"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.
https://cliniclegal.org/file-download/download/public/6539
Thanks Tanika and CLINIC. This should be a great resource for practitioners, litigators, and students.
My apologies for the formatting of the quote!
PWS
03-22-21
“May God forgive you, because I cannot.”
These words were written to me in a letter while I was a United States immigration judge at the Baltimore Immigration Court, where I presided for 31 years. The letter was written by the wife of a man I had ordered deported. In so doing, I had permanently separated a father and husband from his wife and children. These words will stay with me for the rest of my life.
Michelle Jones’ husband, Daryl, was charged with a minor offense in Maryland. Like many first-time offenders and individuals charged with minor violations, he was given probation before judgment (PBJ). This meant that Daryl, a lawful permanent resident of the United States was not convicted under Maryland state law. For United States citizens, a Maryland PBJ poses no further consequences unless they violate the terms of their probation. But for non-citizens like Daryl, the legal consequences can be far more dire.
Although a PBJ is not considered a conviction under state law, it is considered a conviction under federal law and therefore triggers immigration consequences, such as detention and deportation. I have witnessed countless non-citizens be ordered deported as a result of a PBJ and the devastation to their families that follows. I myself have ordered the deportation of hundreds of Maryland residents like Daryl because of a PBJ. It didn’t matter that these individuals had been deemed worthy of a second chance and not convicted under Maryland law. Their PBJs condemned them to the gravest punishment — deportation under federal immigration law — leaving me with no judicial discretion. My hands were tied by the law.
The Maryland General Assembly has the opportunity, and the responsibility, to correct this unjust system by amending the PBJ statute. That is why I am asking the Maryland General Assembly to pass legislation (House Bill 354/Senate Bill 527) that would make probation before judgment accessible to all Maryland residents, regardless of citizenship status. The amendment would merely change the process by which a PBJ is entered; the impact of a PBJ would remain unchanged.
This bill ensures that the consequences of PBJs are the same for citizens and non-citizens alike, narrowing the disparities in our criminal justice and immigration systems, which disproportionately affect people of color. And for someone like Daryl, it would have been the difference between deportation and staying in the country to be with his family and watch his kids grow up.
. . . .
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Read the full op-ed at the link.
All of us who have served on the immigration bench have had cases like Daryl’s where the result is unjust and there is no sensible explanation for what we were forced to do.
The time for rationalizing and humanizing our immigration laws is here. As my long-time friend and colleague (we were “present at the beginning” of EOIR) John says, we must seize and act on every opportunity to make due process and equal justice under law a reality for all persons in America!
Thanks, my friend and colleague!
Historical trivia: I made one of my rare Immigration Court appearances before Judge Gossart in a pro bono case when I was at Frogomen DC. It was an asylum case, and we won at the preheating conference! I do remember that Judge Gossart was pretty peeved at me because I refused to concede removability, asserting my client’s right to be in and remain in the U.S. as a refugee/asylee. He “ripped me” on that issue, but we won on everything else. The INS Attorney didn’t contest it, as I remember.
One of my other pro bono appearances was before my friend and Round Table colleague Judge Joan Churchill in Arlington. Won that one too — recollect it was a withholding of removal case, also resolved through pretrial agreement with the INS Attorney at the suggestion of Judge Churchill.
Didn’t get to show off my “litigation skills” in either case. Probably just as well. A “W” is a “W,” and a life saved is a life saved!
PWS
02-05-21
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/01/06/georgias-voters-end-trump-era-definitively/
E. J. Dionne in WashPost:
Thanks to the voters of Georgia, the 2020 election looks very different than it did 48 hours ago. Barring a highly unlikely shift in the vote count, President-elect Joe Biden will now govern with a Democratic Senate and a Democratic House. The margins will be thin, but the power of Republicans to obstruct has been sharply diminished.
And the political map of the United States looks very different, too. Four years ago, it was unimaginable that Democratic control of the elected branches of the federal government would be cemented by victories in Senate races in Georgia. The Rev. Raphael Warnock won and Jon Ossoff leads in a state that had not elected a Democrat to the Senate in two decades.
The likely outcome put an exclamation point on Biden’s success and a dagger into the Trump era. President Trump almost certainly hurt Republicans Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, both directly and indirectly.
Trump’s insistence, against all the evidence, that the November vote in Republican-led Georgia was fraudulently counted split his party and may have discouraged GOP turnout on Tuesday. And Republicans will confront the reality that some voters drawn to the polls when Trump is on the ballot have no interest in participating when he’s not. They are more Trumpublicans than Republicans.
But the president did still more damage to his party by denigrating the $600 stimulus checks in the recently passed economic relief package and calling for $2,000 payments instead. His unexpected veto threat played directly into the argument made by both Warnock and Ossoff: that only Democrats could be trusted to deliver relief to the economically ailing, including the middle class.
Ossoff was unabashed in appealing directly to voters’ immediate interests: “You send me and Reverend Warnock to the Senate, and we will put money in your pocket.” Biden was equally direct when he campaigned for the Democratic duo on the eve of the election. “If you send Jon and the reverend to Washington, those $2,000 checks are going out the door, restoring hope and decency and honor to so many people struggling right now,” Biden said. “If you send Sens. Perdue and Loeffler back to Washington, those checks will never get there. It’s just that simple.”
Last November, exit polls showed that voters most worried about the pandemic tended toward Democrats, while those worried about the economy leaned Republican. This led critics on the Democratic left, but also from elsewhere in the party, to argue that its candidates had failed to define a clear economic message.
Warnock and Ossoff did not make that mistake when they were given a second chance in the runoffs. Their defining issues were economic, and their victories would make it far easier for Biden to enact a large new relief package, a major infrastructure program, and expansions in health-care coverage and child care — as well as democracy reforms and voting-rights protections.
Georgia’s outcome also showed that the swing of middle-class suburban voters toward the Democrats was not a one-off reaction to Trump. Democrats feared and Republicans hoped that, with Trump defeated, at least some Republican-inclined anti-Trump voters would come home to the GOP on Tuesday. They didn’t — and were likely put off when Perdue and Loeffler embraced Trump’s efforts to nullify the November votes of their own state and elsewhere.
The contest also lifted up the power of organizing. Led by Stacey Abrams, the Democrats’ 2018 gubernatorial candidate, civil rights and voting rights groups registered hundreds of thousands of new Georgia voters. They lifted Biden to his 11,779-vote victory in the state and then went back to work, registering more voters for the runoff and getting them to cast ballots. The result: turnout for the runoff that came remarkably close to matching November’s levels while Warnock and, likely, Ossoff secured margins larger than Biden’s.
. . . .
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Read the full article at the link.
Thank you, Georgia!
