"The Voice of the New Due Process Army" ————– Musings on Events in U.S. Immigration Court, Immigration Law, Sports, and Other Random Topics by Retired United States Immigration Judge (Arlington, Virginia) and former Chairman of the Board of Immigration Appeals Paul Wickham Schmidt. To see my complete professional bio, just click on the link below.
In June, once school let out in rural Dutchess County, New York, I packed up my 7-year-old son and drove 2,054 miles to the Texas-Mexico border. I needed to see with my own eyes what is happening to migrant children separated from their parents as a result of the Trump administration’s escalated “zero tolerance” immigration policy.
I told my son we were going, in person, to demand the reunion of children and parents. Gabe was up for the trip, no questions asked, as he always is when I tell him there is activism to be done. After two nights of sleeping in our car, three days of driving, and 1,764 inquiries of “are we there yet,” we arrived in Texas.
We visited six shelters in the border towns of Raymondville, Combes and Brownsville, and asked for tours. We were denied. Next, we asked to speak with representatives from BCFS or Southwest Key Programs, the organizations that operate these shelters. We were denied again. We were given business cards with the names of public relations officials to call, and repeatedly directed back to the Department of Health & Human Services’ Administration for Children & Families.
None of these contacts promptly returned my calls. So we pitched a tent outside Casa El Presidente, the “tender age” shelter operated by Southwest Key Programs in Brownsville, where children from the ages of 0 to 12 are being held, and we hunkered down for the night. Two weeks later, we are still here.
Our message is this: Reunite these small children with their detained parents now.
Every morning between 9 and 9:45 we can hear the sounds of children playing not far from our encampment. To get close enough to the opaque playground fence outside the shelter, we have to trespass in front of an abandoned building on the adjacent lot. From there, we can see the shapes of children running around — their little feet under the fence, the balls they are playing with flying up in the air. But we must make our glimpses stealthy and quick: Within 15 minutes, without fail, a police car arrives and circles the abandoned lot. Someone inside Southwest Key Programs has called the authorities because we have come too close to seeing the detained children.
COURTESY OF ASHLEY CASALE
A photo Gabe took of kids playing in the back of Casa El Presidente. In the bottom left corner are freelancers for The New York Times.
We have become buddies with news crews who are covering what is happening at Casa El Presidente, exchanging Gatorade and bags of ice and tidbits of news as they wait patiently, sometimes all day, for an official rumored to be visiting the shelter to finally appear. On the Thursday of our first week here, DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen supposedly visited, but this was not confirmed until long after her convoy of vehicles left. The members of the media here know as little about what’s going on as we do.
Last Saturday, we met a mother, Lesvia, who came to the U.S. from Guatemala with her son, Yudem, almost two months ago. She was taken into custody 56 days ago and finally released from the T. Don Hutto immigration detention center in Taylor, Texas, on Thursday. She was driven to Brownsville by representatives of the Austin-based organization Grassroots Leadership, who had advocated for her release, to have a one-hour visit with 10-year-old Yudem, who is being held at Casa El Presidente. She hadn’t seen or spoken to him in over a month. She sobbed as she was led away from our tent while CNN’s news cameras surrounded her.
She deserved to leave with him, but the Office of Refugee Resettlement under the Trump administration has created so much red tape for parents trying to get their children back that she left alone. Lesvia was told that although she showed documents proving her relationship to Yudem, she needed to be fingerprinted and submit to a background check, and may not see her son’s release for another 20 days. I hugged her, kissed her forehead and told her “I’m so sorry” and “We love you.” The Grassroots Leadership representatives translated my words, but they were just words. Her tears wouldn’t stop. There is no comfort. There is no consolation.
I’m camping here because I’m a mom of a tender age child. If it were my child being held captive, it would not be OK, so as far as I am concerned, it is not OK for any other mother or any other child.
While the Trump administration is flagrantly ignoring court-imposed deadlines and heartlessly taking its time reuniting children with their parents, each day that passes is agonizing and traumatic for the tender age children at Casa El Presidente.
I’m camping here because I’m a mom of a tender age child. If it were my child being held captive, it would not be OK, so as far as I am concerned, it is not OK for any other mother or any other child.
Every morning, Gabe reminds me that it’s time to walk a few yards over to the guards and ask for a tour. I get tired of hearing “No ma’am, we cannot let you inside” and “No ma’am, we cannot release that information” when I ask an employee about what is happening in the shelter.
But every day we still ask for a tour, and every day we call the PR spokesperson for Southwest Key Programs asking for answers.
And, without fail, each day we do not get a tour and we do not get any answers.
So we wait.
