman consequences of “Remain in Mexico” (a/k/a “Let ‘Em Die in Mexico”), and abuse “Safe Third Country” agreements by dishonestly pretending that Guatemala, one of the world’s most notoriously dangerous and corrupt “failed states,” meets the statutory requirements?

A key point in Professor Wong’s article is that many, probably the majority, of those released from detention receive inadequate explanations of their obligations to report current addresses and appear for both Immigration Court Hearings and separate ICE detention “check-ins.” Combined with this Administration’s obstinate refusal to work closely and cooperatively with legal services groups to maximize representation, it leads to many unnecessary, yet largely intentional on the part of DHS & EOIR, so-called “no shows.” These, in turn, get bogus “in absentia orders” from Immigration Judges operating under excruciating and inappropriate pressure to “produce numbers, not justice.” This, in turn, feeds the demonstrably false DHS narrative, oft repeated by “Big Mac With Lies” & others, that a large number of asylum seekers will “abscond” if released in the U.S.

It’s all part of a White Nationalist restrictionist immigration agenda that when finally exposed in detail after Trump and his cronies leave office will paint America as foolish, corrupt, and cowardly. Is this the “legacy” we truly want to leave to future generations?

Join the “New Due Process Army” and fight to restore the rule of law and Constitutional order and to end the corruption and daily human rights abuses of the Trump Administration!

PWS

09-0-19

9TH CIR/TRUMP “KILL ‘EM IN MEXICO PROGRAM” ENDANGERS ASYLUM SEEKERS & THOSE WHO ASSIST THEM —Judicial Disgrace Continues To Destroy Lives, Mock Humanity, Undermine The Rule of Law! — “Extortion-minded mobs view vulnerable migrants as walking ATMs.“

https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2019-09-01/kidnapping-of-pastor-in-mexican-border-town-dramatizes-threats-to-migrants

Patrick J. McDonnell

Mexico City Bureau Chief

LA Times

NUEVO LAREDO, Mexico — The kidnappers came to the shelter near the U.S.-Mexico border looking for Cuban migrants, favored targets because relatives in the United States are known to pay exorbitant ransoms to free abducted loved ones.

In cartel-dominated Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, a gateway to the United States, it’s a lucrative racket: Snatch a migrant from Cuba, Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, Venezuela or elsewhere; commandeer their cellphones; then call U.S. relatives demanding thousands of dollars.

No need to spell out the consequences of nonpayment in the lawless Mexican border state of Tamaulipas, known for mass graves and massacres of migrants — including hundreds slain by gunmen of the Zetas cartel outside the town of San Fernando in 2010-11.

(Los Angeles Times)

On Aug. 3, when the Rev. Aaron Mendez, an evangelical pastor and head of the Amar shelter, refused the kidnappers’ demands, the thugs took him away.

The pastor entered the twilight world of Mexico’s “disappeared” — officially 37,000 and growing, with Tamaulipas state leading Mexico in the grisly statistic. Federal and state police are investigating what happened to Mendez, said Ivan Moyle, a spokesman for the Tamaulipas prosecutor’s office, who declined to comment further.

The case has dramatized the systematic fashion of abductions and shakedowns faced by migrants and others at an especially sensitive time — when U.S. authorities have been expelling tens of thousands of Central Americans, Cubans and others back to Mexico’s crime-ridden border cities under the Trump administration’s Migrant Protection Protocols, known informally as “Remain in Mexico.”

Under the program, rolled out in January in the border cities of Tijuana and San Diego — and later expanded to other U.S.-Mexico crossings — more than 37,500 U.S.-bound migrants have been returned to Mexico to wait for U.S. court hearings. Many intend to seek political asylum in the United States.

More than 3,000 have been dispatched across the Rio Grande to Tamaulipas — both to Nuevo Laredo, opposite Laredo, Texas; and to Matamoros, sister city to Brownsville, Texas — since the program was extended in July. Mexican authorities provide little housing or other aid to the returnees, who are often left on the streets to fend for themselves.

Extortion-minded mobs view vulnerable migrants as walking ATMs. They are easy prey, lacking family ties in Mexico and known to have U.S. relatives with access to dollars. Mob halcones — hawks, or lookouts — watch bus stations and other strategic spots, eyeing potential quarry.

Though drug trafficking provides the bulk of cartel income, Mexico’s organized crime groups are multibillion-dollar conglomerates that also control migrant smuggling, kidnapping and other illicit ventures, working in cahoots with corrupt police and politicians.

“There is no protection,” said Father Julio Lopez, a Catholic priest who runs the Casa de Migrante Nazareth shelter in Nuevo Laredo.

Three Honduran migrant families who returned to Mexico under the Migrant Protection Protocols recently recounted in interviews with the Los Angeles Times how gangsters kidnapped them, obliging relatives in the United States to pay ransoms. All three said they had alerted U.S. immigration officials that they had been abducted in Mexico — but were nonetheless sent back to Mexico.

U.S. authorities say multiple factors are considered when determining whether apprehended migrants should be sent back to Mexico, including whether they face persecution or torture. Claims by migrants are documented, authorities said, but fear of being kidnapped does not necessarily disqualify detainees from being sent back to Mexico.

“One of our main priorities in the U.S. Border Patrol is the safety and the well-being of the people that we apprehend,” said Jose A. Martinez, acting assistant chief Border Patrol agent in Laredo, Texas.

The State Department has slapped its highest security alert on Tamaulipas, noting that “armed criminal groups target public and private passenger buses as well as private automobiles traveling through Tamaulipas, often taking passengers hostage and demanding ransom payments.”

Beti Suyapa Ortega, 36, said she was unaware of the extent of the danger when she boarded a Mexican public bus last month headed for the U.S. border with her son, Robinson Javier Melara, 17. The single mother of five from the northern Honduran state of Yoro said she was fleeing maras, or gangs, that demanded weekly extortion payments at her family’s grocery store.

“The maras in Honduras are bad, but here I think they are even worse,” Ortega said.

Ortega spoke in a sweltering ground-floor waiting room in the concrete compound of Mexico’s immigration agency in Nuevo Laredo, where she and others fearful of going outside lingered for hours on plastic chairs and mats strewn on the floor.

On Aug. 4, Ortega said, she and her son were on a bus when a group of about 10 men flagged the vehicle down on the outskirts of Nuevo Laredo. The gangsters demanded that passengers produce identification and forced all foreigners off the vehicle, she said.

“We control this area!” one of the toughs declared, saying that he and the others were from the Northeast Cartel — the dominant gang in Nuevo Laredo and splinter faction of the hyper-violent Zetas mob.

Ortega and her son were taken to a house where about a dozen other migrants were being held, she said, and the kidnappers grabbed her phone. They found the number of her younger brother, Kevin Joel Ortega, 25, who had arrived in Atlanta a few months earlier. The captors snapped photos of Ortega and her son and dispatched the images to her brother, demanding $8,000 for their release, she said.

“If he didn’t pay, they said they would turn us over to ‘other people,’” Ortega said, trembling as she recalled the ominous phrasing. “My brother said it would take him time to raise the money, that he had just arrived, but please not to do anything to us.”

Ortega and her son were held for two weeks in a room with others, sleeping on the floor, receiving two daily meals — mostly beans and rice — and spending much of the time bored and watching a large flat-screen TV, she said. Her jailers did not physically harm anyone, she said, but angrily called the captives’ relatives in the United States daily, insisting on the payments.

“A time finally comes when one is not afraid anymore,” said Ortega, who was barefoot as she kept a close eye on her teenage son, the eldest of her five children, resting on the mat in the grimy Mexican immigration outpost. Her other four kids remained in Honduras.

Her brother in Atlanta was instructed to deposit the funds electronically in five different U.S. bank accounts, Ortega said.

On Aug. 18, when the money had been paid, Ortega said, she and her son were driven to a spot along the Rio Grande, where the cartel strictly controls illicit crossings, and taken across the river in an inflated tire tube.

Ortega and her son were detained in U.S. custody in Texas for two nights, she said, before being released with a court date of Dec. 10 in San Antonio.

“We told them [U.S. immigration authorities] we had been kidnapped, but they didn’t believe us,” Ortega said.

On Aug. 20, U.S. Border Patrol officers returned Ortega, her son and 18 other distraught migrants on foot to Nuevo Laredo across the Juarez-Lincoln International Bridge that spans the Rio Grande, in a sullen procession repeated here daily beneath the blazing sun. Many clutched transparent plastic bags emblazoned with the seal of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and containing notices to appear in immigration court.

But Ortega, like the others huddled in the Mexican immigration depot, said she had no intention of sticking around Nuevo Laredo. She was too frightened. She and fellow migrants were waiting for bus transport to Tapachula, a Mexican city near the Guatemalan border. The one-way rides are a Mexican government initiative that serves a double purpose — removing discouraged migrants from the perilous border zone, while also diminishing the chances that they will make the long and hazardous trip back for U.S. court dates.

“We’ve had enough,” Ortega said.

Also waiting for the bus was Maria Suyapa Rodriguez, 35, and her 12-year-old son. She and her son, she said, had also been kidnapped — on Aug. 15 at the Nuevo Laredo bus terminal, one of the most treacherous spots in town. The two were released two days later when her sister in New York agreed to pay a ransom, said Rodriguez, who did not know the amount. The pair subsequently crossed the Rio Grande, she said, and surrendered to the Border Patrol, which returned them to Mexico.

Like Ortega, Rodriguez said she had given up and would forgo her Jan. 10 U.S. court date and return home to Honduras, following the tracks of so many migrants, broke and petrified of Mexican organized crime.

In one case, said Father Lopez, a Guatemalan man swallowed his phone’s SIM card to prevent kidnappers from tracking down relatives. A Honduran kidnap victim recalled flushing papers with the scrawled numbers of U.S. kin down the toilet.

Among the recent clients at Casa de Migrante Nazareth was Rosa Emilia Torrez, 45, her husband and her two children, a 12-year-old son and an infant daughter. Kidnappers grabbed the family at the Nuevo Laredo bus station July 21, Torrez said, two days after U.S. immigration authorities expelled them back to Nuevo Laredo. The family had planned to take a bus to Durango, Mexico, and wait at a relative’s home until their Sept. 25 U.S. court date, Torrez said.

Their captors released the family July 28, according to Torrez, after her brother-in-law in New Orleans paid $16,000, negotiated down from an initial demand of $32,000.

The kidnappers, Torrez said, then insisted on taking the family back across the Rio Grande to Texas, where, Torrez said, the Border Patrol arrested the family again.

Torrez said she tried to explain to the agents that the kidnappers forced them to return to the U.S. side — and that they feared being sent back to Mexico yet again — but no one paid any attention.

“We just take your fingerprints and send you back to Mexico,” the Border Patrol agent told her, Torrez said.

U.S. immigration authorities returned the family to Nuevo Laredo on Aug. 1, said Torrez, who added that her family plans to find safe housing somewhere in Mexico and show up for their immigration hearing in Texas later this month.

“We came this far,” Torrez said. “We aren’t turning back now.”