With the “Demented Fascist Sore Loser” and “Traitor Ted” Cruz & company stoking the fires of sedition in the streets and revving up an attack on the Capitol through their knowingly bogus anti-American, White Supremacist hate speech, false narratives, vile lies, and baseless conspiracy theories, it’s time to put the GOP to bed for good.
There also should be a move to censure and eventually remove from office through the ballot box Cruz, Hawley, McCarthy, Johnson and the rest of the GOP clowns and traitors whose lies and pandering to Trump stoked this outrage and have brought our nation to the precipice of anarchy. The voters of Georgia have showed us how with hard work, the right pro-humanity message, even against the odds, the anti-democracy GOP can be removed from office at all levels.
Not surprisingly, the Traitor Trump Treason Twitter Account has been “locked.” Too little, too late!
Moscow Mitch and other GOP toadies’ protestations in support of American democracy are far too little, far too late! They are the nihilists who have joined Trump in subverting American democracy and committing “crimes against humanity.” They should not escape accountability!
Then there are still GOP scumbags who refuse to condemn Trump or acknowledge the crimes of his thug rioters! They must be removed from public office, now!
The 81 million of us who saved American democracy need to work hard through legal means to make sure that the anti-democracy minority (“GOP”) never seizes power again! The GOP has proved its disloyalty to our Constitutional order.
It’s time for the GOP to be dissolved and replaced by a legitimate opposition. Even now, scummy GOP legislators insist on delaying the electoral process with bogus claims. I’m tired of indulging these evil clowns and subversives, and particularly, their ignorant anti-American supporters.
PWS
01-06-21
Dan Kowalski reports for LexisNexis Immigration Community:
CA8 on CIMT: Ortiz II (Obstruction)
“[In Ortiz I, this] Court determined that a conviction under Minn. Stat. Ann. § 609.50, subdiv. 2(2) [obstruction of legal process, arrest, or firefighting] is not categorically a crime of violence—and, thus, not an aggravated felony—because the minimum amount of force required to sustain a conviction under that statute is less than the level of force required to constitute a crime of violence under Johnson v. United States, 559 U.S. 133, 140 (2010). Ortiz v. Lynch, 796 F.3d 932, 935-36 (8th Cir. 2015). Accordingly, we granted Ortiz’s petition for review, vacated the order of removal, and remanded to the BIA to decide whether Ortiz’s prior conviction nonetheless subjected him to removal under 8 U.S.C. § 1227(a)(2)(A)(i) as a crime involving moral turpitude.
… Pursuant to the parties’ joint motion, the BIA remanded the case to the IJ to decide the issue. Ortiz again moved to terminate removal proceedings, arguing that a conviction for obstruction of legal process under Minn. Stat. Ann. § 609.50, subdiv. 2(2) is not a crime involving moral turpitude. The IJ denied the motion, finding that Ortiz’s prior conviction was categorically a crime involving moral turpitude because (1) the statute requires intentional conduct, and (2) using or threatening force or violence to obstruct legal process entails conduct that is inherently base, vile, or depraved and contrary to accepted rules of morality. Accordingly, the IJ sustained the charge of removability under 8 U.S.C. § 1227(a)(2)(A)(i) and ordered Ortiz’s removal from the United States to Mexico on that basis. The BIA affirmed the IJ’s decision, adding that the minimum conduct punishable by the statute falls within the definition of “moral turpitude” because it involves some aggravating level of force or violence in the context of interference with important and legitimate government functions. Ortiz again filed a timely petition for review.
… [W]e conclude that the BIA erred in finding that a conviction under Minn. Stat. Ann. § 609.50, subdiv. 2(2) is categorically a crime involving moral turpitude. For the foregoing reasons, we hold a conviction under Minn. Stat. Ann. § 609.50, subdiv. 2(2) is not categorically a crime involving moral turpitude under 8 U.S.C. § 1227(a)(2)(A)(i). We, therefore, grant Ortiz’s petition for review and vacate the order of removal.”
[Attorney David L. Wilson writes: “This statement is particularly helpful and could go unnoticed. The court wrote, “Further, because subdivision 2(2) is a penalty provision, rather than a “statutory element[] that criminalize[s] otherwise innocent conduct,” the presumption in favor of a scienter requirement does not apply. United States v. X-Citement Video, Inc., 513 U.S. 64, 72 (1994).” The government has been trying to invoke this argument for some time, and the Eighth just shut it down. A round of applause to Anne Carlson for the first round of the fight, and Brittany Bakken for bearing with me for the second round.”]
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Bottom line: For more than five years over two Administrations on a number of charges, EOIR has been attempting to wrongfully deport this individual. This falls below the “minimum level of competence” that should be expected of an “expert tribunal” that is nothing other than a deportation factory with a fancy title. And, let’s remember that the 8th Circuit, out in the middle of “America’s Heartland,” is hardly the 9th Circuit, the 7th Circuit, or even the 4th Circuit, all of which have been much more openly critical of the BIA’s lousy performance.
The cost of “deportation at any cost” is too high for America! Whatever happened to due process, fundamental fairness, and impartial judging? Gone by the wayside! No wonder this unfair and dysfunctional system is running a largely self-inflicted backlog of more than 1.4 million known cases and “who knows how many” that are lost or otherwise “off-docket” in the EOIR morass of biased judging and gross mismanagement.
When will it end? How many will be wrongfully deported or die because one of American’s largest “court” systems (that isn’t’ a “court” at all) is allowed to continue to operate far below minimum levels of constitutionality and competence?
PWS
06-29-30
Pete Williams reports for NBC News:
WASHINGTON — The retired judge appointed to act as a friend of the court in the Michael Flynn case strongly urged the court Wednesday not to let the Justice Department abandon the prosecution.
In a scorching 83-page submission, John Gleeson said the government’s move to drop the case was “riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact,” which were contradicted by the positions it has taken in other false statement cases and by its own previous court filings about Flynn’s conduct as well as his decisions to plead guilty twice.
“Even recognizing that the Government is entitled to deference in assessing the strength of its case, these claims are not credible,” the retired judge wrote. “Indeed, they are preposterous. For starters — and most unusually — they are directly and decisively disproven by the Government’s own briefs filed just months ago in this very proceeding.”
Gleeson said judges must ordinarily defer to the wishes of the Justice Department about whether to pursue a prosecution, but not when the motives of the government are suspect. In Flynn’s case, the government’s move to dismiss the case “is based solely on the fact that Flynn is an ally of President Trump.”
Federal District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan of Washington appointed Gleeson to submit arguments about why the government should not be allowed to drop the case, so that Sullivan could consider both sides.
The appointment came after the Justice Department last month asked the judge to dismiss the case, having determined that even if Flynn lied to FBI agents in early 2017 about his phone calls with Russia’s ambassador to the U.S., his lies were not “material” to any investigation and did not, therefore, violate the false statement law at the heart of his case.