Beside our tent we paint signs that read “Complicit,” “All we’re asking for is a tour,” “Try transparency,” “We will go home when the children are reunited” and “How many separated kids do you have?” My son made a sign, not in the neatest handwriting, that simply says “Free The Kids.”
Gabe doesn’t understand why one sign says “Give Yudem to Lesvia.” Don’t we want all kids reunited? he asks. I explain that sometimes telling the story of just one family can be more powerful. I tell him it can humanize what is happening more than a sign that reads “Reunite Every Child” might.
We spent the first few days here chasing after our signs, until we finally got smart about the Texas wind and bought some twining.
NORMA HERRERA
The author holds a sign reading “Give Yudem To Lesvia.” The photo was taken by Norma Herrera from Grassroots Leadership through her car window as she was driving Lesvia away from Casa El Presidente.
Southwest Key Programs, though nominally a nonprofit, is explicitly benefiting from the separation of children and parents through hundreds of millions of dollars in federal contracts. The employees, security guards and constables I have met in the last two weeks are not just “doing their job” ― they’re complicit in a national atrocity.
But it’s unclear to me if they know that. One security guard, referring to a sign we’ve made that originally read “14 days is running out” and now reads “14 days is up,” asked me, “Ma’am, what does 14 days mean?”
How could he be standing out here for a 12-hour shift and not know about the now come-and-gone court-imposed deadline that required children ages 5 and under to be reunited with their parents within 14 days?
The Trump administration claimed on Thursday that all children 5 and under would be reunited by that morning “if they are eligible.” But who decides eligibility? The administration has said, rather vaguely, that factors like a criminal record, having already been deported, or being “otherwise unfit” would make parents trying to reunite with their children 5 and under ineligible. It was then decided that only 57 children were eligible for reunification, and 46 were not. When, if ever, will those 46 children under 5 be reunited? And what about the thousands of children over the age of 5 who are currently in shelters? When will they see their families again?
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I want my son to see that when there is injustice and we aren’t given answers, we can literally refuse to leave until we get them — even if it means pitching a tent and preparing to stay as long as it takes.
The U.S. government has created a dehumanizing frenzy surrounding the notion of “illegal immigration,” and convinced the president’s supporters that we need more hostility, more arrests, more detention centers, more Border Patrol agents, more border wall. What we really need now is an army of moms and dads patrolling the border, demanding the reunion of these children with their parents.
Finding myself unexpectedly unemployed several months ago, I had the time, freedom and privilege to personally start this patrol. The idea of taking a 9-to-5 desk job and putting my son in day care all summer while children are in detention at the border and activists and lawyers are clamoring to get them released did not feel right, so I put my job search on hold. I needed to be on the ground, adding what I could to the work being done.
On the drive down, I briefed my son on what is happening at the border, and he talked about how he hoped to make friends with the kids in the shelters. We haven’t been able to get anywhere close to that. But at the very least, I hope he’s learning about the importance and power of direct action. This mother is fighting for other mothers. This mother is demanding answers. I want my son to see that when there is injustice and we aren’t given answers, we can literally refuse to leave until we get them ― even if it means pitching a tent and preparing to stay as long as it takes. When our tent is removed (this happened last week, while it was unattended for an hour), we get a new tent, move it even closer to the entrance and make our signs even bolder. We have it all set up before sunrise.
I also want my son to see that direct action works. When Lesvia arrived for her next one-hour visit with her son this past Thursday, one thing had changed: She had brought a tent with her. She planned to camp out with me and Gabe until Yudem was released, and she made this clear to Southwest Key Programs. Her story had gained press attention, and there were members of the media waiting outside while she visited with her son. Yudem was released to her shortly after 5 p.m. on Thursday, and she never had to pitch her tent.
Seeing Yudem come out of Casa El Presidente and tearfully walk over to our tent as Grassroots Leadership members translated our signs for him was magical. Seeing his face when he saw his name on a sign, as he realized complete strangers had been advocating for his release, was magical. And when Yudem cried as his mother kissed him, it was hard for anyone there ― including the reporters ― not to weep themselves. Still, as beautiful as this moment was, we cannot forget there remain dozens of tender age children just like Yudem inside Casa El Presidente waiting to be released.
COURTESY OF ASHLEY CASALE
Lesvia kisses her son Yudem just moments after he was released from the Casa El Presidente shelter.
I finally spoke with Cindy Casares, a spokeswoman for Southwest Key Programs, after countless calls and a barrage of tweets from my handle, @BorderPatrolMom (and perhaps also after reports from inside Casa El Presidente that two people were camping outside). She wouldn’t confirm that where we’re camping is a tender age facility, although press has already confirmed this. She wouldn’t confirm how many children are inside. She wouldn’t discuss reunification plans.