Times staff writer Molly Hennessy-Fiske in Houston and Cecilia Sanchez of The Times’ Mexico City bureau contributed to this report.

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Patrick J. McDonnell is the Los Angeles Times Mexico City bureau chief. McDonnell is a native of the Bronx, where he majored in Irish-American studies and N.Y. Yankee fandom. He is a graduate of New York University and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, was a Nieman fellow at Harvard and a 2014 Pulitzer finalist in international reporting for coverage from inside Syria.

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Cowardly tyrants like Trump his lying DHS lackeys like McAleenan & co. count on the complicity of at least some Federal Judges to get away with their program of undermining the rule of law and violating human rights. So far, the Ninth Circuit has obliged them when it comes to declaring “open season” on the world’s most vulnerable individuals seeking, but not finding, justice and fairness under our law.

The “Big Lie” By U.S. Border Patrol:

“One of our main priorities in the U.S. Border Patrol is the safety and the well-being of the people that we apprehend,” said Jose A. Martinez, acting assistant chief Border Patrol agent in Laredo, Texas.

Obviously, Chief Martinez is a liar. The safety and well-being of those apprehended in the U.S. not only is not a “main priority,” it’s not even “on the radar screen.” Indeed, sending folks who have passed credible fear back to Mexico to be abused and possibly Continue reading 9TH CIR/TRUMP “KILL ‘EM IN MEXICO PROGRAM” ENDANGERS ASYLUM SEEKERS & THOSE WHO ASSIST THEM —Judicial Disgrace Continues To Destroy Lives, Mock Humanity, Undermine The Rule of Law! — “Extortion-minded mobs view vulnerable migrants as walking ATMs.“

LABOR DAY @ WASHPOST: The Toxic Hypocrisy Of Trump & The Restrictionists On The Labor Issue!

LABOR DAY @ WASHPOST: The Toxic Hypocrisy Of Tru.mp & The Restrictionists On The Labor Issue!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/these-days-our-debate-over-labor-is-awash-in-hypocrisy/2019/09/01/d57e735c-c9a4-11e9-a4f3-c081a126de70_story.html

By Editorial Board

September 1 at 5:47 PM

A CYNIC, says a character in one of Oscar Wilde’s novels, is someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. If that’s true, then the debate over the state of labor in the United States these days is awash in cynicism — or maybe it could just be called plain old hypocrisy. And in truth, it’s not so much a debate as a shouting match, largely over the inflamed issue of immigration.

Most of the noise comes from restrictionists, encouraged and shamelessly egged on, for the first time in memory, by a president of the United States. Such people recite figures they have assembled regarding the costs of immigration: its effects on wages, government spending and, of course, our “culture,” which some might take as a cover word for race or ethnicity or religion. But a lot of these compilations are questionable, both in their origins and their conclusions.

And beyond that, there is a great contradiction in such reasoning: It fails to take account of the work immigrants do in this country — the fruits of their labor, which are shared by the entire society. The skylines of metropolitan areas such as ours have been transformed over the past quarter-century by new construction, with immigrants providing a considerable share of the labor. Many of our hospitals, clinics, day-care centers, hotels, homes for the elderly and other institutions could not exist without immigrant employees, who made up about 17 percent of this country’s workforce in 2018, according to a government report.

A quarter of immigrants, in turn, are thought to be unauthorized. Although they are regularly slandered — by the president, among others — as a source of crime and as living off the dole, they are, for the most part, as law-abiding as the general population and are eligible for few government benefits. Not many people with personal knowledge of the matter would question their work ethic. Their labors in farm and field help feed the country; replacing them there would be a daunting task. They serve in some of the most demanding and often unpleasant jobs in our society: slaughtering animals, working long hours outdoors in punishing heat and cold, caring for the elderly, sick and mentally ill, cleaning four or five homes a day.

Strangely enough, this sort of thing is rarely discussed in any serious way on the cable outlets and social media. There is much in the way of insult and calumny toward impoverished immigrants (they “make our country poorer and dirtier,” said one popular TV opinionizer) but little constructive thought on how this country, with a static and aging native population and a tightening labor market, can continue to prosper without a reasonable amount of immigration.

Although unauthorized immigrants are routinely demonized by some in Congress and the media, there is a sizable part of the country, perhaps a majority, that does not consider their presence here to be criminal, that in fact sympathizes with them. There aren’t many other kinds of lawbreakers of whom that can be said. The recent immigration raid on agricultural processing plants in Mississippi, in which nearly 700 workers were rounded up, brought forth a wave of help and support for the workers and their families from people around the country, including churches and neighbors in Mississippi.

Practical and intelligent proposals are being made for dealing with the problems of immigration and work. But nothing can be done unless more of this country pays attention to the realities in working America in the coming election year and not to the dark maundering of demagogic doomsayers.

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Yup.

Largely what I’ve been saying all along on “Courtside.” The solution to the largely manufactured “immigration crisis” is staring us in the face.

Legalize those already in the labor force, so that they can be fully protected from exploitation by minimum wage, wage and hour, and OSHA laws, and reach their full economic potential in our society (which would also maximize tax revenues and Social Security contributions).

Then, provide many more legal immigration opportunities for workers and families, both permanent and temporary, to keep America great and prevent us from suffering the type of economic stagnation that has hit Japan and other “low immigration” countries.

The main things standing in the way of such rational and practical solutions are Trump and the hard core GOP restrictionists who prop him up.

Sadly, it also appears that some, not all, within the massive DHS bureaucracy have become invested in cruel and futile immigration enforcement which requires endless taxpayer money and bodies to maintain its cycle of inevitable, yet sometimes politically advantageous, “enforcement-only” failures.

PWS

09-02-19

LABOR DAY TRIBUTE: Carlos Lozada’s “Review of ‘A Good Provider Is One Who Leaves: One Family and Migration in the 21st Century’ by Jason DeParle”

Carols Lozada — Carlos Lozada
Journalist

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/08/30/many-immigrants-family-separation-happens-long-before-border/

There is a family separation that occurs long before an immigrant reaches America’s borders. It is no less wrenching than the ruptures that the Trump administration inflicted on thousands of children and parents last year as part of its “zero tolerance” policy against illegal entry, and may at times be even more painful, since it happens voluntarily. That is, if acts born of despair can ever be described as entirely voluntary.

In “A Good Provider Is One Who Leaves,” journalist Jason DeParle’s riveting multigenerational tale of one Filipino family dispersing across the globe, from Manila to Abu Dhabi to Galveston, Tex., and so many places in between, separation is a constant worry and endless toll. Parents leave their kids and country for years at a time so they can send back wages many multiples of what they previously earned. Children yearn for their parents, rebelling or wilting without them, while the youngest latch on to aunts and grandparents. Births, birthdays, weddings, illnesses, funerals — daily life slips by for the absent, imagined and unexperienced. Meanwhile, the government encourages the exodus; 1 in 7 laborers in the Philippines becomes an Overseas Filipino Worker (OFW), a status so common it rates not just an acronym but also an industry of private middlemen and government agencies managing a sector that accounts for one-10th of the country’s economy.

But the price is loneliness and longing. “The two main themes of Overseas Filipino Worker life are homesickness and money,” DeParle writes. “Workers suffer the first to get the second.” With immigration a central battleground in the Trump-era culture wars, and with the southern U.S. border and Hispanic influx dominating the political debate, this book provides crucial insight into the global scope, shifting profiles and, above all, individual sacrifices of the migrant experience.

DeParle, a New York Times reporter, tells the story of Emet, Tita and their daughter Rosalie, as well as their other children and grandchildren — a Manila family he first encountered and lived with for several months in the late 1980s. As a young reporter, DeParle wanted to better understand poverty, but in the Philippines, that meant learning about migration instead. The title of his book is also the Portagana family’s unofficial creed, a pained mix of self-affirmation and abnegation.

Emet cleaned pools in a government complex in the Philippines, earning $50 a month, barely enough to scrape by with his family in their Manila shantytown. When he has the chance to clean pools in Saudi Arabia for $500 per month, he takes it, while his wife of 14 years and their five children stay behind. “Ever since his orphaned childhood, all he had wanted was a family, but to support one, he had to leave it.” Tita cries when Emet departs, left to fend for herself and the family, rising at 4:30 a.m. to boil the breakfast rice, washing the school clothes every day, making every tough decision — does she pay for a doctor’s visit or for more food? — on her own.

When Emet first sends money, she cries again. “Tita stopped running out of fish and rice,” DeParle recounts. “She bought extra school uniforms so she didn’t have to wash every day. . . . After years of toothaches, she had seven teeth pulled and treated herself to dentures. . . . But the ultimate luxury was the family’s first bed.” She told Deparle how “I was ecstatic we could lay on something soft.”

New comforts are part of “migrant lore,” DeParle writes. Some analysts worry that remittances lead to consumerist splurges, but families receiving migrant income also invest in housing, health care and education. Migration serves as a tool of economic development, DeParle suggests, because of migrants’ enduring loyalty to the family back home. Of the 11 siblings in Tita’s own family, nine worked abroad, as did all five of Tita and Emet’s children. When DeParle returned to the Philippines two decades after having lived in Tita’s home, he saw that the family’s old straw huts had morphed into a compound of a dozen houses for various relatives — and the quality of the amenities bore a direct relationship to how long each owner had worked abroad. But an aging Emet still pondered the price, nostalgic for the days in the slum. “I was happier then,” he acknowledges, “because I was with my children.”

[Who gets to dream? America’s immigration battles go beyond walls and borders.]

Rosalie, their middle child, emerges as the book’s itinerant protagonist, not simply because she becomes the clan’s essential breadwinner as a nurse in America but because, for DeParle, she embodies the new face of migration. “Since 2008, the United States has attracted more Asians than Latin Americans, and nearly half of the newcomers, like Rosalie, have college degrees. Every corner of America has an immigrant like her.” Long male-dominated, migration has been increasingly feminized, in part because of the demand for caregiving workers in rich countries, a need that women have disproportionately filled. “By the mid-1990s when Rosalie went abroad, nearly half the world’s migrants were women — more than half in the United States — and they increasingly went as breadwinners, not spouses.”

Rosalie was a quiet child and an average student who considered religious life in Manila — not necessarily someone you’d pick to make it through nursing school, move to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates for several years, and take and retake English-language tests until, after 20 years of working, she could obtain a visa to the United States, take on a night shift in a Galveston hospital and embrace suburban life. She is separated from her own children, just as she suffered years without Emet. Her eldest daughter grows attached to Rosalie’s sister Rowena as a sort of surrogate mother, calling her “Mama Wena” and struggling with her aunt’s absence after reuniting with Rosalie in Texas.

Having long operated as a far-flung family, Rosalie, her husband, Chris, and their three kids must not only learn to live in America — they have to learn to live together. DeParle’s examination of how the two daughters adapt to U.S. elementary schools, seeking to become more all-American than the Americans, even as their parents find solace in Texas’s Filipino immigrant networks, is a minor classic of the assimilation experience. He also reflects on the impact of communications technology on migrant communities: “Can assimilation survive Skype?” DeParle wonders, seeing how it eases transitions by helping relatives stay in touch across time zones but also lengthens and deepens immigrants’ ties with the old country.