Flynn told the FBI that he did talk to Ambassador Sergey Kislyak during the Trump transition but denied that they talked about Russia’s response to the latest Obama sanctions or about a forthcoming UN vote. He later admitted that both those statements were untrue.
Those statements, Gleeson said, were clearly important to the FBI’s investigation into potential connections between the Trump campaign and the Russian government.
“It is hard to conceive of a more material false statement than this one,” Gleeson said.
Gleeson said without any firm legal basis for wanting to drop the case, the only other reason must be Flynn’s relationship with Trump. Wednesday’s brief noted that the president tweeted or re-tweeted about Flynn at least 100 times since March 2017.
Clearly the president is personally invested in ensuring that Flynn’s prosecution ends, Gleeson said, adding, “Everything about this irregular.”
. . . .
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Read the rest of Pete’s article at the link.
Add this to the absolute legal, ethical, constitutional, and management disaster going in in the U.S. Immigration Courts under Barr’s “maliciously incompetent” management, and the case for removing him from office is overwhelming. Won’t happen. But, it should!
Actually, filing a “preposterous motion” backed by clearly untrue assertions is a clear violation of an attorney’s role as an “officer of the court” owing “candor to the tribunal.” If Barr were a private practitioner, it would likely earn him a referral to his state bar authorities for possible discipline or license revocation.
But, in Federal Courts these days the “undue deference” and unfairly favorable treatment of DOJ attorneys continues. It has actually been institutionalized, and even unjustly rewarded, by the Supremes. Talk about encouraging worst practices and highlighting “negative role models!”
The whole ethical debacle of the Trump Administration DOJ and the overall feckless performance of our Federal Courts, particularly the Supremes and certain Circuit Courts of Appeals, at halting clear Executive abuses and requiring honesty and professionalism (including rejecting racist or religiously bigoted agendas) from the Federal Government before tribunals cries out for a serious re-examination of: 1) who should be sitting on the Federal Bench; 2) what ethical standards they should be held to; and 3) the undue favoritism and leniency traditionally shown by Federal Courts to Government lawyers engaging in misrepresentations, sloppy work, promoting pretexts for overtly racist agendas, and constantly using dilatory litigation tactics intended to punish individual litigants for asserting their legal rights.
The last three years have shown that better Federal Judges and much more courageous, effective judicial leadership committed to guaranteeing due process and fairness for all is absolutely necessary for our nation to achieve “equal justice under law.” The current sorry state of the Article III Judiciary shows that police departments are not the only part of our broken justice system that needs reform and some “different faces” to achieve equal justice under law. As a nation, we can’t achieve social and racial justice with the gang that promoted, enabled, and in some cases even encouraged injustice in charge. And, that goes for all three failed branches of our Federal Government.
George Floyd’s death should never have happened; nor should families be separated, kids put in cages, legal asylum applicants told to rot in Mexico, and Billy Barr be allowed to operate unconstitutional “Star Chambers” masquerading as “courts” (when they are nothing of the sort). The problems in our justice system go much deeper than the Minneapolis Police Department!
Yes, they can be solved! But, not without some new faces, new approaches, and some progressive thinking and input from all of society, particularly our younger generations! You have to believe in equal justice to achieve equal justice! We can’t get there with the current gang of “non-believers” in charge and promoting their failed, and all too often overtly or covertly racially biased, agendas.
PWS
06-11-20
May 17, 2020. Nearly five decades ago, a tough-minded U.S. District Judge in Washington, D.C., refused to “go along to get along.” Judge “Maximum John” Sirica saw through the corrupt B.S. being put forth by defendants (“The Plumbers”) who pleaded guilty in attempting to “cover up” the badly bungled Watergate burglary of DNC headquarters in the Watergate Hotel. So, Sirica did some digging on his own.
One of his most famous quotes — the “No Nincompoops Rule” was set forth in his New York Times obit:
“I don’t think a Federal judge should sit up on a bench — particularly in a case like this one, with great public interest in it — I don’t think we should sit up here like nincompoops.” https://www.nytimes.com/1992/08/15/us/sirica-88-dies-persistent-judge-in-fall-of-nixon.html
None other than former Attorney General John Mitchell had been involved in orchestrating the Watergate caper, and the “cover-up” trail eventually led all the way to the Oval Office and President Nixon. Nixon eventually resigned with impeachment, conviction, and removal staring him in the face.
The scandal involved some truly bizarre moments such as the “kidnapping” of Mitchell’s eccentric, talkative, estranged wife Martha and White House Counsel John Dean being told to “deep six” potentially incriminating documents by throwing them off the 14th Street Bridge on the way home to his Alexandria townhouse. It added to our vocabulary colorful terms like “stonewalling,” “twisting slowly in the wind,” “Deep Throat,” and more, in addition, of course, to “deep six.” John “The Con” Mitchell was convicted of conspiracy, perjury, and obstruction of justice (although never charged with Martha’s kidnapping) and served time in a Federal Penitentiary. Judge Sirica was named Time’s “Man of the Year.”
Watergate also resulted in changes in ethical rules and an effort to insulate the DOJ investigative and prosecution functions from political influence, particularly interference from the White House. With AG Billy Barr’s assistance, Trump has basically blown away all ethical safeguards and politicized and “weaponized” government institutions to a degree that probably exceeds Watergate.
Now, Billy Barr is trying to further Trump’s agenda by making the Flynn prosecution go away. That’s after Flynn actually pleaded guilty to the charges before Judge Emmet G. Sullivan. At least initially, Judge Sullivan appears skeptical about the sudden change of course by DOJ prosecutors. It’s a move that led to the withdrawal of the career prosecutors involved in the case and a demand from a bipartisan group of more than 2,000 former DOJ officials (including me and many colleagues from the Round Table of Retired Judges) that Barr resign.
Judge Sullivan has a reputation for independence and not suffering fools lightly. He has appointed private counsel to argue against dismissal of the charges. We’ll have to see what, if anything, comes of it all.
It’s also unclear whether a lone Federal Judge of courage and integrity still can “make a difference” in today’s rapidly deteriorating legal and political environment. During Watergate, a unanimous Supremes (with Chief Justice Rehnquist recused) stood up to Nixon and rejected his bogus executive privilege claim on incriminating tapes. GOP Congressional leaders eventually joined those voices urging Nixon to resign.
So far, by contrast, the Roberts-led Supremes’ majority hasn’t shown an inclination to stand up to Trump on any major issue of Executive overreach. And, GOP legislators have shown themselves to be so scared of Trump and so far inside his pocket that they can’t see the light of day. Indeed, they appear to have lost ambition to do anything other than help Trump and cover up his corruption and “malicious incompetence.”