The evasiveness and secrecy is all supposedly in the name of protecting confidentiality, but I believe this is about covering up the lies of the Trump administration and the brutality of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol agents. I believe Southwest Key Programs fully realizes that the American people would be outraged to know the truth about the suffering of the children inside, so everything is being kept under wraps. Rather than agitating for swifter reunions, they choose to play innocent and present themselves as a benevolent nonprofit simply complying with government orders. They could do more. They could do better. But it’s a good time to be in the business of immigration detention.
So, with no answers and very little having changed, we prepare for another night outside Casa El Presidente. I wouldn’t want my environmentalist friends back home to know I’m using bug spray with DEET, but we need it to ward off the Texas mosquitoes ― “little hummingbirds,” as my son calls them. We brush our teeth crouched by the front tire of our Prius, spitting toothpaste on the ground. We wash our hair using jugs of water left to heat up in the tent and shampoo ourselves in the middle of the street. It’s not exactly a glamorous life.
But every day, I’m reminded of our privilege. Every day I’m reminded that for my son, this is like a camping trip, an exciting adventure. We’re sleeping in a tent, eating food out of a cooler, tossing around a baseball with our gloves while we wait. He’ll assemble complicated Lego structures while I’m journaling or making phone calls or typing on my laptop: This is not all that different from being home. Every day I’m reminded that though it may be 100 degrees here and I may resort to dumping melted ice from the cooler over my head to cool down a bit, I have my son sitting out here with me, cuddling with me in the tent when the sun sets and waking me up when it rises. These parents and these children deserve the same.
COURTESY OF ASHLEY CASALE
Gabe sitting on our cooler.
Still, there’s more to think about, beyond and after the reunions finally happen. While most discussions about what is taking place at the border have centered on the need to reunite separated children with their parents, we should also be discussing the trauma that has been inflicted upon these tender age children, which includes having a conversation about reparations. Who will pay for the therapy they will need to begin to heal from this terrifying experience? These children are victims of state-sanctioned violence — they are essentially experiencing child abuse — and the organizations claiming to serve children are wholly complicit in this abuse.
My son and I want Southwest Key Programs to reveal the number of children inside Casa El Presidente. We want to know the ages of the children being held here. We want to know how the people running this shelter, and all the other shelters like it, plan to reunite these tender age children with their families. We want to know the timeline for making this happen. In the meantime, you can find us at our campsite, demanding answers and refusing to leave until we get them.
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As Ashley makes clear, the idea that anyone in the Trump Administration is acting for the welfare or in the best interests of these children is beyond preposterous!
Sessions plans to return all brown-skinned refugees to countries where they will be “sitting ducks” for gangs and domestic abusers and the governments will either join in or willfully ignore what’s happening. In other words, he intends to sentence them to lives of abuse or perhaps death without even fairly considering their claims for refuge. He just doesn’t care, because they aren’t white.
We all should be ashamed of what America has become under Trump & Sessions.
SAN ANTONIO, Texas — Federal judges are setting unusually large bonds for detained immigrants, immigration attorneys say, including for parents who were separated from their children at the border, a shift that has delayed the parents’ release even as the Trump administration insists it is making every effort to bring families back together.
Judges in past administrations routinely set large bonds for detained immigrants, often as high as $7,500, and well in excess of the $1,500 minimum required by law. But the practice appears to have grown under President Donald Trump, as judges respond to new Department of Justice guidelines aimed at reducing legal and illegal immigration.
The change is significant because the bond process is a key, if often overlooked, part of the immigration court system. For most detained immigrants, securing a bond is their only chance to live outside of detention in the United States while the federal government determines whether to deport them or allow them to remain in the country, a procedure that can take months, or in many cases, years, to complete. As of last month, the average wait time for a pending asylum case was more than 700 days, according to a database maintained by Syracuse University.
A ‘massive departure’
The Obama administration directed immigration judges to use their discretion to release eligible immigrants on low-cost bonds or without any bond at all, a form of parole known as “release on recognizance.” That is no longer the case under President Donald Trump, more than a dozen immigration lawyers and legal aid groups who represent detained immigrants said in interviews for this story.
Instead, immigration court judges — as well as officials from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, who also have authority to grant bonds — are increasingly denying bond requests altogether, or setting them at amounts in excess of $10,000, making them unaffordable for many immigrant families entering the country. One immigration attorney, who asked not to be named to discuss her clients’ cases, said it was “not rare” to see bonds of $25,000 for asylum seekers.