After all, even when you’ve left, you’re never entirely gone. Any health crisis among her extended family in the Philippines results in new bills for Rosalie to cover from afar. Chronically exhausted at the hospital — where Filipino nurses feel they get shorthanded shifts and sicker patients — she must also deal with the insecurities of her suddenly stay-at-home husband, whose masculine self-perception suffers in the face of his provider-wife. (“Would you be ashamed of Daddy if I worked as a janitor?” Chris asks the kids as he seeks a job in Galveston.) DeParle highlights this “inversion” of traditional gender roles in the modern migrant experience. For women, “migration elevated their incomes, raised their status, and increased their power within their marriages,” he writes. “But it also took many away from their children, often to care for the children of others, and elevated the risks of abuse.”

DeParle has a gift for distilling complexity into pithy formulations. “Migration is history’s ripple effect,” he writes, noting how U.S. colonialism led to the establishment of the Philippines’ first nursing schools, an industry that would propel Rosalie to America a century later. He also aptly captures the United States’ conflicted feelings about immigrants, a mix of resentment and need. “Unwelcomed is not the same as unwanted,” he explains simply. And the ominous U.S. Embassy in Manila, the repository of so much hope and so many fears for Filipino visa seekers, is “the gateway to opportunity, but marines guard the gate.” The book is packed with insights masked as throwaway lines — lines that convey so much.

So I wish DeParle had conveyed more about his own role in the story of this remarkable family. “Our relationship defies easy categorization; it’s part author-subject, part old friends,” he writes, likening himself to a big brother for Rosalie and uncle to her kids. “This was a journalistic endeavor but not an entirely arm’s-length one,” DeParle admits. “Occasionally my presence shaped events I was trying to record.” Some of these events were crucial. He gets Rosalie an English tutor for her exams. He spends hours on the phone helping Rosalie practice for her interview with the Galveston hospital. Most essential, he intervenes when bureaucratic scheduling nearly derails a final visa approval. “I was there as a journalist, not an advocate,” he writes. “But Rosalie had been waiting for twenty years.” So he helps by speaking with a U.S. Foreign Service officer. It is an entirely humane impulse, and DeParle stresses that the determination that got Rosalie to America “is hers alone.” But the author’s unexpected appearances complicate and at times confuse his narrative.

“A Good Provider Is One Who Leaves” has political implications without being an overtly political work. Yes, DeParle’s sympathies are clear. “Rosalie’s experience was a triple win: good for her, good for America, and good for her family in the Philippines,” he writes. “Migration was her vehicle of salvation. It delivered her from the living conditions of the nineteenth century. It respected her talent, rewarded her sweat, and enlarged her capacity for giving.” He also stresses how Filipino immigrants thrive in America, with more education, higher employment, and lower poverty and divorce rates than the native-born.

Yet he mainly calls for calm and compromise around the immigration debates. “Be wary of seeing the issue in absolutist terms,” DeParle warns. He worries that if immigration becomes entrenched as another American culture war, like those over guns or abortion rights, its supporters will have more to lose. The warning comes under a Trump administration that has defined itself through its offensive against migrants, not just rewriting policies but seeking to write immigration out of the American tradition. On this point, DeParle offers a devastating rebuttal in another simple line.

“It’s good,” he concludes, “for your country to be the place where people go to make dreams come true.”

Follow Carlos Lozada on Twitter and read his latest essays and book reviews, . . . .

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

This story reminds me of the dramatic presentation about her own family’s immigrant experience delivered by my friend and co-teacher Professor Jennifer Esperanza of Beloit College during our recent Bjorklunden Seminar on American Immigration. I’ve posted it before, but here it is again. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OEODrtuj_Pk&t=323s

One of the points Jenn makes is how she channeled the challenges of her childhood into learning that led to a lifetime of success and high achievement.

PWS

09-02-19

FAILED STATE: Trump & “Big Mac” Claim Guatemala Is A “Safe Third Country” For Asylum Seekers — They Lie! — The Truth Is Ugly: “Guatemala in grip of ‘mafia coalition’, says UN body in scathing corruption report!”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/aug/28/guatemala-corruption-mafia-coalition-jimmy-morales?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

From the Guardian:

Cicig says in final report before mandate expires corruption ‘cannot be solved without profound restructuring of the state’

Associated Press in Guatemala City

Published:

17:09 Wednesday, 28 August 2019

A UN commission that spent the last 12 years investigating graft in Guatemala has described the country as “captured” by corruption in its final report, days before it is set to wrap up operations after President Jimmy Morales refused to renew its mandate.

The commission, known as Cicig for its initials in Spanish, said in its final report that there is a “mafia coalition” among members of government, the business community and private individuals that is “willing to sacrifice Guatemala’s present and future to guarantee impunity and preserve the status quo”.

The commission chief Iván Velásquez, a Colombian lawyer who has been barred by Morales’ government from entering Guatemala, said via video conference from Colombia that the report would be the commission’s last public act.

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“We almost got to the nucleus of the structures that have captured the state,” Velásquez said. “This cannot be solved without a profound restructuring of the state.”

The commission began its work in Guatemala in 2007 at the request of then-president Óscar Berger and was given responsibility for dismantling illegality in the wake of the country’s 1960-1996 civil war.

Morales accused the body of overreaching its authority last year, after the commission brought investigations against him, some of his relatives and his inner circle. He was protected from prosecution as a sitting president and has denied wrongdoing.

While many observers praised the commission for its work, which resulted in the prosecution of more than 400 people, including the former president Otto Pérez Molina, his vice-president and much of his cabinet, Morales decided that Cicig had run its course, setting up its impending departure on 3 September.

Critics saw Morales’ refusal to renew the commission’s mandate as an attempt to protect himself and those close to him.

The report said the “impunity of power” in Guatemala dates to colonial times.

Guatemala elections show corruption rampant four years after uprising toppled president

One of the reasons why corruption networks persist today, it said, is that “they have distorted democratic institutionality in their favor and they have molded the political system and designed mechanisms that allow them to occupy positions of power, manipulating legislation.”

“Between 2012 and 2015, an illicit, political-economic network took over the executive (branch), subordinated the legislative, manipulated and interfered in the election of judges to high courts and, in addition to looting the state, promoted laws and policies favoring private companies to the detriment of competition and the citizenry,” the report continued.

All that benefited drug trafficking networks, it added.

Together with Guatemalan prosecutors, the commission took down 70 organized crime networks. Those targeted for prosecution have included public officials, lawmakers, judges, businesspeople and other civilians.

It also investigated Morales’ National Convergence Front for alleged illegal political financing.

The report said illicit political money is “present in the majority of campaigns and parties” and comes from criminal organizations including drug traffickers seeking territorial control and political protection, as well as businesspeople seeking influence.

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

Seems like the life threatening lies and misuse of Government authority should be enough to remove both of these congenital liars from office.

PWS

08-31-19

IMMIGRATION COURTS: “MALICIOUS INCOMPETENCE ON STEROIDS” — With Court System Reeling & Asylum Applicants Suffering, Administration Plans Another Round Of Massive “Aimless Docket Reshuffling” (“ADR”), Reports Hamed Aleaziz @ BuzzFeed News!

https://apple.news/A3UINub7KSjuOLcKAHDJMLw

Hamed Aleaziz reports for BuzzFeed News:

A Surge Of Immigration Judges Are Expected To Handle The Cases Of Thousands Forced To Wait In Mexico

“This will wreak havoc on court dockets across the country,” said one immigration court official.

Hamed Aleaziz

BuzzFeed News Reporter

A 10-month-old boy, whose family fled violence in El Salvador, waits in a tent in Tijuana, Mexico, for an immigration court hearing in the US.

Department of Homeland Security officials expect about 150 immigration judges from across the US will be selected to handle cases involving asylum-seekers forced to remain in Mexico while their cases proceed, according to a source with knowledge of the matter, a massive potential increase in assignments that threatens to overwhelm an already struggling court system.

Around a dozen judges currently presiding over courts in San Diego and El Paso, Texas, handle the cases of people referred under Migration Protection Protocols, the controversial Trump administration policy forcing asylum-seekers to remain in Mexico as their cases move through the immigration system. While the cases can take months or years to be scheduled, the number of individuals included in the program has expanded to more than 35,000, according to figures obtained by BuzzFeed News.

The Trump administration hopes to change that by soon opening facilities along the border to handle the cases. Officials plan to open two border courts in Texas — in Laredo and Brownsville — by the middle of September, in which they will hear up to 20 cases per day, according to a government briefing document obtained by BuzzFeed News. A DHS spokesperson said the date the facilities would open was still to be determined.

On Tuesday, Rep. Lucille Roybal-Allard, who chairs the House DHS Appropriations Subcommittee, revealed in a letter that the agency had plans to transfer $155 million in federal disaster funds to Immigration and Customs Enforcement to help fund the new facilities.

The cases heard at the border are expected to be conducted primarily via video teleconferencing, allowing for more judges across the country to be brought into the process. Assistants, working on contract, will help organize the hearings by taking roll call, send case documents to judges in other locations, and operate the video systems, according to a separate DHS planning document obtained by BuzzFeed News.

Judges assigned these cases could be forced to delay other asylum and deportation hearings that had already been scheduled, causing a ripple effect and further growing an already bloated court backlog of hundreds of thousands of cases.

People wait inside an immigration court in Miami.

“Once again immigration judges from courts across the country will have to push their home court dockets aside to preside televideo at border courts,” said one immigration court official who could not speak publicly on the matter. “This will wreak havoc on court dockets across the country.”

At a San Diego court that has presided over many “Remain in Mexico” cases for months, judges have been told to prioritize the hearings over others, according to a source with knowledge of the change. As a result, some immigrants who have waited for months or years for their previously scheduled cases will likely have their hearings delayed.

“The prioritization of MPP cases will place a huge burden on the immigration courts,” said a DOJ official involved with immigration matters. “Additionally, the postponement of previously scheduled cases will cause the backlog to grow even more, as the completion of these cases will be further delayed for months or even years.”

Rebecca Jamil, a former immigration judge under the Trump administration, said that the cases on judge’s dockets don’t go away when they are assigned new cases.

“Those families have been waiting for years to have their cases heard, and now will wait another two or three years, and due process is denied by the delay — evidence becomes stale, witnesses die, country conditions change,” she said.

The Department of Justice, which oversees the Executive Office for Immigration Review, which manages the nation’s immigration courts, is prepared to meet the demands from the DHS on any hearings, an agency spokesperson said.

The potential changes come as data revealed by Syracuse University indicates that asylum-seekers forced to wait in Mexico rarely have legal representation; just 1% of individuals are accompanied by attorneys at their hearings.

The Remain in Mexico program is one of the few hardline Trump immigration policies that has thus far survived a court injunction. While a federal court judge in San Francisco blocked the policy earlier this year, a 9th Circuit Court of Appeals panel allowed it to continue as a legal challenge works its way through the court process.