Even if Sullivan does uncover something shady, it’s likely that Roberts and the GOP will leap to help Trump and Barr suppress and cover up any evidence of wrongdoing by blocking or obstructing any further investigation by House Democrats. Times have changed. And, right now, that doesn’t appear to be for the better for our justice system or our nation.
PWS
05-17-20
San Francisco Chronicle published my Letter to the Editor this AM:
“Regarding the Chronicle’s Editorial on DOJ (May 11), I was in the Department of Justice under five presidents, and Bill Barr when he first served as attorney general. For the second time, I joined some two thousand fellow alumni of the Department in seeking Bill Barr’s resignation. We share shock and sadness over the Department under Bill Barr. As a United States Attorney, initially appointed by President Carter, I served President Reagan’s attorney general, William
French Smith, as his chairman of the advisory committee of US Attorneys. In today’s partisan climate, my role of advising an attorney general of the Republican Party as a Democrat would never happen. Each chapter of Barr’s tenure is more shoddy than the last. My hat is off to those career Justice attorneys who declined to lend their names to the motion to dismiss charges against General Flynn.”
George Proctor
San Francisco
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My friend and colleague George is a true American hero and one of the most dedicated public servants I have known. We actually go back to my days as the Deputy General Counsel of the “Legacy” INS during the Carter and Reagan Administrations. George is also a Veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps. I remember that George and I were in the same “New Judge Training Class” at the National Judicial College in Reno after Ashcroft “exiled” me from the BIA in 2003!
George is a prime example of the nonpartisan career lawyers and civil servants being “ground into the dust” by the shenanigans of the politicized, unethical, and biased DOJ under Sessions and Barr.
Thanks for speaking out, George!
PWS
05-14-20
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/19pdf/19-67_n6io.pdf
Syllabus
NOTE: Where it is feasible, a syllabus (headnote) will be released, as is being done in connection with this case, at the time the opinion is issued. The syllabus constitutes no part of the opinion of the Court but has been prepared by the Reporter of Decisions for the convenience of the reader. See United States v. Detroit Timber & Lumber Co., 200 U. S. 321, 337.
SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES
Syllabus
UNITED STATES v. SINENENG-SMITH CERTIORARI TO THE UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR
THE NINTH CIRCUIT
No. 19–67. Argued February 25, 2020—Decided May 7, 2020
Respondent Evelyn Sineneng-Smith operated an immigration consulting firm in San Jose, California. She assisted clients working without au- thorization in the United States to file applications for a labor certifi- cation program that once provided a path for aliens to adjust to lawful permanent resident status. Sineneng-Smith knew that her clients could not meet the long-passed statutory application-filing deadline, but she nonetheless charged each client over $6,000, netting more than $3.3 million.
Sineneng-Smith was indicted for multiple violations of 8 U. S. C. §1324(a)(1)(A)(iv) and (B)(i). Those provisions make it a federal felony to “encourag[e] or induc[e] an alien to come to, enter, or reside in the United States, knowing or in reckless disregard of the fact that such coming to, entry, or residence is or will be in violation of law,” §1324(a)(1)(A)(iv), and impose an enhanced penalty if the crime is “done for the purpose of commercial advantage or private financial gain,” §1324(a)(1)(B)(i). In the District Court, she urged that the pro- visions did not cover her conduct, and if they did, they violated the Petition and Free Speech Clauses of the First Amendment as applied. The District Court rejected her arguments and she was convicted, as relevant here, on two counts under §1324(a)(1)(A)(iv) and (B)(i).
Sineneng-Smith essentially repeated the same arguments on appeal to the Ninth Circuit. Again she asserted a right under the First Amendment to file administrative applications on her clients’ behalf, and she argued that the statute could not constitutionally be applied to her conduct. Instead of adjudicating the case presented by the par- ties, however, the court named three amici and invited them to brief and argue issues framed by the panel, including a question never raised by Sineneng-Smith: Whether the statute is overbroad under the
2 UNITED STATES v. SINENENG-SMITH Syllabus
First Amendment. In accord with the amici’s arguments, the Ninth Circuit held that §1324(a)(1)(A)(iv) is unconstitutionally overbroad.
Held: The Ninth Circuit panel’s drastic departure from the principle of party presentation constituted an abuse of discretion.
The Nation’s adversarial adjudication system follows the principle of party presentation. Greenlaw v. United States, 554 U. S. 237, 243. “In both civil and criminal cases, . . . we rely on the parties to frame the issues for decision and assign to courts the role of neutral arbiter of matters the parties present.” Id., at 243.
That principle forecloses the controlling role the Ninth Circuit took on in this case. No extraordinary circumstances justified the panel’s takeover of the appeal. Sineneng-Smith, represented by competent counsel, had raised a vagueness argument and First Amendment arguments homing in on her own conduct, not that of others. Electing not to address the party-presented controversy, the panel projected that §1324(a)(1)(A)(iv) might cover a wide swath of protected speech, including abstract advocacy and legal advice. It did so even though Sineneng-Smith’s counsel had presented a contrary theory of the case in her briefs and before the District Court. A court is not hidebound by counsel’s precise arguments, but the Ninth Circuit’s radical trans- formation of this case goes well beyond the pale. On remand, the case is to be reconsidered shorn of the overbreadth inquiry interjected by the appellate panel and bearing a fair resemblance to the case shaped by the parties. Pp. 3–9.
910 F. 3d 461, vacated and remanded.
GINSBURG, J., delivered the opinion for a unanimous Court. THOMAS, J., filed a concurring opinion.
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👎Justice Thomas used his concurring opinion as an opportunity to attack the “overbreadth doctrine,” and to solicit future challenges to it, presumably from right-wing advocates and activist conservative judges who agree with him.
It’s interesting how moderate and liberal judges who believe in the Constitution, the rule of law, and standing up for individual rights in the face of government overreach are often forced to deny that they are “activists.” By contrast, right wing judges often make little or no attempt to disguise their activist, often anti-human-rights, “turn back the clock to the bad old days,” agenda and to use their opinions as a forum to critique and solicit challenges to rules of law they don’t like. Often such rules under attack from the judicial right tend to vindicate the rights and humanity of individuals, particularly minorities and other vulnerable individuals, over corporate, government, financial, and other elitist interests.
Additionally, as with Thomas, the the right-wing judicial activists customarily harken back wistfully to a past “golden” age of American Jurisprudence when the exclusively white, male, nearly 100% Christian Supremes were perfectly happy to look the other way and bend the rules to favor ruling elites over African Americans, women, children, the poor, non-Christians, and others who weren’t part of the “ruling elites.” Thomas laments the abandonment of the views and methods of the “18th & 19 century” American judiciary. Most ironically, under those rules and the “world outlook and values” they often embodied, it’s highly unlikely that Thomas himself would have been able to attend Yale, become a Justice, or otherwise be allowed and encouraged to reach his full potential.