The entrance to an immigration court in San Antonio where judges hold bond hearings and other cases for detained immigrants. Photo by Phil Kline for PBS NewsHour
It’s a massive departure, in the sense of removing common sense discretion,” said Alfredo Lozano, an immigration attorney, referring to administration policymakers and immigration judges.
Erica Schommer, a law professor at St. Mary’s University in San Antonio, said there was no reliable data showing exactly how many immigrants were affected by these changes. But she and other attorneys estimated that “thousands of families have gotten higher bonds since Trump took office.”
It’s unclear how many detained parents separated from their children at the border remain in custody due to their inability to pay bond.
Numerous immigration attorneys also said the rise in unusually high bonds continued even after families were separated as a result of the “zero-tolerance” policy that took effect in May, despite public assurances from senior administration officials that the government was trying its best to reunite parents and children.
“The bond setting process with these high bonds is leading to lengthier time in detention, and lengthier periods of separation,” said Denise Gilman, the director of the Immigration Clinic at the University of Texas at Austin.
A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security wrote in an email that there was no “significant deviation” in the bond amounts that ICE officers set today compared to those under previous presidents.
The official denied that ICE officers were setting higher bonds at the request of the Departments of Homeland Security and Justice, as part of the Trump administration’s crackdown on illegal immigration. “There has been no change to bond policy,” the official said.
The average immigration bond set by ICE in fiscal year 2016 was $9,000, the official said. But he did not provide any documentation to corroborate the figure, and the agency did not respond to a request for data on the number or average cost of bonds granted to detained immigrants who were recently separated from their children.
The Homeland Security official also referred questions to the Executive Office for Immigration Review, the office within the Department of Justice that oversees federal immigration court.
An asylum seeker, who asked that his face not be shown to protect his identity, at immigration court after being released from detention. Photo by Phil Kline for the PBS NewsHour
On Wednesday, a spokesperson for the Department of Justice said in an email that the Executive Office for Immigration Review, does not keep data on the average bond amount for immigrants in detention, or the percentage of bond requests that are approved.
Another Justice Department spokesperson followed up Thursday to say that the office did keep some statistics on median bond amounts set by the immigration court, but that the office was not required to record the amounts in its database.
The official also pointed to an annual report on immigration cases prepared by the Executive Office for Immigration Review. The latest report showed the immigration court system completed 61,976 bond cases in fiscal year 2016, down from 78,221 in fiscal year 2012, the first year in the report.
Inside the complex bond process
The bond process follows a complex set of guidelines. In general, however, immigrants’ chances of obtaining a bond are based on a few key factors: how they entered the country, whether they have strong ties to family already living in the U.S., and the strength of their asylum claim.
The Immigration and Nationality Act requires the federal government to detain immigrants who enter the country legally by presenting themselves at a border checkpoint and claiming asylum, as well any immigrants who are caught illegally crossing the border. Once in custody, immigrants are interviewed by government officials to determine if they have a legitimate claim to asylum. If it’s determined that they do, they become eligible for release on bond.
ICE officers can release immigrants at any point in the process. Under Obama, the agency frequently released adult immigrants into the country without bond, as long as they did not have a serious criminal record or pose a national security threat. But immigration attorneys said that practice, often referred to by administration officials as “catch and release,” has largely ended under Trump, a change that has forced immigrants to fight their cases from detention — unless they can get out on bond.
Now, as more judges set higher bonds, immigrants are increasingly spending more time in detention, immigration lawyers said.
“We’ve consistently seen the bonds creep up and up and up over the last year and a half,” said Jodi Goodwin, an immigration attorney who runs a law practice in Harlingen, a small city on the U.S.-Mexico border in southern Texas. “From what we’ve normally seen in the past, which was an average of $3,500 to $5,000, to now $10,000.”
The Trump administration has consistently said that stricter enforcement measures are needed to curb illegal immigration.
Gilman, who represents immigrants in court, said in an interview that one of her clients, a woman named Jessica, recently received a $12,500 bond after being separated from her two sons at the border in March. The woman, whose last name Gilman asked not be revealed to protect her identity, said she had fled El Salvador to escape gang violence.
After they were detained, the woman’s children, who are four and 10 years old, were transferred to the Office of Refugee Resettlement, the agency within the Department of Health and Human Services that oversees the custody of immigrant children, and later released to relatives. But the mother is still in detention, while advocacy groups attempt to raise the bond money to get her out, Gilman said.
Unlike in the criminal justice system, where defendants can be released on bail, detained immigrants in immigration court proceedings, which are civil, must have their bonds paid in full to leave detention. Bail is not allowed, a factor that makes it even harder for immigrants like Jessica to be released from detention.