Asylum-seekers who were returned to Mexico under the Trump administration have faced consequences of remaining there, according to advocacy group Human Rights First. The group found more than 100 cases of people returned under the program alleging rapes, kidnappings, sexual exploitation, or assault, according to a report released this month.

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This is the result of the complete abdication of duty by the Ninth Circuit in Innovation Law Lab v. McAleenan, that lifted a proper, life-saving U.S. District Court injunction and allowed the Administration’s patently illegal and immoral “Kill ‘Em in Mexico Program” to proceed.

The solution: There is no such thing as a “fair” asylum denial under this program. Yes, not everyone meets the criteria. But, everyone is entitled to a fair chance to present a claim, free from duress, coercion, and biased judging, which is not happening.

Advocates must flood the Ninth Circuit and the other border circuits with petitions for review and other types of court actions forcing these complicit Article III “Ivory Tower Judges,” who believe they have removed themselves from the fray, with the human carnage resulting from their gross dereliction of duty to enforce the statutory and Constitutional rights of asylum seekers.

The disgusting and spineless performance of the Article IIIs in light of the Administration’s bogus, illegal actions to “deter” legitimate asylum seekers is nothing short of a national disgrace. If not corrected, it will rightfully tarnish the reputation of the Federal Courts and the individual judges involved for generations to come.

PWS

08-30-19

IMMIGRATION COURTS: After Two Years Of Trump Administration Anti-Immigrant Shenanigans At EOIR, The Backlog Has Mushroomed To 975,298, Morale Has Hit Rock Bottom, & Due Process Is Mocked Every Day — There Is A Solution, But Will Our Republic Survive Enough To Reach It?

https://www.themarshallproject.org/2019/08/28/is-it-time-to-remove-immigration-courts-from-presidential-control

Julia Preston reports for The Marshall Project:

By JULIA PRESTON

A string of directives from President Donald Trump’s Justice Department that have reduced the authority of immigration judges and limited their control of their courtrooms has given new urgency to calls for a complete overhaul of the immigration courts.

Those courts now exist within the Justice Department and answer to the attorney general. Proposals for Congress to exercise its constitutional powers and create separate, independent immigration courts have long been dismissed as costly pipe dreams. But under Trump, judges and others in the court system say they are facing an unprecedented effort to restrain due process and politicize the courts with the president’s hard line on immigrants and demands for deportations.

“It’s time for the Department of Justice and the immigration courts to get a divorce,” said Jeremy McKinney, an attorney who is a vice-president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association.

In a letter in July, the immigration lawyers joined the American Bar Association, the Federal Bar Association and the immigration judges’ union to call on Congress to “establish an independent court system that can guarantee a fair day in court.” The idea is percolating in the Democratic presidential contests, with three candidates—Julián Castro, Beto O’Rourke and Sen. Elizabeth Warren—presenting specific plans. Another candidate, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, drafted a bill last year to make the change.

The chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Rep. Jerrold Nadler, a Democrat from New York, said he will hold hearings on the proposals this fall. There is little chance such a plan would have traction in the Republican-controlled Senate.

Under the proposals, the immigration courts would become a stand-alone agency that would not be run or controlled by outside officials, with the goal of insulating judges from political pressure by any administration.

Department of Justice officials say they are working on a fast track to modernize courts that have been relegated to institutional backwaters. They oppose any plan to separate the courts, saying it would create a bureaucratic and legal morass that would do little to resolve massive backlogs and other chronic problems.

The costs and logistical hurdles “would be monumental and would likely delay pending cases even further,” said Kathryn Mattingly, a Justice Department spokeswoman. The proposals present “significant shortcomings, without any countervailing positive equities,” she said.

But several judges, including three who spoke anonymously because they are not authorized to make public statements, said the Trump administration has pushed the courts too far. The latest salvo emerged from a thicket of legal language in a rule issued Monday by the Justice Department. In a major change, it gives the official in charge of running the courts, who is not a sitting judge, the last word in appeals of some immigration cases. It also gave that official—the director of the Executive Office for Immigration Review, the formal name of the immigration court agency—expanded power to set broadly-defined “policy” for the courts.

The judges’ union reacted with alarm. Judge Ashley Tabaddor, president of the National Association of Immigration Judges, said the rule “removes any semblance of an independent, non-political court system.”

The judges’ association was already reeling after receiving what amounted to a declaration of war on Aug. 9, when the Justice Department filed a decertification petition that would bar judges, who are department employees, from being represented by the union.

Former Attorney General Jeff Sessions used his authority extensively, eliminating judges’ ability to close deportation cases and narrowing the path to asylum for migrant families from Central America fleeing domestic abuse, gang violence and cutthroat cartels. In a recent decision, Attorney General William Barr went further to deny families asylum, overruling long-standing opinions by judges.

Late last year the current director of the courts, James McHenry, under pressure from the White House, ordered judges in 10 busy courts to give priority to cases of families seeking asylum, pushing those cases to the front of their dockets while postponing others. Many judges are frustrated with the “rocket dockets,” finding that they deny many immigrants time to prepare for hearings while unreasonably delaying other cases, further stretching out backlogs.

In recent months McHenry, citing budget constraints, began to limit the availability of language interpreters for initial hearings, where judges see immigrants who speak many different languages. Translators have been replaced with videos providing boilerplate explanations of an immigrant’s rights. Judges said the videos are befuddling to immigrants in their first encounter with the court, and take away time for judges to address each person individually.

What really antagonized many judges was the imposition of quotas for finishing cases, tied to their performance reviews. Since last October, judges must complete at least 700 cases a year, with less than 15 percent of decisions being sent back to them by appeals courts. Time limits were set for many other decisions.

To remind judges of their standing, Justice officials designed a speedometer that sits on judges’ computer screens, with green marking numbers of decisions that meet the metrics and stoplight red indicating where they are lagging.

“So you sit down and you see that dashboard staring at you, updated every day, and you have 50 motions on your desk to decide whether to continue a case,” said Denise Noonan Slavin, who retired as an immigration judge in March after 24 years on the bench. The metrics, she said, inevitably discourage judges from granting more time for cases, even if an immigrant presents a valid argument.

“If judges get into that red, they can lose their job,” Slavin said.

Last October the Justice Department initiated performance metrics for immigration judges (referred to as IJs), setting benchmarks that they must complete at least 700 cases a year and finish other decisions within certain time limits. Speedometers sit on judges’ computer screens, with green showing they are on track with their cases and red signaling they are far behind. U.S. DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE, EXECUTIVE OFFICE FOR IMMIGRATION REVIEW

Most proposals to reconfigure the courts would have Congress act under Article One of the Constitution. The courts would become a separate agency governed by judges, but would remain within the executive branch. There is no appetite for the vast costs and litigation it would take to move the courts to the federal judiciary.

Reformers cite the example of the tax court, which Congress set up in 1969 to have independent judges deciding federal tax disputes, taking them out of the grip of the Internal Revenue Service. Similarly, Judy Perry Martinez, president of the American Bar Association, said in an interview that the immigration courts cannot be fully impartial while they are subordinate to the attorney general, the nation’s top prosecutor.

The Federal Bar Association, which has written a model bill for the transformation, insists it would not be as daunting as it sounds. The bill is drafted “with the idea of simply lifting the courts,” and their budget, out of the Justice Department, said Elizabeth Stevens, chair of the organization’s immigration law section. Under this plan, the courts would remain in existing facilities and current judges would continue to serve for four years before being re-appointed by Senate-confirmed appeals judges to serve in the new system.

Proponents have a harder time explaining how the transition would avoid even more of a bureaucratic sinkhole than existing courts, where the backlog stands at more than 930,000 cases. But Slavin said independent judges would take back their ability to manage cases efficiently, which she said micromanagement under Trump had eroded.

Advocates have few illusions that Trump and a Congress locked in immigration feuds will address their complaints soon. But they want to get the issue on the election year agenda, contending that Democrats and some judicial conservatives among Republicans could vote for an eventual bill.

The Justice Department can be expected to resist. But McKinney, from the lawyers association, said that with the sense of siege in the courts, “Suddenly something that was a dream or a theory is becoming something that could become a reality.”

Julia Preston covered immigration for The New York Times for 10 years, until 2016. She was a member of The Times staff that won the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for reporting on international affairs, for its series that profiled the corrosive effects of drug corruption in Mexico. She is a 1997 recipient of the Maria Moors Cabot Prize for distinguished coverage of Latin America and a 1994 winner of the Robert F. Kennedy Award for Humanitarian Journalism.

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

Lost in the shuffle: With all the money poured down the drain on mindless schemes to DENY DUE PROCESS rather than enhance it, after 19 years of “study and development,” EOIR IS STILL WITHOUT A FUNCTIONAL E-FILING SYSTEM!

Plenty of money for absurd “Judicial Dashboards;” none for even minimally competent court administration. And, how about the reduction in essential interpreter services mentioned in Julia’s article? Talk about “malicious incompetence” in action!

Also, the 975,298 “docketed” cases in the backlog (according to TRAC, as of 07-31-19) DOES NOT include most of the approximately 330,000 “Administratively Closed” cases that Sessions and Barr have idiotically tried to “force” back on the already-backlogged dockets. This week, the Fourth Circuit “called out” this illegal nonsense by emphatically rejecting Sessions’s scofflaw ruling in Matter of Castro-Tum, 27 I&N Dec. 271 (AG 2018). This development was reported in “Courtside” yesterday. https://immigrationcourtside.com/2019/08/29/gonzo-apocalyopto-slammed-unanimous-panel-of-4th-cir-rejects-matter-of-casto-tum-exposes-irrationality-of-biased-unqualified-restrictionist-former-ag/.

Unfortunately, however, the Fourth Circuit’s ruling in Zuniga Romero v. Barr currently only applies in the Baltimore, Arlington, and Charlotte Immigration Courts. This leaves the rest of the country in the type of mass confusion and uncertainty that the Trump Administration strives to create.

It’s past time for the Article III Courts to do their duty, put this patently unconstitutional mess out of its misery, and appoint a “Special Master” to restore at least some semblance of Due Process, fundamental fairness, impartiality, quasi-judicial independence, and competent court management to this system pending Congressional reforms to comply with the Constitution.

Most important: judicial intervention might save some human lives that will otherwise be lost as a result of the “malicious incompetence” with which the Trump Administration regularly has abused the “captive” U.S. Immigration Courts.

PWS

08-30-19

JUSTICE FARCE: BARR PACKS APPEALS BOARD WITH “JUDGES” KNOWN AS ANTI-ASYLUM ZEALOTS! — Body Charged With Insuring Impartiality & Due Process Now Serves As “Chief Persecutor” Of Asylum Applicants — This Is America?

https://apple.news/A4TEHyWG1TfmB-yGzUmx3YA

Noah Lanard reports for Mother Jones:

The Trump Administration’s Court-Packing Scheme Fills Immigration Appeals Board With Hardliners

In his first six years as an immigration judge in New York and Atlanta, from 1993 to 1999, William Cassidy rejected more asylum seekers than any judge in the nation. A few years ago,Earle Wilson overtook Cassidy as the harshest asylum judge on the Atlanta court, which has long been considered one of the toughest immigration courts in the country.