Quite contrary to Thomas’s argument, we can’t and shouldn’t take “value judgement” out of judging. Indeed, Thomas’s plea to let the Legislature and the Executive run roughshod over constitutional rights if they choose to do so is, in and of itself, a clear “value judgment” as to what best serves society. Making “value judgments” is at the heart of all judging. That isn’t the problem. No, the real problem is the lack of consistent human (and humane) values, practical experience, and human empathy in too many of today’s Federal Judges, particularly those appointed by Trump and Moscow Mitch.
At least we clearly know what’s coming in the future from the “Trump Judiciary” and their cheerleaders like Thomas. Consequently, it’s critically important that “Democrats and liberals” act accordingly the next time they get control over Federal Judicial appointments.
PWS
05-07-20
Here are Steve, my long-time friend, and his amazing colleague Jakki,, both now at Cornell Law, on court closings from the NY Post:
CORONAVIRUS UPDATES: THE LATEST IMPORTANT DEVELOPMENTS
ADVERTISEMENT
Close immigration courts now: A coronavirus necessity to protect public health
By STEPHEN YALE-LOEHR and JACLYN KELLEY-WIDMER
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
MAR 31, 2020 1:36 PM
In this Nov. 15, 2019, file photo, a detainee talks on the phone in his pod at the Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, Ga. While much of daily life has ground to a halt to reduce the spread of the coronavirus, the Trump administration is resisting calls from immigration judges and attorneys to stop in-person hearings and shutter all immigration courts. They say the most pressing hearings can still be done by phone so immigrants aren’t stuck in detention indefinitely.(David Goldman/AP)Imagine you’re an immigration lawyer. You have a case scheduled for trial in immigration court, but you’ve got a cough, a sore throat and shortness of breath. In normal times, you probably would have gone to court for the trial. In current times, you’re worried. We all know what those symptoms mean.
You call your doctor, who tells you that you’re displaying symptoms consistent with COVID-19. The doctor recommends that you self-quarantine.
Your immigrant client is detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and counting on you to present their asylum case. You’ve been preparing for months. Your client’s ability to avoid being deported to a country where they face torture or death depends on your performance.
Even though most courts around the country are closed in response to the pandemic, your court date is still on. The Justice Department is keeping its detained immigration courts open, ignoring joint letters from the National Association of Immigration Judges, the American Immigration Lawyers Association and the union representing ICE attorneys calling for a shutdown during the pandemic.
As of your trial date, you haven’t been able to meet with your client in person to prepare for at least two weeks. At the time, ICE wouldn’t let you use your regular attorney visit rooms due to disease risk, so you were stuck waiting in line for the one glass-partitioned attorney room at the detention center. You never got to the front of the line for the room, so you were only able to talk to your client through glass and on the telephone.
Then ICE issued a new directive on March 21 requiring all attorneys to bring their own gloves, mask and eye protection for contact visits with clients. Your office doesn’t have any of this gear. Even if you could get protective gear, you wouldn’t take it away from the medical professionals who truly need it.
Despite all of this, you hope the immigration judge will sympathize with your predicament. You file a motion asking for more time to better represent your client after all of this is over. You cite your own illness, your inability to meet with your client to prepare, and local and national public health warnings.
Despite your objections, the immigration judge proceeds with your client’s asylum trial. The judge gives you the choice of abandoning your client to face the fight of his life by himself or proceeding as his attorney via telephone. Reluctantly, you find a folding table to put your file on and try the case from your couch, unable to see or communicate privately with your client. You cannot see anything that is happening in court.
All you know is that the immigration judge, ICE prosecutor and interpreter are there.
. . . .
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Read the rest of the article at the above link.
And here’s my good friend and former Georgetown Law colleague Leila, now at Tulane Law, with her plea in Slate for some sanity and humanity on unnecessary and demonstrably harmful and dangerous continued incarceration of children in DHS’s “New American Gulag.”
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/03/coronavirus-immigrant-children-detention.html
With nearly 3,000 deaths and more than 160,000 infected by COVID-19 in the United States, it’s clear no one will be spared from impacts of the pandemic. In the past week, four children in immigration detention and seven employees of the Office of Refugee Resettlement who work in children’s detention facilities in New Jersey and Texas tested positive for the virus. Doctors working with detained immigrants have warned members of Congress that immigrant detention centers pose a “tinderbox scenario,” where social distancing precautions are impossible.
Two separate lawsuits are asking federal courts to force the release of unaccompanied children as well as families in immigrant detention, citing the grave health risks of contracting the coronavirus and spreading the disease. These risks are particularly serious because of the confluence of factors in family detention centers: crowded quarters, limited cleaning supplies, and the influx of new families into the detention centers. While it is understood children are usually less at risk of serious complications from COVID-19, a handful of children in the U.S. with COVID-19 have died in the past few days, and children may be more likely to more rapidly spread the disease.
Instead of a public health–oriented response to COVID-19 in the immigration legal system, we are seeing political opportunism. The Trump administration is using the virus as an excuse to swiftly deport unaccompanied minors at the border, despite laws that require that children be allowed to have their cases heard first by an immigration judge. Similarly, the Department of Justice is defying public health guidelines by forcing judges, attorneys, and immigrants to appear in select immigration courts across the country, despite positive COVID-19 tests from court personnel and risks inherent to crowded courtrooms, in order to continue deportation proceedings.
This mistreatment of children is not new. Before the outbreak, children were finding themselves in an increasingly punishing immigration legal system—where they had been separated from their parents, detained in record-breaking numbers for longer periods of time, and held in shocking and abusive detention conditions, including “dog cage” holding cells without mattresses, overflowing toilets, and frigid temperatures. Children do not have to be held in these conditions; unaccompanied children can and should be released more expeditiously to live with family in the U.S., and children detained with parents could be released as a family unit to pursue their legal case outside of detention.
Detained children have experienced forced hunger, dehydration, and sleeplessness. Holly Cooper, an attorney representing detained children, stated: “In my 22 years of doing visits with children in detention I have never heard of this level of inhumanity.” One 15-year-old boy, detained at the jail-like Shenandoah Valley facility, wrote “I want us to be treated as human beings.”
As a law professor and immigration attorney for more than a decade, I have seen firsthand how the immigration system mistreats children. In a recent law journal article, I argue adultification bias can help explain the mistreatment of immigrant children, who are largely teenagers of color. Adultification is the phenomenon whereby children of color are perceived as more adultlike and therefore less innocent than white peers. Adultification has created systemic harm for children of color within public systems like education, juvenile justice, and child welfare. In particular, the disproportionate rates of arrests, adjudications, and sentencing for children of color within the juvenile justice system has been studied closely.