Another crucial difference of immigration court — compared to criminal cases — is that the government is not required to provide a lawyer for immigrants who cannot afford to hire an attorney or find free legal representation. As a result, just 14 percent of detained immigrants in the U.S. were represented by lawyers during their deportation proceedings from 1951 to 2013, according to a report by the American Immigration Council, published in September 2016.
An immigration court in downtown San Antonio where judges hold bond hearings and other cases for detained immigrants. Photo by Photo by Phil Kline for PBS NewsHour
A separate study by the Vera Institute of Justice found that in New York State, an immigrant’s odds of remaining legally in the country increased from 4 percent to 48 percent when they had an attorney. The findings mirrored national statistics on the benefits of legal representation in immigration court.
The dearth of legal representation could impact the next phase of the family separation crisis, which has been closely intertwined with the immigration bond process.
A federal judge Tuesday ordered the Trump administration to reunify detained parents and their children within 14 to 30 days, depending on the age of the child, and stop separating families at the border. But it’s unclear how the administration will quickly reunify adults like Jessica, who are detained by the Department of Homeland Security, with their children, who are in the custody of a separate federal agency.
Moreover, the injunction did not stop the Trump administration from prosecuting immigrants who cross into the country illegally, or block judges from setting high bonds that most immigrants can’t afford to pay. As long as judges keep setting higher bond amounts, detained immigrant adults will likely continue to spend long periods of time apart from their families.
“The Department of Homeland Security and the Justice Department have been making claims about how hard they’re working to reunite families, when actually they’re working hard to keep families detained through the bond process,” Gilman said.
Immigration attorneys and legal aid groups said the administration’s claim that nothing has changed contradicts what they’re seeing on the ground in immigration courtrooms across the country.
The practice of consistently setting large bonds represents “a dramatic change from the Obama administration’s policies,” said John Sandweg, who served as the acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
“I’m not surprised if the Department of Justice is directing courts to step up and be tougher on bonds. The administration is trying to keep as many people in detention as possible” to hasten their deportation, Sandweg said.
Shifting grounds for asylum
In one case that is becoming increasingly common, a judge recently set a $9,000 bond for an immigrant mother after she was detained and separated from her two-year-old child at the Texas border. Schommer, the St. Mary’s law professor who is representing the woman in court, shared some aspects of her client’s story on the condition that the woman remain anonymous.
The woman based her asylum claim on being a victim of domestic abuse in her home country, Schommer said. At her bond hearing, according to Schommer, the immigration judge said he was setting a high bond because he did not think the woman’s asylum request would be granted under a ruling issued this month by Attorney General Jeff Sessions. The ruling held that gang violence and domestic abuse are no longer grounds for seeking asylum.
Schommer’s client’s case offers a concrete example of an immigration judge making decisions based on the immigration policies set by top administration officials in Washington.
“Obviously, her family does not have the $9,000” to pay for the bond, Schommer said. She said she had turned for help to RAICES, an immigration advocacy group that is raising money to pay for bonds for immigrant parents separated from their children. “We’re in the process of trying to get the money,” Schommer said. “Hopefully we’ll able to get her bond posted this week.”
That might not be necessary if the Trump administration moves quickly to comply with the order to reunify separated families. Even so, the woman will likely remain separated from her young son for at least the next several days, if not longer.
The PBS NewsHour could not independently confirm the story and other similar stories that immigration attorneys related in interviews. Immigrants who are currently in detention or who have family members in the system are often reluctant to reveal details of their cases to the media, out of fear that the information, once it is made public, could hurt their chances of avoiding deportation.
But in repeated visits to three different immigration courts in Texas this week, including one inside the detention center in the city of Pearsall, this reporter witnessed judges consistently deny bonds or set bonds at amounts well above the $1,500 minimum. In several instances, judges set bonds above $10,000, including one for $12,000 and another for $15,000.
Those bond hearings were for immigrants who were detained before the “zero-tolerance” policy took effect. Still, they provided clear anecdotal evidence of the preference on the part of judges for issuing large bonds, and the difficulties immigrants face in navigating the U.S. legal system — especially if they don’t have an attorney. The vast majority of immigrants in the bond hearings witnessed during these visits to the courts did not have legal representation.
“You can see the tide has changed. Not just with enforcement. The tide has changed with the judges’ discretion on bonds ever since Trump came to office,” said Lozano, an immigration attorney. “If they can make it difficult, they will make it more difficult.”
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Obviously, something fishy is going on here.
Average bonds in Arlington Immigration Court 2003-2016 in my experience, $2500 – $5000.
In 13 years, I only set one $25,000 bond. That was pursuant to a stipulation by the parties.
Approximately 95% of those I bonded “made” their bonds.