Now both men have been elevated to the Board of Immigration Appeals, which often has the final say over whether immigrants are deported, as part of a court-packing scheme by the Trump administration that is likely to make it even more difficult for migrants fleeing persecution to gain asylum.

Between 2013 and 2018, the average immigration judge in the country approved about 45 percent of asylum claims. The sixjudges newly promoted to the board have all approved fewer than 20 percent. Cassidy granted 4.2 percent of asylum claims. Another appointee, Stuart Couch, approved 7.9 percent. For Wilson, the figure was just 1.9 percent.

Paul Schmidt, who chaired the Board of Immigration of Appeals from 1995 to 2001, says the administration’s goal is to build a “deportation railway” in which cases move through the system as quickly as possible and then get “rubber-stamped by the Board.”

Until last year, the board had 17 members. The Trump administration expanded the board to 21 members, arguing it was necessary to handle an increase in appeals. That has allowed Attorney General William Barr to fill the panel with immigration hardliners. It’s reminiscent of President Franklin Roosevelt’s ill-fated 1937 effort to overcome Supreme Court resistance to the New Deal by adding up to six additional justices—only immigration courts are part of the Justice Department, giving the department the power to expand the Board and fill the new openings with judges sympathetic to the administration’s immigration crackdown.

The promotions of the six judges this month, first reported by the San Francisco Chronicle, are part of an intensifying effort to reshape immigration courts. Earlier this month, the Justice Department moved to eliminate the immigration judges’ union, which has been highly critical of the administration’s policies. On Monday, a regulation took effect that gives the head of the immigration courts, a political appointee, the power to decide appeals if judges do not hear them quickly enough. A rule that gives board members more authority to summarily deny appeals without issuing a full opinion takes effect on Tuesday.

Lawyers who have appeared before Cassidy, Couch, and Wilson say all three have intense tempers. All of them had many of their asylum denials reversed by the Board of Immigration Appeals. Now they’ll be the ones deciding those appeals. (The Justice Department’s Executive Office for Immigration Review, which oversees the immigration court system, did not respond to a request to comment on details in this story.)

Cassidy is most associated with his decision to deport Mark Lyttle, a US citizen who did not speak Spanish, to Mexico during a mass deportation hearing. One Georgia attorney I spoke to blamed Immigration and Customs Enforcement for Lyttle’s removal, but Lyttle asserted that he told Cassidy twice about his US citizenship.

Glenn Fogle, an Atlanta immigration attorney, concluded in 2001, “You could have Anne Frank in front of him and he would say it was implausible that she could have hidden in the house for years and not be caught.” Now he says his feelings about Cassidy haven’t changed. He described a recent case in which Cassidy rejected a Congolese client who said he had scars on his back from being persecuted in his home country. Cassidy, presiding via an aging video system, asked the man to lift up his shirt and show the scars, then said he couldn’t see them. “Judge, how on earth could you see anything with this video?” Fogle recalls asking. Cassidy denied the asylum claim, noting in his decision that he couldn’t observe the scars.

Peter Isbister, a senior attorney with the Southern Poverty Law Center, says Cassidy sometimes writes orders denying bond requests while Isbister is still opening his argument. If he tries to finish, Cassidy can get frustrated and say something like, “You can take it up with the board. We’re done!”

In 2010, Cassidy had an asylum denial overturned because he had written the ruling before the hearing even began. The next year, Cassidy sat down in another judge’s courtroom in his judicial robe. In what one observer described as a “surreal” scene, Cassidy then raised his hand and told how the judge how the case should be handled. Assistant Chief Immigration Judge Deepali Nadkarni admonished Cassidy for his “inappropriate conduct.” In 2016, Cassidy compared an immigrant arriving at the border to “a person coming to your home in a Halloween mask, waving a knife dripping with blood.”

Cassidy and Couch have both suggested that asylum seekers are dishonest and trying to scam their way into the country. A Charlotte immigration attorney, who requested anonymity because Couch is now handling appeals, heard Couch say he believes 85 percent of asylum seekers are lying, that 10 percent are telling the truth but not eligible for protection, and that 5 percent are both honest and eligible for asylum. Couch is also skeptical of lawyers. When an out-of-state lawyer couldn’t make it to a hearing because of a funeral, Couch called the funeral home to verify the claim, according to the Charlotte attorney.

In 2004, Couch, then a military prosecutor, attracted widespread attention for refusing to prosecute a Guantanamo detainee because he had been tortured. But as an immigration judge, Couch has almost always ruled against people who say they’ve been persecuted. He is best known among immigration attorneys for his 2015 decision to deny asylum to a woman who said she had been repeatedly physically and sexually abused by her ex-husband. One year later, the Board of Immigration Appeals overturned Couch’s ruling and ordered him to grant her asylum. But Couch again declined to do so. The case gained prominence when Jeff Sessions, then the attorney general, used it to issue a sweeping precedent that made it much harder for asylum seekers to claim domestic violence as a reason for asylum. (Couch isn’t uniformly anti-immigration—Jeremy McKinney, a North Carolina attorney and the vice president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, saw him lobby North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis to greatly expand Central Americans’ access to temporary visas—but has a narrow view of who qualifies for asylum.)

Wilson has the highest asylum denial rate of the six new appointees. His most notable habit is leaning back in his chair while respondents are testifying and closing his eyes so that it looks like he’s sleeping. In one case, according to an observer from Emory University’s law school, Wilson leaned back with his eyes closed for 23 minutes as an asylum seeker described the murder of her parents and siblings.

Like the others, Wilson has often been overturned by the appeals board he is now a part of. In one case, he ruled against a victim of domestic violence partly on the grounds that she had been able leave her abuser and reach the United States. “We disagree,” the Board decided. “Although the respondent did ultimately come to the United States to escape her abuser, by definition, any person applying for asylum in the United States has fled the harm that they experienced.”

Under the regulation that goes into effect Tuesday, Board members will have more authority to summarily deny appeals without providing any justification. Charles Kuck, an Atlanta attorney and former president of the American Immigration Lawyers Associations, expects that to lead to an assembly-line system like the one that existed under the George W. Bush administration, when Board members sometimes issued more than 50 decisions a day.

Two decades later, one Cassidy case still sticks with Fogle. His client was a former Ethiopian government official. As he was telling his story, Fogle remembers, Cassidy jumped up, turned off the court’s audio recorder, and yelled, “Bullshit!” His client insisted he was telling the truth.

Fogle says it was among the most unprofessional behavior he has ever seen from a judge. “I’ve been around,” he says. “I will never forget that.” He adds, “That’s the guy that’s going to be adjudicating appeals from other immigration judges.

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Sounds like a Third World kakistocracy to me. And, over my years working on asylum cases, I became familiar with many of those. Never imagined the U.S. would hit these depths.

PWS

08-29-19

“GONZO APOCALYPTO” SLAMMED: UNANIMOUS PANEL OF 4TH CIR. REJECTS MATTER OF CASTO-TUM — Exposes Irrationality Of Biased, Unqualified Restrictionist Former AG — “ADR” Outed — “Although one of its purported concerns is efficient and timely administration of immigration proceedings, it would in fact serve to lengthen and delay many of these proceedings by: (1) depriving IJs and the BIA of flexible docketing measures sometimes required for adjudication of an immigration proceeding, as illustrated by Avetisyan, and (2) leading to the reopening of over 330,000 cases upon the motion of either party, straining the burden on immigration courts that Castro-Tum purports to alleviate.”

Zuniga Romero – CA4 Decision (8-29-2019)

ZUNIGA ROMERO V. BARR, NO. 18-1850, 4th Cir., 08-29-19, published

PANEL: AGEE, FLOYD, and THACKER, Circuit Judges.

OPINION BY: Judge Agee

KEY QUOTE:

In the absence of Auer deference, the weight given to a BIA decision “hinges on the thoroughness evident in [the BIA’s] consideration, the validity of its reasoning, its consistency with earlier and later pronouncements, and all those factors which give it power to persuade”—that is, whether the interpretation should be afforded Skidmore deference. Zavaleta–Policiano v. Sessions, 873 F.3d 241, 246 n.2 (4th Cir. 2017) (internal quotation marks omitted). And here, a court reviewing Castro-Tum for Skidmore deference would not be persuaded to adopt the agency’s own interpretation of its regulation for substantially the same reasons it is not entitled to Auer deference: because it represents a stark departure, without notice, from long-used practice and thereby cannot be deemed consistent with earlier and later pronouncements. As a result, it lacks the “power to persuade.” Id.; see also Kisor, 139 S. Ct. at 2427 (Gorsuch, J., concurring) (contending that an agency interpretation of a regulation should as an initial matter be “entitled only to a weight proportional to ‘the thoroughness evident in its consideration, the validity of its reasoning, its consistency with earlier and later pronouncements, and all those factors which give it power to persuade’” (quoting Skidmore, 323 U.S. at 140)). Put another way, even under the view set forth by Justice Gorsuch in Kisor, the Attorney General’s interpretation would amount to a failure of proof because the evidence—that is, Castro- Tum—comes too late in the game.

*** *

In sum, the result is that 8 C.F.R. §§ 1003.10(b) and 1003.1(d)(1)(ii) unambiguously confer upon IJs and the BIA the general authority to administratively close cases such that the BIA’s decision should be vacated and remanded.

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A huge victory for the “New Due Process Army.” The “Roundtable of Former Immigration Judges” actually filed an amicus brief before Sessions in Castro-Tum raising many of the points found determinative by the Fourth Circuit. Our brief was, of course, ignored by “Gonzo,” who undoubtedly had already drafted his decision along the lines dictated to him by some restrictionist interest group.

Finally, an Article III Court “gets” how the DOJ under the Trump Administration is promoting “Aimless Docket Reshuffling” (“ADR”) in an attempt to build the backlog, destroy the system, blame the victims (respondents and their, largely pro bono, attorneys), and dishonestly call upon GOP Legislators to mount a pernicious attack on constitutional Due Process by statute!

The idea that adding 330,000 cases to the already backlogged Immigration Courts was legally required or a good policy idea clearly is a piece of White Nationalist restrictionist propaganda promoted by corrupt public officials like Miller, Sessions, and Barr.

With the Democrats in control of the House, there is no way that Congress will eliminate “Administrative Closing” by statute. And, while the DOJ under the sycophantic Barr might try to change the regulation, this decision makes it very clear that there is no rational basis for doing so. Therefore, any future regulation change is likely to be tied up in litigation in the Article III Courts for years, adding to the confusion and ADR, as well as threatening to immobilize the Article III Courts.

Unless the Article III Courts want their dockets to be totally swamped with immigration appeals, the answer is to end this unconstitutional system administered by an Attorney General clearly unfit to act in a quasi-judicial capacity and place the Immigration Courts under a court-appointed independent “Special Master” to insure fairness, impartiality, and other aspects of Due Process until Congress fixes the glaring Constitutional defect by creating an independent U.S. Immigration Court outside of the DOJ.