Immigration laws were not designed to protect children. In fact, only a few areas of the law consider the special circumstances of children. The Flores settlement sets minimum standards for detaining minors, limited to children under 18. Under Flores, children should be released as soon as possible to family, when feasible. Furthermore, the Office of Refugee Resettlement, not U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, is tasked with the custody of detained unaccompanied minors. According to legislative history, this is because ORR, under the Department of Health and Human Services, has more expertise in child care. Another child-focused measure is the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008, or TVPRA, which expands legal protections for children including in the areas of asylum law and special immigrant juvenile status, a pathway to legal permanent residence and citizenship available for some children. Lastly, the government has issued guidelines for children’s cases to improve immigration court procedures.
. . . .
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Read the rest of Leila’s article at the link.
“Adultifiation,” “Adjudication Bias,” “Dred Scottification,” “dehumanization,” it’s all pretty much the same thing. As human beings, we must ask ourselves every day why have we empowered the cowardly bullies of the Trump regime to commit what are essentially “crimes against humanity” against the most vulnerable among us, their courageous representatives (about the only folks in the country brave enough to stand up for all of our Constitutional and human rights), and even their own employees? Compare their brave performance with the complicity of many Federal Judges, all the way up to the Supremes, and many legislators who stand by and watch these preventable and outrageous human and legal disasters occur, yet do nothing to stop them!
Why do we have the best and brightest legal and public health minds in the country pleading with the regime to take straightforward, common sense, prudent steps that even a minimally competent government would have taken long before now? How have we allowed the kakistocracy and the wanton cruelty and “malicious incompetence” they inflict on almost everything they touch become the “face of America?”
PWS
04-01-20
Pereida-Supremes-Amicus-19-438 Amici Brief Former US Immigration Judges
SUMMARY OF ARGUMENT
This brief presents the view of former IJs and BIA members on an issue of vital importance to the functioning of our immigration system: how requiring IJs to assess inconclusive conviction records to determine whether a prior criminal conviction disqualifies a noncitizen from applying for relief from removal is contrary to longstanding application of the categorical approach, will create further delays in an already overburdened immigration system, and will deprive IJs of their discretionary power.
Mr. Pereida is correct that inconclusive state conviction records cannot satisfy the categorical approach’s requirement that the state conviction necessarily establishes federal predicate offenses. Affirming this interpretation of the categorical approach will promote the expeditious and fair adjudication of the hundreds of thousands of cases pending in immigration courts.
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The Government incorrectly asserts that when the conviction record is inconclusive as to whether a conviction was for a disqualifying offense, a noncitizen does not carry his or her burden of proof to show statutory eligibility for relief. That argument is faulty because it would require IJs to conduct an inquiry, which the Government wrongly argues is governed by the Immigration and Nationality Act’s (“INA”) burden of proof allocation, focusing on the facts underlying the conviction. Moreover, rather than aid IJs in resolving cases, the Government’s position would impede the application of the modified categorical approach by forcing IJs to delay the proceedings. IJs will be forced to wait for the noncitizen to obtain and present criminal records that may not even exist or be obtainable and then examine those criminal records to make factual determinations the categorical approach is meant to avoid. The Government’s novel gloss on the modified categorical approach is antithetical to the analysis IJs have employed for decades and would preclude the exercise of discretion essential to the functioning of immigration courts.
Contrary to the Government’s contention, the modified categorical approach does not involve a separate factual inquiry. The requisite analysis is a legal one: whether the conviction rests upon nothing more than the minimum conduct necessary for a conviction. Deviating from the categorical approach’s sole focus on a direct and uncomplicated comparison between state and federal offenses, as the Government would require, threatens to disturb the uniformity of outcomes in similar circumstances that the categorical approach safeguards. Mr. Pereida’s interpretation of
8
the categorical approach would avoid this undesirable outcome.
For the reasons explained in the balance of this brief, Mr. Pereida’s solution is the correct one. Section I provides a real-world overview of how removal proceedings operate, focusing on the typical sequence of immigration court proceedings, how criminal records are introduced and considered, and the limited ability of noncitizens (many of whom are detained during such proceedings) to procure relevant records. Section II discusses the administrability of the categorical approach and its modified variant, highlighting the benefits of the approach, how Mr. Pereida’s position is in harmony with the way in which IJs apply the approach to reach just results, and how the Government’s interpretation would impede the workings of immigration courts. Finally, Section III explains how the Government’s position would curtail IJs’ discretionary power to analyze the facts of each case to reach a just result.
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Many, many, many thanks to David G. Keyko, Counsel of Record, Robert L. Sills, Matthew F. Putorti, Stephanie S. Gomez, Jihyun Park and the rest of the amazing pro bono team over at Pillsbury for their outstanding and timely research and writing.
And, as always, it’s a privilege and an honor to be listed with the rest of my friends and colleagues on our Round Table of Former Immigration Judges!
PWS
02-07-20
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-no-more-deaths-religious-liberty_n_5e3adf4ec5b6d032e76d1313
Carol Kuruvilla in HuffPost:
A federal judge has ruled that President Donald Trump’s administration, which often boasts about defending religious liberty, has violated the religious rights of a group of volunteers at the U.S.-Mexico border.
The Trump administration has spent years cracking down on the work of No More Deaths/No Más Muertes, a Unitarian Universalist ministry in Arizona that provides water and food to migrants crossing a treacherous stretch of desert along the border where dozens have died. Various members of No More Deaths have faced fines and even jail for what they consider to be faith-based, life-saving humanitarian aid.
But for the second time in months, a judge has ruled that the government shouldn’t be punishing these volunteers for putting their faith into practice.
U.S. District Judge Rosemary Márquez ruled Monday that four volunteers who left water and food for migrants at the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge were acting according to their “sincerely held religious beliefs.” As a result, the government substantially burdened the volunteers’ religious liberty by prosecuting them for this work, Marquez said.
“Given Defendants’ professed beliefs, the concentration of human remains on the [refuge], and the risk of death in that area, it follows that providing aid on the [refuge] was necessary for Defendants to meaningfully exercise their beliefs,” the judge wrote.
Márquez’s ruling reversed the decision of a lower court, where another judge dismissed the volunteers’ religious liberty claims and sentenced them to probation and fines last March.
A federal judge has ruled that four volunteers who left water and food for migrants at the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge were acting according to their “sincerely held religious beliefs.” From left, they are Natalie Hoffman, Madeline Huse, Zaachila Orozco-McCormick, and Oona Holcomb.