I seldom had a problem with bonded respondents failing to appear.
There is no current crisis or other reason for higher bonds.
The only real change is that Sessions is pressuring Immigration Judges to implement his White Nationalist agenda.
By rewriting established asylum law to deny most gender based claims, Sessions is actively encouraging Immigration Judges to prejudge asylum cases and keep those who should be bonded in detention for improper deterrence or punishment purposes.
There will be no justice or Due Process in a fake “court system” run and controlled by a racist, White Nationalist, Jim Crow like Sessions.
Congrats to reporters like Daniel and courageous advocates who are exposing the systemic corruption, illegality, and immorality that Sessions has brought to an already overwhelmed and dysfunctional system.
Even ICE officers are starting to resist the racist, counterproductive, and in many cases just plain stupid enforcement policies of the Trump immigration enforcement regime.
I know that Federal jobs are important. But where are the Immigration Judges willing to stand up and “just say no” to unconstitutional and racist policies?
Is a job, even a very good one, more important than personal integrity and the lives of migrants being unfairly targeted and harmed by a White Nationalist regime?
Keep digging Daniel. You’ll eventually hit ”paydirt.” And nothing is more important to our country than to hold those public officials like Sessions who misuse our laws to inflict their personal bias on others accountable in some way, shape, or form.
“When Jennye Pagoada Lopez arrived at the U.S. border post of San Ysidro in July seeking political asylum, she showed agents ultrasound images of her pregnancy and told them she was bleeding and needed immediate medical attention.
But instead of taking her to the hospital, they detained her for more than a day before transferring her to the Otay Mesa Detention Center in San Diego.
It took two days to get a medical exam. Four days after that, she was informed that she had a miscarriage.
That was the account she gave in a sworn declaration to her lawyers.
“I was neglected, subjected to abusive conditions and denied medical treatment when requested,” she testified.
Pagoada is among ten women whose testimony was included in a complaint filed this week against the U.S. Department of Homeland Security by seven rights groups accusing immigration officials of improperly detaining pregnant women and failing to provide them with adequate medical care.
The complaint — made to the department’s inspector general and civil rights officer — alleges that the women suffered physical and psychological harm and asks the department to investigate the cases and report on what steps immigration authorities will take to enforce its policies on the detention and treatment of pregnant women.
“We are gravely concerned with the agency’s failure to abide by its own policy against detaining pregnant women, the detention conditions that have been reported by pregnant women in various detention facilities across the country, and the lack of quality medical care provided to women who are pregnant or have suffered miscarriages while in custody,” the complaint said.”
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Read the rest of Melissa’s report at the link.
The American Gulag intends to demean, dehumanize, demoralize, and discourage migrants like Jenny Pagoda Lopez.
But, the reality is that Lopez and others like her come out as human, brave, and courageous.
The truth is that all Americans are demeaned and dehumanized by unnecessary immigraton detention. It is a stain on our humanity, our professed values, and our national conscience that will not easily be washed away.
“JUST SAY NO” to politicos who support, actively or passively, this un-American regime!
“Detention as a tool of immigration enforcement has increased dramatically following immigration reforms enacted in 1996. Two Supreme Court cases at the dawn of the new millennium offered contrasting approaches to the review of decisions of the U.S. government to detain immigrants. In 2001, in Zadvydas v. Davis, the Supreme Court interpreted an immigration statute to require judicial review of a detention decision because “to permit[] indefinite detention of an alien would cause a serious constitutional problem.” Just two years later, the court in Demore v. Kim invoked the “plenary power” doctrine – something exceptional to immigration law and inconsistent with modern constitutional law – to immunize from review a provision of the immigration statute requiring detention of immigrants awaiting removal based on a crime.
How the Supreme Court reconciles these dueling decisions will no doubt determine the outcome in Jennings v. Rodriguez. This case involves the question whether immigrants, like virtually any U.S. citizen placed in criminal or civil detention, must be guaranteed a bond hearing and possible release from custody. Relying on Zadvydas v. Davis, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit affirmed a district court injunction that avoided “a serious constitutional problem” by requiring bond hearings every six months for immigrant detainees. The court of appeals further mandated that, in order to continue to detain an immigrant, the government must prove that the noncitizen poses a flight risk or a danger to public safety.”
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Read the rest of Dean Johnson’s analysis at the link.
This is huge in human rights. A “W” for the Administration, which many observers view as likely with the advent of Justice Gorsuch, will essentially “Green Light” the Trump-Sessions-Miller plan to construct the “New American Gulag.” The Gulag’s “prisoners” will be noncriminal migrants (many of them women fleeing violence in the Northern Triangle) whose only “crime” is to assert their rights for due process and justice under our laws.