PWS

08-29-19

MAINE AND OTHER STATES ARE HURTING BECAUSE OF POPULATION LOSS — The Answer — More Legal Immigration Across The Board — Is Staring Us Right In The Face — But, Trump’s White Nationalist Nativist Agenda Stands In The Way Of Rational Solutions!

Boothbay Harbor, ME
Looking West from the Whales Tails Restaurant & Seafarer Pub

From the Washington Post:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/a-rational-immigration-system-is-the-answer-to-us-worker-shortages/2019/08/25/b396bada-c5c4-11e9-b72f-b31dfaa77212_story.html

A rational immigration system is the answer to U.S. worker shortages

Add to list

By Editorial Board

August 25

OCCUPATIONAL AND physical therapists. Religious workers. Plant operators. Railway personnel. Construction workers. Maintenance and repair workers. Firefighters. Social workers. Nurses. Funeral workers. Truckers. That’s only a brief sampling of the jobs in the United States for which there are severe shortages of available employees, and way more openings than applicants.

A recent article in The Post detailed the heartbreaking effects of a drastic deficit in just one employment category — home health aides — in just one state, Maine, which has the nation’s second-highest percentage of people over age 65 . They and their relatives who cannot afford private home health aides (who charge roughly $50 an hour) are suffering. Nursing homes, similarly, are closing for want of workers. Even attempts to lure employees by raising wages have hit a brick wall; there simply aren’t enough job applicants in the state nor, apparently, enough people willing to move there.

Maine’s problems in that regard will soon be a national epidemic. Within a decade or so, at least a fifth of the population in roughly 28 states will be 65 or older. The effects of aging baby boomers will be compounded by a national fertility rate that has fallen to its lowest level in nearly five decades. That means younger people will not be available to replenish the ranks of older workers as they retire.

A rational immigration system, one that meets the labor market’s demands for workers in an array of skill categories and income levels, is the obvious antidote to chronic and predictable labor deficits. Unfortunately, the Trump administration, heedless of the pleas of employers, has implemented and proposed measures whose effect will deepen existing and future shortages. And it has done so even as the unemployment rate, now 3.7 percent, continues to bump along at near-historic lows.

A policy announced by the administration this month would impede large numbers of low-income legal immigrants from remaining in the United States, or coming in the first place, if they are judged likely to use public benefits to which they are entitled, including noncash ones such as housing subsidies and health care. The impact would be a dramatic reduction in newcomers, and in existing immigrants eligible to become legal permanent residents, or green-card holders, the final step before full citizenship. By targeting low-income and low-skilled migrants, the rule would perpetuate severe worker shortages in a variety of sectors.

Earlier this year, the administration unveiled a blueprint for legal immigration that, in a reversal, maintained overall levels of immigrants. That recognized that slashing immigration is a recipe for economic decline. However, the Trump plan, by favoring educated, skilled English speakers with strong earnings prospects over relatives of current residents, ignored the reality that retail, landscaping, food processing and dozens of other industries rely on relatively low-skilled labor — and are desperate for workers.

The critical role ICE plays in Trump’s immigration push

President Trump has found a crucial tool to carry out his sweeping immigration polices: U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. (John Parks, Luis Velarde/The Washington Post)

President Trump has leveraged nativist policies to his political advantage. He has been indifferent to their corrosive long-term economic impact. Far from making America great again, the president’s policies are likely to transform the United States into a second Japan, where an aging population and barriers to immigration have sapped the dynamism and prospects of what was once one of the world’s most dynamic economies.

Here’s a link to Jeff Stein’s August 14 article on the crisis in Maine:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/this-will-be-catastrophic-maine-families-face-elder-boom-worker-shortage-in-preview-of-nations-future/2019/08/14/7cecafc6-bec1-11e9-b873-63ace636af08_story.html

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

One reason our current immigration system is failing is that it has ignored market forces both in the U.S. and in sending countries.

That’s particular true with what we consider “manual labor” (which usually takes skills that most Americans either lack or have no interest in developing).

Working with market forces, rather than futilely trying to override or reverse them, would be a win-win-win. It would benefit the migrants, our country, and would greatly reduce the amount of time and money we waste on cruel, controversial, legally questionable, and ultimately ineffective “civil enforcement” of unrealistic and unworkable restrictive immigration laws.

Even now, what if we welcomed qualified asylum seekers, screened and processed them rapidly for legal status, and worked with NGOs and states like Maine to place them in localities where their skills could be put to immediate use or they could be trained to make critical contributions to our society’s needs while improving their own situations?

Indeed, Maine already has an outstanding record of welcoming refugees and asylum seekers. Notwithstanding initial climate and cultural differences, an amazing number of forced migrants from Africa have resettled in Maine and contributed to their communities and the state’s well-being, as well as adapted to the “Maine way of life.” It’s a process of give and take integration that enriches both the immigrants and the communities in which they settle.

PWS

08-29-19

DUE PROCESS: I Speak Out Against Latest DOJ Attack On Due Process & Judicial Independence!

https://apple.news/AF5h6SB1USvW1DbhapvzZLw

Alan Pyke reports for ThinkProgress:

Shakeup of immigration court system threatens migrants’ due process

Migrants may soon have a much harder time finding lawyers and understanding their rights in immigration court, as the Trump administration pursues a major overhaul of the agency that oversees those proceedings.

The crucial office that provides basic legal information to migrants and helps connect some of them to pro-bono immigration lawyers will be merged into a Trump-created unit widely viewed as the nerve center of his immigration power grab. Though Friday’s reorganization rule makes no specific threat to shutter those legal assistance programs, the president has wanted to kill them for more than a year.

The bureaucratic reshuffle leaves the assistance programs “buried deep in the bowels” of an agency that today “never does anything without some ulterior political motive relating to the restrictionist immigration agenda,” retired immigration judge Paul Schmidt told reporters Friday.

The regulations concern the Executive Office of Immigration Review (EOIR), where the work of applying immigration laws to individual human cases gets done. In addition to burying the legal-assistance work in a team Trump created, the rule endows EOIR’s director with vast new power to change how immigration laws are applied.

The proposal “shows [the] Trump Administration’s ‘weaponization’ of EOIR as a means of implementing restrictionist policies by precedent decision without going through legislation or rule making,” Schmidt told reporters in an email.

Immigration courts, despite their name, are not independent judicial forums. And because deportation is a civil proceeding rather than a criminal one, migrants who come before the courts are not guaranteed counsel.

Any given migrant’s ability to vindicate the rights they do have in immigration court therefore ends up resting, in many cases, with the presiding judge. If the law says a given migrant’s case might merit a stay of deportation or other relief, and an immigration judge applies the law accordingly, the system slows down and fewer people are evicted from the country.

The Trump administration has repeatedly pushed immigration judges to set aside those legal niceties in favor of rapid removal orders for almost everyone they see. Judges now face discipline if they fail to clear 700 cases per calendar year, a speed judges have repeatedly said makes a mockery of due process.

The big winner in Friday’s order is EOIR’s new Office of Policy, created at the start of President Donald Trump’s term. That team will take over management of a key legal orientation program for giving migrants a basic overview of the legal process they’re facing and the rights they have within it.

The Office of Policy has become the prime mover behind various Trump efforts to create a deportation assembly line that favors speedy removals over the fuller individual consideration envisioned in immigration law, experts said.

“The Office of Policy… has in many ways led the Trump administration’s agenda to reduce the independence of the immigration court system,” American Immigration Council policy analyst Aaron Reichlin-Melnick said in an interview.

Currently, EOIR’s Office of Legal Access Programs helps link some migrants to pro-bono immigration attorneys as part of its legal orientation work. Having a lawyer “is arguably the single most important factor in determining whether someone is allowed to remain in the United States” at the conclusion of their immigration case, Reichlin-Melnick said.

The new rule moves the pro-bono program into the Trump-created policy office, along with the legal orientation system that’s meant to give migrants without attorneys a fighting chance.

There is nothing in the rule that says the DOJ is killing the pro-bono system or the legal orientation program, Reichlin-Melnick stressed.

“But we know in the past this is something the administration has gone after,” he said, noting that the White House tried to defund the legal orientation work in 2018 only for a bipartisan coalition of lawmakers to insist it continue.

“It’s a popular program with pretty much everybody,” he said, “except those inside the Trump administration who think we shouldn’t be spending money on helping people know their rights, because that slows things down.”

The same Office of Policy is widely blamed for concocting the 700-case-per-year standard that judges and experts view as an intentional demolition of immigrants’ due process rights. It is also seen as the driving force behind a new piece of technology that displays a speed gauge on judges’ desks while they work, glaring red when they take the time to explore factual disputes or delve into process issues of a given case and fall behind the administration’s speed requirements.

“That kind of pressure creates problems, even if it doesn’t mean that people are going to explicitly deny cases because of it,” Reichlin-Melnick said. “Even the most well-minded people are affected by someone essentially standing behind them tapping their watch.”

The case-completion rule in question technically came from a different EOIR office. But Trump’s new policy office is understood to have crafted it and passed it to the appropriate internal authority to promulgate.

Last year, National Association of Immigration Judges union head Ashley Tabaddor urged her colleagues to take whatever time a case requires regardless of the administration’s pressure tactics. This summer, the administration announced its intention to dissolve the NAIJ and strip judges of labor protections.

These maneuvers “create the appearance of coercion” of a professional legal staff who are responsible for applying the law to a complex array of individual circumstances, Reichlin-Melnick said. A political team that isn’t getting the results it wants from immigration courts when they scrutinize the facts is turning to threats – judges can be denied raises or terminated outright over the running-clock rules – and increasing the authority its Office of Policy holds over those judges.

The new rule “raises a number of concerns about conflict of interest that could play out. Maybe they won’t – at this point it’s a little bit premature to panic, or to make large declaratory statements about how this rule will affect the process,” he said. “But it certainly raises concerns.”

Former immigration judge Schmidt was blunter.

The new policy office’s “primary role appears to be to ensure that EOIR functions as an adjunct of DHS Enforcement and that any adjudication trends that enhance Due Process or vindicate Immigrants rights are quickly identified so that they can be wiped out by precedents or policy changes,” Schmidt wrote.

“Look for the [EOIR] Director over time to reinsert himself in the adjudicative activities of EOIR,” he wrote, “for the purpose of insuring subservience to [the] Administration’s political enforcement priorities.”

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

Thanks, Alan, for “telling it like it is.”

Pro bono lawyers have been very successful in both helping asylum applicants vindicate their rights and winning cases. They have also given those who lose before the Immigration Judge the ability to exhaust their remedies before the BIA and challenge wrongful denials in Circuit Courts. Almost every day, one or more Circuit Courts find that the BIA has erred or improperly cut corners in some way.

The success of the pro bono program in achieving asylum and other forms of protection is what the White Nationalists in the Trump Administration hate. They don’t like their immorality and illegality constantly exposed to public view. They would much rather “beat up on” defenseless, unrepresented applicants who can’t even understand English, let alone understand the system and the hyper-technical, intentionally restrictive criteria confronting them. Also, lots of denials, even if completely unfair, bolsters the Administration’s false statistical claim that most asylum claims are without merit.