The case against the four volunteers ― Natalie Hoffman, Oona Holcomb, Madeline Huse and Zaachila Orozco-McCormick ― goes back to December 2017, a year when 32 sets of human remains were recovered from the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge. The volunteers were charged with misdemeanors for entering the wildlife refuge without proper permits and leaving behind jugs of water and cans of beans, which the government called abandonment of property.
The volunteers’ defense hinged on the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 (RFRA). The law states that if a defendant can prove that the government is substantially burdening her “sincerely held religious beliefs,” then the government has to show that it’s using the “least restrictive” path to achieving its goals.
This ruling shows that religious freedom is not just for the Christian right, as the Trump administration would have us believe.Parker Deighan, spokesperson for No More Deaths
RFRA initially had broad bipartisan support. But more recently, the religious right has been using RFRA as a way to secure exemptions for conservative beliefs about abortion and LGBTQ rights. The evangelical Christian owners of the Hobby Lobby craft stores famously used RFRA to avoid paying for insurance coverage for contraception.
Under Trump, the Department of Justice has urged a narrow reading of RFRA claims made by people of faith who do not share the administration’s policy goals, according to Katherine Franke, faculty director of Columbia University’s Law, Rights, and Religion Project.
“The Trump Department of Justice has taken a biased approach to defending and enforcing religious liberty rights under RFRA, robustly protecting the rights of conservative Evangelical Christians while prosecuting people whose faith moves them to oppose the government’s policies,” Franke told HuffPost in an email.
Michael Bailey, the Trump-nominated U.S. attorney for Arizona, said his team has no issue with Márquez’s finding that strong religious beliefs motivated the defendants’ acts.
“We highly value religious freedom without regard to where on the spectrum one’s beliefs might fall,” Bailey told HuffPost in a statement.
A volunteer for the humanitarian aid organization No More Deaths delivers water along a trail used by undocumented immigrants in the desert on May 10, 2019 near Ajo, Arizona.
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No More Deaths is a Unitarian Universalist ministry. But all four volunteers are technically religiously unaffiliated, which means they are part of a growing group of Americans who decline to identify with any specific religious tradition.
During testimonies, the four described feeling a spiritual calling to volunteer, inspired by beliefs about the sanctity of human life. They also spoke about taking moments of silence in the refuge to reflect on the suffering of those crossing the desert.
Holcomb said that she had constructed a “personal altar” at her home that included a ring of water bottles she picked up in the desert.
“There is … for me, I will say, like a deep spiritual need and a calling to do work based on what I believe in the world,” Holcomb testified, according to the judge’s opinion.
In its response to the volunteers’ appeal, the government argued that their beliefs were not truly religious because they didn’t explain how they fit into a “particular system of religious or spiritual beliefs.” The government also asserted that the volunteers were “draping religious garb” over “secular philosophical concerns.”
In her opinion, Márquez said that the volunteers’ RFRA claims can’t be dismissed just because they described their beliefs in broad terms and don’t belong to an established religion. She pointed out that religious and political motivations overlapped in the Hobby Lobby case. ThatSupreme Court verdict has shown that government faces an “exceptionally demanding” obligation to be minimally restrictive while imposing on a person’s religious exercise, Márquez said.
Ultimately, the government had failed to demonstrate that prosecuting the volunteers was the least restrictive means of achieving a compelling governmental interest, the judge said.
Scott Warren, a volunteer for the humanitarian aid organization No More Deaths, walks into Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument to deliver food and water along remote desert trails used by undocumented immigrants on May 10, 2019, near Ajo, Arizona.
Márquez’s decision comes months after another No More Deaths volunteer, Scott Warren, was acquitted of a federal misdemeanor charge for leaving water jugs in the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge for migrants. The judge in that case also acknowledged that Warren’s action was protected by his right to religious freedom. That was one of the first times progressive religious beliefs related to immigration have been protected in this way, the Law, Rights, and Religion Project told HuffPost in November.
Franke said there are other cases where progressive people of faith are making religious exemption claims. The Rev. Kaji Douša, a New York pastor and immigrant rights activist, claims the federal government violated her religious freedom when she was detained and placed on a watch list for ministering to asylum seekers at the U.S.-Mexico border. The government has “trivialized” Douša’s RFRA claims and urged the court to dismiss them, Franke said.
In Philadelphia, the DOJ is trying to prevent a faith-based overdose prevention organization from opening a safe injection site, arguing that its “true motivation is socio-political or philosophical — not religious — and thus not protected by RFRA.”
Franke said that when Congress passed RFRA in 1993, the statute was meant to protect the religious liberty of people across a wide spectrum of beliefs, “not just some, and certainly not only those who hold religious beliefs that were shared with the current federal administration.”
Parker Deighan, a spokesperson for No More Deaths, told HuffPost that Márquez’s ruling on Monday reaffirms that “providing humanitarian aid is never a crime.”
“This ruling shows that religious freedom is not just for the Christian right, as the Trump administration would have us believe,” she said. “We hope that that Judge Marquez’s ruling signifies a shift towards religious freedom exemptions being used to protect the work of people and organizations fighting on the side of justice, such as migrant solidarity organizations and indigenous peoples fighting for protection of their sacred lands and traditions, rather than protection for discrimination and bigotry.”
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So, here’s the deal.
The Trump (the least religious and most immoral President in U.S. History) regime uses a bogus “religious protection” rationale to cloak far-right programs of hate, intolerance, dehumanization, marginalization, and cruelty directed at people of color, the LGBTQ community, migrants, refugees, women, children, Muslims, Jews, and other vulnerable groups. According to the regime, “religious freedom” is limited to the “extremist religious right.”
Then, the regime attempts to misuse “the law” to punish those who actually “show Christ-like love in word and in deed.” To her credit, U.S. District Judge Rosemary Márquez “just said no” to this disingenuous nonsense.
The only way to stop the intellectual dishonesty, mockery of religious humanitarian principles, and misuse of our laws is to oust Trump and his enablers from office at every level. Otherwise, we can expect the persecution and cruelty to continue.
And don’t be surprised if the “J.R. Five” on the Supremes find a way to manipulate the system to enable the persecution of others to continue and grow worse. It’s what complicit “judges” do in the face of tyrants.
While the regime is using your tax dollars to pervert the law to persecute humanitarian workers, they are simultaneously violating our Constitution, our statutes, and our international obligations, with the connivence of the Supremes and Federal Appeals Courts who choose to look the other way rather than standing up for individuals’ rights against authoritarian overreach.
It’s time to stand up for our Constitutional rights, human rights, and human decency. Throw the corrupt and immoral GOP and their collaborators out of office at the next election, and bring in Government officials, legislators, and life-tenured judges who are willing and able to stand up for their oaths of office!