The concept that migrants have rights is something that sticks in the craws of the White Nationalists. So, punishing them for asserting their rights (with an objective of coercing them into giving up their rights and leaving “voluntarily”) is the next best thing to denying them entirely (which the Administration routinely does whenever it thinks it can get away with it — and the Article IIIs have largely, but not entirely, been asleep at the switch here).
And, make no mistake about it, as study after study has shown, the “conditions of civil detention” in the Gulag are substandard. So much so that in the last Administration DHS’s own study committee actually recommended an end to private immigration detention contracts and a phasing out of so-called “family detention.” The response of the Trump White Nationalists: ignore the facts and double down on the inhumanity.
Based on recent news reports, DHS immigration detainees die at a rate of approximately one per month. And many more suffer life changing and life threatening medical and psychiatric conditions while in detention. Just “collateral damage” in “Gonzo speak.”
Immigration detainees are often held without bond or with bonds that are so unrealistically high that they effectively amount to no bond. And, in many cases (like the one here) they are denied even minimal access to a U.S. Immigration Judge to have the reasons for detention reviewed.
Plus, as I reported recently, across the nation DHS is refusing to negotiate bonds for those eligible. They are also appealing Immigration Judge decisions to release migrants on bond pending hearings, apparently without any regard to the merits of the IJ’s decision. In other words, DHS is abusing the immigration appeals system for the purpose of harassing migrants who won’t agree to waive their rights to a due process hearing and depart!
Also, as I pointed out, in the “no real due process” world of the U.S. Immigration Courts, the DHS prosecutors can unilaterally block release of a migrant on bond pending appeal. In most cases this means that the individual remains in detention until the Immigration Judge completes the “merits hearing.” At that point the BIA determines that the DHS bond appeal is “moot” and dismisses it without ever reaching the merits. Just another bogus “production” statistic generated by EOIR!
Oh, and by the way, contrary to “Gonzo” Session’s false and misleading rhetoric on so-called “Sanctuary Cities,” one of the things jurisdictions that rationally choose to limit cooperation with DHS enforcement to those with significant criminal records are doing is protecting their law-abiding, productive migrant residents and migrant communities from the patent abuses of the “American Gulag.” “Gonzo policies” predictably drive reasonable people to take protective actions.
But, some day, the bureaucrats, complicit judges (particularly life-tenured Article III Judges, like the Supremes), reactionary legislators who turn their backs on human suffering, and misguided voters who have allowed this human rights travesty to be perpetrated on American soil will be held accountable, by the forces of history if nothing else.
“It turns out that the immigration crackdown that Donald Trump’s ICE is pursuing, though hard on illegals and their families by producing terrible uncertainty for them, is not without its “bright side.” The light that provides a bright side is shining on the shares of stock in the Geo Group and CoreCivic, and on jails in a number of Texas counties.
Geo Group and CoreCivic operate private, for-profit prisons. Before Trump became president, they were on hard times, and for good reason. In August 2016, the U.S. Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General issued a report that was highly critical of the way those companies treated prisoners entrusted with their care. The report found that inmates in facilities run by those corporations “were nine times more likely to be placed on lockdown than inmates at other federal prisons and were frequently subjected to arbitrary solitary confinement simply because there was not space for them among the general population.”
Although placing them in solitary confinement so they would not add to overcrowding in the general prison population had the desired effect, solitary confinement is generally acknowledged to be equivalent to torture and has been repeatedly criticized for its excessive use in United States prisons. According to the report, the Bureau of Prisons was using the private prisons on a large scale to “confine federal inmates who are primarily low security, criminal alien adult males with 90 months or less remaining to serve on their sentences.” The report stated that “in a majority of the categories we examined, contract prisons incurred more safety and security incidents per capita than comparable Bureau of Prisons institutions.” It said that the contract prisons “do not provide comparable services [to those operated by the Federal Bureau of Prisons], do not save substantially on costs, and do not maintain ‘the same level of safety and security.’”
At almost the same time that that report was issued, Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, issued instructions to federal officials to reduce the use of private prisons because of the falling prison population throughout the country. The result was that stock in CoreCivic and GEO, the two largest private prison companies in the United States, fell precipitously. The election of Donald J. Trump reversed their fortunes.