PWS

08-26-19

“I Don’t Want To Do Your Dirty Work No More” — Is Mexico Tiring Of Committing Human Rights Violations In The Name Of Trump & The 9th Circuit?

“Times are hard

You’re afraid to pay the fee

So you find yourself somebody

Who can do the job for free

When you need a bit of lovin’

‘Cause your man is out of town

That’s the time you get me runnin’

And you know I’ll be around

I’m a fool to do your dirty work

Oh yeah

I don’t wanna do your dirty work

No more

I’m a fool to do your dirty work

Oh yeah”

From “Dirty Work” by Steely Dan (1972)

Listen on Youtube here: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ghcsrblhn7A

Songwriters: Donald Jay Fagen / Walter Carl Becker

https://apple.news/AzGaEoYZJR_KtFInPtWScxA

Gaby Del Valle reports for Vox News:

The Mexican government is finally pushing back against the controversial Trump policy of forcing some asylum-seekers to wait in Mexico while their immigration cases play out in court, according to an internal Department of Homeland Security Briefing obtained by BuzzFeed News.

More than 35,000 migrants have been returned to Mexico under the Migrant Protection Protocols, colloquially referred to as the Remain in Mexico policy, since its start in January, according to the DHS document. That’s put migrants in danger and strained resources in Mexican Border Communities. Now, Mexican officials have reportedly begun limiting the days and times U.S. immigration agencies can send asylum-seekers back to Mexico and have cracked down on which migrants can be returned.

Mexican officials in El Paso, for example, have stopped accepting migrants after 1 p.m., even though some migrants have to return to Mexico after crossing into the U.S. for court hearings, according to the memo. As a result, Customs and Border Protection has had to detain more than half of the migrants who came to the city for hearings in August. The Mexican government has also occasionally refused to accept migrants who have been issued deportation orders but are fighting their cases, the memo says..

The policy has led to overcrowding at migrant shelters along the border, many of which are operated by nonprofits and religious organizations. At cities along the border, migrants have become easy prey for cartels and gangs. The people helping them have become targets, too: In Nuevo Laredo, members of an organized crime group kidnapped the director of a migrant shelter earlier this month. The violence against migrants is so pervasive that advocates refer to the MPP as the Migrant Persecution Protocols.

The Mexican government has attempted to alleviate the strain by busing migrants to cities further from the border, like Monterrey and Tapachula, the later of which is close to the country’s border with Guatemala. That has only complicated things further, since migrants have to return to the U.S. for their court hearings.

Being forced to wait in Mexico has also had legal consequences for migrants, many of whom struggle to find lawyers. A recent report by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University found that less than 1% of migrants who have been forced to wait in Mexico as part of the MPP have lawyers.

Cover image: A security guard accompanies a group of U.S. asylum-seekers out of Mexican immigration offices after they were returned by U.S. authorities to wait in Mexico under the so-called Remain in Mexico program, in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, Wednesday, July 17, 2019. (AP Photo/Christian Chavez

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

As I’ve been saying all along, the bogus “Migrant Protection Protocols” (a/k/a “Return to Mexico,” a/k/a “Let “em Die In Mexico”) are nothing more than a very transparent scheme to deprive asylum applicants who have passed “credible fear” of their statutory, regulatory, and Due Process Constitutional right to be represented by counsel of their choice.

DHS has intentionally made it functionally impossible for U.S. pro bono groups to effectively represent those asylum seekers returned to Mexico. As we all know, without counsel, applicants have little, if any, realistic chance of succeeding on asylum claims, particularly under Trump’s restrictionist, openly anti-asylum regime.

For some reason, a complicit 9th Circuit Court of Appeals is allowing this legal travesty to proceed. Vulnerable asylum applicants are being abused by Trump on the 9th Circuit’s watch with impunity.

PWS

08-25-19

NEXT TIME “BIG MAC” LIES ABOUT THE “FLORES SETTLEMENT,” HERE’S JACLYN KELLEY-WIDMER WITH THE TRUTH!

Jacklyn Kelley-Widmer
Assistant Clinical Professor
Cornell Law

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/08/24/new-trump-administration-rule-allows-children-be-detained-indefinitely-heres-what-you-need-know/

Jaclyn Kelley-Widmer writes in WashPost:

By Jaclyn Kelley-Widmer

August 24

On Wednesday, the Trump administration released a regulation that would allow it to detain migrant children indefinitely. The new rule, which is not yet in effect, would end the 1997 consent decree known as the Flores Settlement Agreement, which put in place protections for migrant children who arrive at the border. The Flores agreement limits how long children can be detained and requires that they be placed in the least restrictive setting possible.

Many Americans first heard about the Flores agreement last summer, when the Trump administration began separating families at the border. The administration claimed that it had to separate children from their guardians because the Flores agreement would not let the government detain the families together long enough to resolve the parents’ immigration cases, which often takes months or years. Previous administrations usually released families until their cases were heard.

In response to public outrage, the Trump administration officially ended the family separation policy — but continued to separate hundreds of families under other rules. Meanwhile, the administration continued its efforts to do away with Flores altogether, culminating in this rule.

Here are four things to know about the new rule.

1. Long-term detention has lasting mental health effects on children

Acting homeland security secretary Kevin McAleenan said that the rule sets guidelines for the care of detained families in “campus-like settings” where all needs are ostensibly met. These “family residential centers,” he said, will have “appropriate” facilities for “medical, educational, recreational, dining” and housing needs. However, there is good reason to doubt that detention conditions will be adequate, given recent reports of the lack of even basic necessities at some facilities.

Detention is likely to have a lasting detrimental impact on children’s mental health. A 2017 American Academy of Pediatrics report concluded that detained immigrant children experience high levels of mental health problems such as anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder during and after detention. Detaining children with their families does not significantly mitigate the severe mental health impact. Any detention is especially traumatic for children; long-term detention only increases the likelihood of lasting effects.

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In the week I spent earlier this year in the family detention center in Dilley, Tex., law students and I observed that the environment created continuing trauma for the children and families. One child I met cried silent tears throughout the legal meeting I held with her mother. A detained teenager was entertaining thoughts of suicide and refusing food.

[Does separating families at the border deter immigration? Here’s what the research says.]

2. The United States already detains some children for far longer than permitted by Flores

Flores imposed a 20-day limit for detaining migrant children, unless the parent opts to waive the child’s right to be released. The government already flouts this limit.

Children are detained more than 20 days when bureaucratic hurdles block their release. For example, in December 2018, the average stay in the children’s detention facility at Tornillo, Tex., was 50 days. Such waits are caused by a Trump-era Department of Homeland Security policy that requires background checks of the relative waiting to take in the child and also of every person in that relative’s home. Cornell Law School faculty members have met children detained in Brownsville, Tex., for up to 10 months.

3. The rule will not deter desperate families

McAleenan claimed that the rule will discourage adults from bringing children to the United States, whether those adults are the children’s parents, other relatives or smugglers. But such deterrence policies rarely work, researchers find. Pushed out of dangerous home countries by poverty, crime or other threats, migrants simply look for other ways into the United States.

For example, the Trump administration’s new Migrant Protection Protocols require migrants who present themselves at an official border point of entry to wait in Mexico for their asylum hearing. Knowing this, many detained women I spoke to in Dilley had avoided the point of entry. Instead, they crossed the Rio Grande at night on inflatable rafts, clutching their toddlers. They asked for asylum when Border Patrol apprehended them.

[How deporting immigrants from the U.S. increases immigration to the U.S.]

4. The rule faces several potential legal challenges

The administration published the rule in the Federal Register on Friday. It could take effect in 60 days, but only if it’s approved by federal judge Dolly M. Gee, who oversees the Flores agreement. Once the rule is published, the government has seven days to file a brief to obtain her approval. Last year, she denied the government permission to modify Flores to permit indefinite child detention. If she denies this request as well, the government will probably appeal.

Even if Gee grants the government’s request, the rule will probably be delayed by legal challenges from advocacy groups such as the Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law, which originally filed the Flores case and continues to litigate it today. Advocates are likely to argue that the new rule violates Flores, putting the government in contempt of the court’s order.

If the rule does go into effect, advocates will probably bring a new class-action suit under some of the principles of the original 1985 Flores complaint, arguing that indefinite detention is a violation of due process and equal protection under the Constitution. They may also argue that the policy violates certain provisions of the Immigration and Nationality Act. Further, advocates could turn to international human rights law, arguing that the rule violates the right to personal liberty and security enshrined in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

Lawyers for detained children may also file individual writs of habeas corpus, a legal term for petitions for release alleging that the detention is an unconstitutional deprivation of freedom. Immigration attorneys have increasingly been filing habeas corpus petitions for immigrants in prolonged detention — at times successfully obtaining their clients’ release.

Beyond legal action, the indefinite child detention policy may again spark public outrage, as happened last summer over family separation. Collective public action could also prompt policy change.

Don’t miss anything! Sign up to get TMC’s smart analysis in your inbox, three days a week.

Jaclyn Kelley-Widmer is an assistant clinical professor of law at Cornell Law School, where she teaches lawyering and directs the 1L Immigration Law and Advocacy Clinic

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

So, why are guys like Big Mac, “Cooch Cooch,” Barr, and Stephen Miller still on the “public dole” rather than in jail for abusing children, lying about it, and knowingly and intentionally abusing our legal system with frivolous false claims?

These aren’t legitimate legal and policy disputes. They are blatant attempts, fueled by outright lies and racist-inspired knowingly false narratives, calculated to “break” our legal system and improperly punish individuals for exercising their legal rights.

PWS

08-25-19

CRUEL & SELFISH TRUMP ENCOURAGES RACE TO THE BOTTOM: Mistreating The Younger Generation, Whether Or Not They Are “Ours,” Will Come Back To Haunt Us!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/its-how-we-treat-other-peoples-children-that-matters/2019/08/23/24fcf982-c4f8-11e9-9986-1fb3e4397be4_story.html

Nancy Gibbs writes in WashPost:

Nancy Gibbs is director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University and a former editor of Time.

It is not an act of particular virtue to love your children and treat them well; instinct and evolution privilege our own kids, and from the moment they blink into the world, we would risk anything for their safety, sacrifice anything for their happiness.

It’s how we treat other people’s children that measures and tests us today. And here, as we shudder at the impact of his immigration policies on families, I can’t help but think that President Trump is channeling parents on both the right and the left who’ve decided that other people’s children don’t matter, as long as their own get ahead.

Anyone asserting the existence of certain universal values could always default to this: No decent society would ever argue that it’s okay to torture children. Which made it all the more chilling when U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers in Mississippi swept up about 680 undocumented workers, leaving some children to return from the first day of school to locked houses, missing parents and shattered families. The spectacle — and it was flaunted as a spectacle, the largest one-state immigration enforcement effort in U.S. history — does not just challenge us on how best to balance politics, economics and justice. It asks us, “When is it okay to torment other people’s kids?”