The day after the election shares in CoreCivic rose 43 percent and share in GEO rose 21 percent. The investors’ optimism was rewarded when on February 21st, 2017, Attorney General Sessions, rescinded the order that the private prisons be phased out. Following the announcement, the prison companies enjoyed another jump in share prices. The order should not have been a surprise. Notwithstanding the Justice Department report that was highly critical of the private prisons, Trump―for whom facts are notoriously unimportant―said: “I do think we can do a lot of privatizations and private prisons. It seems to work a lot better.” Of course, private prisons are not the only ones rejoicing in the prospect of more inmates, thanks to the increased attention being paid to illegal immigrants and their incarceration. Jailers in small Texas counties are also excited.
. . . .
. . . . Now many of the counties that eagerly built new jails find themselves trying to pay off the cost of construction without adequate occupants to pay the debt that was incurred to build them. The good news for them is that since Trump has encouraged ICE to round up and jail illegal immigrants, the glut of jail space may soon vanish and cells that were empty and non-income producing, will once again be fully occupied with illegal immigrants and their families.
In a speech delivered to Police Chiefs Association on April 11, 2017, Attorney General Sessions announced a number of increased enforcement policies including a provision that those who get married to avoid immigration laws, will be charged with offenses that carry a two-year mandatory minimum prison sentence. If, notwithstanding the prospect of new occupants, counties no longer want to maintain their facilities, they may be able to sell them to private prison companies that will use the space for housing illegal immigrants. It’s a win-win situation for private prisons and Texas counties. The only loser is the pre-Trump United States we knew and loved.”
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Hey, the only “losers” here are humanity, values, taxpayers, and our self-respect. What’s not to like about that Sessions-Trump initiative?
And “Gulag” is definitely the right term to describe contemporary immigration detention. Just ask families whose loved ones, and lawyers whose clients are moved from facility to facility, and sometimes removed from the United States, without notice. Even U.S. Immigration Courts sometimes have a hard time locating the “respondents” on their detained dockets in the DHS detention maze. Not to mention that sometimes detainees with cases pending before one Immigration Court are more or less arbitrarily moved to another detention center in another jurisdiction (perhaps to save a few bucks on “bed rates”).
“Imagine: Miles upon miles of new concrete jails stretching across the scrub-brush horizons of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California, with millions of people incarcerated in orange jumpsuits and awaiting deportation.
Such is the fevered vision of a little-noticed segment of President Donald Trump’s sulfurous executive order on border security and immigration enforcement security. Section 5 of the January 25 order calls for the “immediate” construction of detention facilities and allocation of personnel and legal resources “to detain aliens at or near the land border with Mexico” and process them for deportation. But another, much overlooked, order signed the same day spells out, in ominous terms, who will go.
Trump promised a week after the November elections that he would expel or imprison some 2 million or 3 million undocumented immigrants with criminal convictions—a number that exists mainly in his imagination. (Only about 820,000 undocumented immigrants currently have a criminal record, according to the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank. Many of those have traffic infractions and other misdemeanors.)
Still, the spectre of new, pop-up jails housing hundreds of thousands of people is as powerful a fright-dream for liberals as it is a triumph for the president’s “America first” Svengali, Steve Bannon. But, like the fuzzy Trump order dropping the gate on travelers from seven Muslim-majority states, the deportation measure presents so many fiscal and legal restraints that is also looks suspiciously like just another act of ideological showboating from the rumpled White House strategy chief.
“I’m a Leninist,” Bannon proudly proclaimed to the writer Ronald Radosh at a party at his Capitol Hill townhouse in November 2013. “Lenin,” he said of the Russian revolutionary, “wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.”
The executive orders were “not issued as result of any recommendation or threat assessment made by DHS to the White House,” Department of Homeland Security officials conceded in a closed-door briefing on Capitol Hill Wednesday, according to a statement from Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill. They were all Bannon-style revolutionary theater.
. . . .
Expect DHS to start advertising for bids from private prison operators, a much-maligned industry that was collapsing in the latter years of the Obama administration. Two of the largest, GEO Group Inc. and CoreCivic Inc., are already seeing windfalls from their second chance at life: Their stock prices have nearly doubled since the election.
All of which recalls another Leninist idea that Bannon may have forgotten: Prisons are universities for revolution.”
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Stein’s article confirms what many of us had suspected all along — these draconian and unnecessary measures were were “’not issued as result of any recommendation or threat assessment made by DHS to the White House.’” No, they were part of a pre-hatched anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim program cooked up by Bannon and others in the White House to “make good” on Trump’s campaign promises (regardless of whether the measures were necessary of sensible).
But they will be a boon for two important U.S. industries: the private prison industry and the legal industry, as both sides “lawyer up” for a long-term, avoidable, and wasteful fight. Who needs foreign enemies when the Administration is so determined to wage warfare against a large number of our own citizens and residents who disagree with his ill-considered and ill-timed policies?
Stein’s full article (well worth the read) is at the link.