CONTENT FROM VIRGINIA HOSPITAL CENTER

Treating America’s back pain problem

Doctors are finding new ways to address the condition, which impacts 80 percent of people in the U.S.

For Trump, the answer was clear and blithely callous: “This serves as a very good deterrent,” he declared. What parent watching the sobbing children would dare step foot across a border illegally? “I just hope to keep it up,” he said.

You don’t have to be an apologist for open borders to conclude that there are ways to promote security that stop short of emotional torture. Yes, children often suffer when parents commit crimes, but that is the collateral damage of enforcement, not its goal.

Still, the mentality that justifies harming children so long as they’re not your own is not unique to the president. From the beginning of this year to mid-August, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed more than 1,200 cases of measles, the most since 2000. Arrogance plus ignorance takes its toll: Parents who won’t “risk” vaccinating their own children discount the risk to others. If they think vaccines are more dangerous than the diseases they prevent, they should hope other parents stop vaccinating, as well. But more likely they are counting on others to comply so that their own children can have the best of all worlds: no vaccine and little chance of exposure to disease.

CONTENT FROM SAFEWAY

Back-to-school lunch tips for parents

How to pack a simple, wholesome, school-approved lunch that your kids will love.

In a different way but in the same spirit, the psychotically ambitious parents of the “Varsity Blues” college admissions scandal did not care who they deprived of a spot at Stanford or the University of Southern California as long as their children succeeded. Unlike many things in life, college admissions is zero-sum; an unqualified student who bribes her way in takes a spot from someone who tried to earn it. Need extra time for the SAT? Get a doctor to diagnose a learning disability. Between 2009 and 2016, the number of students getting special accommodations more than doubled, according to an analysis by the Wall Street Journal. At one school in affluent Westchester County, N.Y., nearly 1 in 5 students had special testing privileges, which was nearly 10 times the national average.

These are starling parents, like the birds that destroy other birds’ eggs to take their nests and protect their own. For if every parent puts his or her child first at all costs, communities degrade, schools can’t function, society becomes ungovernable. And while they are not natural objects of sympathy, the cheaters’ children suffer, as well. The most obvious victims are the ones who end up sick or disabled by infections that could have been avoided. But moral infection eats you from the inside, rots relationships, wounds self-worth. As the college admissions scandal unfolded, I kept wondering what scars the parents’ ambitions left on their children. “The ruin of a nation,” a Ghanian proverb warns, “begins in the homes of its people.”

Which brings us back to our larger family. America’s identity derives from ideals that set us apart from the places we left to come here: freedom and fairness, justice and mercy, where anyone with moxie and muscle can build a future. We care for our neighbors; we honor service and sacrifice. Soldiers died for these values; parents watched sons and daughters go to war, sacrifice that which was most precious, to defend something bigger than ourselves.

This president doesn’t seem to think very much of our national character. He discounts our instinctive generosity to those in need, our compassion not just for our own children but all children, our confidence that we can succeed together, not just at each other’s expense.

What happens when nothing is bigger than oneself, no value is worth sacrificing for and it’s every man for himself? We are finding out.

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

Trump constantly preaches a foul doctrine of “beggar thy neighbor.”

PWS

O8-25-19

HARD RIGHT TURN: Barr Appoints “Death Squad” Of New “Appellate Judges” Tasked To “Snuff Out” Any Last Remaining Pockets Of Due Process For Asylum Seekers & Send As Many As Possible Unlawfully Into Harm’s Way! — Judge Earle Wilson Has An Astounding 98.1% Asylum Denial Rate, But His New Colleagues Are Hot On His Tail! — TAL @ SF CHRON REPORTS!

Tal Kopan
Washington Reporter, SF Chronicle

https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/AG-William-Barr-promotes-immigration-judges-with-14373344.php

AG William Barr promotes immigration judges with high asylum denial rates

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration has promoted six judges to the immigration appeals court that sets binding policy for deportation cases — all whom have high rates of denying immigrants’ asylum claims.

The six come from courts that have higher asylum-denial rates than the national average, including two from a court that has drawn complaints of unfair proceedings from immigration attorneys and advocates. A third has a long history of denying asylum to domestic violence victims, something the Justice Department has also sought to do.

The new appeals judges, who will now make up more than a quarter of the appellate board, were appointed as the administration works to speed up the immigration courts and narrow migrants’ use of asylum cases to come to the U.S. The six new appointees were sworn in Friday.

The hires are in a new role, in which judges will be allowed to continue serving at any immigration court in the country rather than having to move to suburban Falls Church, Va., where the appeals board’s headquarters are. The new appeals judges will also be allowed to serve as fill-in lower court immigration judges. Critics had suspected the Justice Department, which oversees the immigration courts, created the new positions to pack the board with judges from courts with high rates of denying immigrants’ claims, who may otherwise not have wanted to move to D.C.

The board serves as the appellate body for the immigration court system, an entity separate from the federal courts.

As in the federal system, the immigration board has the power to overrule lower court decisions with three-judge panels. By a majority vote of all its 21 members, it can make those rulings binding on the nation’s nearly 400 immigration judges. Recently, Barr published a new regulation giving himself the power to make any appellate decision binding as well.

By law, the Justice Department is barred from considering political leanings when hiring judges. Agency officials say judges are selected based only on their qualifications for the job, and that their history of rulings is not taken into account.

According to data tracked by Syracuse University from 2013 through 2018, all the judges promoted Friday have records of denying asylum at much higher rates than immigration judges nationally. The Justice Department has in the past questioned Syracuse’s methodology, but does not provide statistics of its own.

Two of the new appeals judges were promoted by Barr from the Atlanta immigration court, which has one of the highest rates of asylum claim denials in the country. The court rejected 95.3% of claims from 2013 to 2018, compared with a national average of 57.6%, Syracuse found.

One of the two new appeals judges from Atlanta, William Cassidy, had a rejection rate of 95.8%, 22nd highest in the country.

Cassidy was also the subject of 11 complaints from immigration attorneys from 2010-2013, according to material obtained by the American Immigration Lawyers Association through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. That number of complaints was more than roughly 95% of all other immigration judges in that period, according to information from the lawsuit. Five of the 11 resulted in Cassidy being counseled by a superior on proper judicial behavior.

Also promoted by Barr from the Atlanta court was Earle Wilson, who denied 98.1% of asylum claims from 2013 to 2018, according to Syracuse. That was more than all but five immigration judges in the U.S.

Wilson and Cassidy were also named in two complaints filed by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights group, in 2017 and 2018 that argued the Atlanta court was treating immigrants unfairly. The complaints said Wilson and Cassidy behaved in an intimidating fashion toward immigrants and their advocates.

It is not clear whether the Justice Department has responded to those complaints. The department said Friday it does not discuss personnel matters.

The other new appellate judges are:

• Keith Hunsucker, who has spent most of his time on the bench at the immigration court at the Port Isabel Detention Center in Texas. While there, he denied 81.6% of asylum cases, consistent with his court’s 81.1% average. Hunsucker is now in Cleveland.

• Deborah Goodwin, appointed from the Miami immigration court. She began hearing cases in 2017, and through last year had a denial rate of 89.4%, above her court’s average of 79.6% in the 2013 to 2018 time frame measured by Syracuse.

• Stephanie Gorman, promoted from the Houston immigration court. She began hearing cases in 2017 and has an 86.9% asylum denial rate, slightly below her court’s 89.3% average.

• Stuart Couch, who was appointed from Charlotte, N.C., denied 92.1% of asylum claims from 2013 to 2018. That was above his court’s average of 88.2%.

Couch also authored a 2017 ruling denying asylum to a Salvadoran woman who was physically and emotionally abused and raped by her ex-husband, a decision that the Board of Immigration Appeals reversed. It was that appellate decision that Sessions overturned to align the law more closely with Couch’s interpretation, saying domestic violence was largely not grounds for asylum. A federal judge has blocked that ruling for now.

Couch’s original decision was one of 10 domestic violence-related cases in 2017 in which the Board of Immigration Appeals found his rulings were “clearly erroneous.” In all 10, Couch rejected the claims of Central American women who had been beaten, raped and otherwise abused by their husbands or partners. The cases were made public as part of a Freedom of Information Act request by immigration attorney Bryan Johnson.

The Justice Department stood behind all the judges.

“DOJ doesn’t track asylum approval and denial rates for individual immigration judges, and (Syracuse) uses its own methodologies in interpreting the data it receives, resulting in conclusions that we cannot verify,” a spokesperson said in a statement. “Collectively these judges combined, have nearly 120 years of immigration law combined, through multiple administrations. Advocates that attack their integrity and professionalism only undermine the entire system.”

Immigration attorneys fear the hires are part of an effort by the Trump administration to skew the courts against immigrants, who face deportation if their claims are denied.

“The board’s primary function is to ensure rule of law and impartiality, yet the department cherry-picked judges from the harshest jurisdictions with the lowest asylum grant rates in the nation,” said Laura Lynch, senior policy counsel for the American Immigration Lawyers Association. “When we’re talking about asylum cases, these decisions are life or death for those seeking protection.”

Lynch’s group, along with the American Bar Association and national union for immigration judges, have called for the immigration courts to be removed from the Justice Department and made independent. Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-San Jose, has pledged to pursue legislation that would do so through the Judiciary subcommittee on immigration she chairs in the House.

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How many refugees will die or be subjected to additional torture and persecution because of thoroughly biased judges and a corrupt “judicial” system controlled by political hacks like Barr. Will Congress and the Article IIIs ever step in and restore some semblance of Due Process? Unless and until they do, the “blood of the innocents” will be on their hands.

Meanwhile, the complicit/complacent Article IIIs who have let this situation get out of control can look forward to being flooded with petitions for review, because the New Due Process Army will continue to fight this unconstitutional, fundamentally unfair, and evil perversion of American justice!

The idea that six Judges with asylum denial rates astronomically above the national average of 57.1% were the “best qualified” for these appellate jobs is simply absurd. Indeed, probably all of us in the Roundtable of Former Judges know of much better judicial candidates who were passed over so that Barr could install his “Death Squad.”

As Tal points out, unless piling up bar complaints, being cited by the public for rudeness, being reversed by their BIA, and denying an usually high number of asylum claims are among the “quality ranking factors” for these jobs, it’s hard to see how several of these judges would be considered even minimally qualified for promotion, let alone “best qualified.” It seems that a Congressional investigation into the selection process would be well warranted, including a look at the qualifications of candidates who were passed over.

Human lives are being trivialized by this White Nationalist regime and its enablers.

PWS

08-23-19

Join the “New Due Process Army” and fight to restore the rule of law and Constitutional order and to end the corruption and daily human rights abuses of the Trump Administration!

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The solution: There is no such thing as a “fair” asylum denial under this program. Yes, not everyone meets the criteria. But, everyone is entitled to a fair chance to present a claim, free from duress, coercion, and biased judging, which is not happening.

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Paul Schmidt, who chaired the Board of Immigration of Appeals from 1995 to 2001, says the administration’s goal is to build a “deportation railway” in which cases move through the system as quickly as possible and then get “rubber-stamped by the Board.”

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