PWS
02-06-20
https://cases.justia.com/federal/appellate-courts/ca10/18-2168/18-2168-2020-02-04.pdf?ts=1580846433
U.S. v. Gonzalez-Fierro, 10th Cir., 03-04-20, published
PANEL: TYMKOVICH, Chief Judge, EBEL, and LUCERO, Circuit Judges.
OPINION BY: Judge Ebel
CONCURRING OPINION: Chief Judge Tymkovich
KEY QUOTE FROM MAJORITY:
In this direct criminal appeal, Defendant Rodolfo Gonzalez-Fierro, a Mexican citizen, challenges his conviction for unlawfully re-entering the United States after a prior removal, in violation of 8 U.S.C. § 1326(a). That conviction was based in part on Gonzalez-Fierro’s prior expedited removal from the United States in 2009. Due process requires that, before the United States can use a defendant’s prior removal to prove a § 1326(a) charge, “there must be some meaningful review” of the prior administrative removal proceeding. United States v. Mendoza-Lopez, 481 U.S. 828, 837-38 (1987). In light of that, Congress has provided a mechanism, set forth in 8 U.S.C. § 1326(d), for a defendant charged with a § 1326(a) offense to challenge the fundamental fairness of his prior unreviewed removal. But, pursuant to 8 U.S.C.
§ 1225(b)(1)(D), that § 1326(d) mechanism applies only to prior formal removal orders, and not to prior expedited removal orders like Gonzalez-Fierro’s. Expedited removals apply to undocumented aliens apprehended at or near the border soon after unlawfully entering the United States. Different from formal removals, expedited removals are streamlined—generally there is no hearing, no administrative appeal, and no judicial review before an expedited removal order is executed. Applying the Supreme Court’s reasoning in Mendoza-Lopez, we conclude that § 1225(b)(1)(D) is unconstitutional because it deprives a defendant like Gonzalez-Fierro of due process; that is, § 1225(b)(1)(D) allows the Government to use an unreviewed expedited removal order to convict a defendant of the § 1326(a) offense of unlawfully re- entering the United States after a prior removal.Unconstrained by § 1225(b)(1)(D), we review here Gonzalez-Fierro’s 2009 expedited removal order. Doing so, we conclude that he has failed to establish that that removal was fundamentally unfair. On that basis, having jurisdiction under 28 U.S.C. § 1291, we AFFIRM Gonzalez-Fierro’s § 1326(a) conviction.
KEY QUOTE FROM CHIEF JUDGE TYMKOVICH’S CONCURRING OPINION:
I agree with the majority’s determination that Mr. Gonzalez-Fierro’s 2009 expedited-removal order was not fundamentally unfair under 8 U.S.C.
§ 1326(d)(3). Nevertheless, I do not believe we possess jurisdiction to reach that question.I would AFFIRM the judgment of the district court that it lacked jurisdiction to consider the merits of the prior removal order.
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I think there are lots of Constitutional problems with “expedited removal.” I’m not sure, however, that this decision will have much immediate impact because:
On the other hand, and notwithstanding Chief Judge Tymkovich’s concurring opinion, the facial lack of Due Process in the essentially un-reviewable “expedited removal” process seems quite evident.
So, hopefully advocates can eventually leverage this into an overall determination that there must be meaningful judicial review of expedited removal. This is particularly important because the Administration’s attempt to expand expedited removal to its maximum statutory scope is currently “on hold” pending further judicial review.
We’ll just have to wait and see how this plays out.
PWS
02-05-20
Adolfo Flores reports for BuzzFeed News:
A government watchdog report published Wednesday said immigrant children who were separated from their parents at the border by the Trump administration last year suffered increased post-traumatic stress and trauma.
Some unaccompanied immigrant children who end up at government facilities already experienced physical or sexual abuse in the countries they fled, or violence on the journey to the US, the report said. The trauma was only made worse by the “zero tolerance” policy that led to thousands of children being systematically separated from their parents by immigration authorities in the spring of 2018.
Separated children experienced heightened levels of anxiety, fear, and PTSD compared with children who were not taken from their parents, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Office of Inspector General said. Its report looked at facilities funded by HHS’s Office of Refugee Resettlement, which had custody over children who were separated from their parents or who arrived in the US unaccompanied by an adult.
“Some separated children expressed acute grief that caused them to cry inconsolably,” the report said. “Children who believed their parents had abandoned them were angry and confused. Other children expressed feelings of fear or guilt and became concerned for their parents’ welfare.”
The report offered additional details on the effects the Trump administration’s systematic family separations had on immigrant children and how the trauma was made worse by federal agencies’ lack of preparedness and poor record-keeping.
One 7- or 8-year-old boy who was separated from his father believed his dad had been killed and that he would also be killed. The child ended up in emergency psychiatric care.
dical director said separated children felt physical manifestations of their psychological pain and made statements like “every heartbeat hurts” or “I can’t feel my heart.”
The increased mental health issues were made worse by the difficulty in finding the parents of separated children and being able to set up phone calls with the kids — due to the government’s lack of record-keeping for separated children.
During the height of family separations at the border, statements from federal authorities revealed the Trump administration had little to no planning for how the children and parents would eventually be reunited.
At a court hearing in 2018 before a judge who ordered the Trump administration to reunite separated children, Justice Department attorneys acknowledged that the government is uncertain it knows the whereabouts of all the parents of 101 children under the age of 5. Around the same time, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar told reporters that the agency was scrambling to be sure it knew the location of all the children who’d been separated from their parents.
Program directors at facilities holding separated children said the process for reuniting children covered by the judge’s order changed frequently and with little notice, adding to the stress and mental health needs of these kids.
Some reunifications were scheduled with little notice, were suddenly canceled, or were delayed. In one case, a girl was moved from a facility in Florida to a facility in Texas to be reunited with her father, but after making several trips to the detention center, she was sent back to Florida “in shambles” without ever seeing her dad.
Another HHS OIG report, the result of 45 visits to facilities and a review of some employee files last year, found that some facilities holding unaccompanied immigrant children didn’t have proof of employees’ FBI fingerprint or Child Protective Services background checks.
Half of the facilities allowed employees to start working with children before getting the results of either the FBI fingerprint check or the CPS check, or both, the report said. Ten employees worked with children for a year or more with no prior FBI criminal background check.
Amy Frontz, assistant inspector general for audit services, said that for the employees that they were able to eventually get background information, no disqualifying factors were found. And an OIG spokesperson said, “We don’t have information at this time that the lack of background checks resulted in any specific abuse or assault cases.”
“However, some employees when we completed our work did not have have an FBI background check or CPS check,” Frontz said.
Frontz noted that in 2018, HHS OIG released a memo that staff at the “tent city” in Tornillo, Texas, that was holding hundreds of immigration children, were not undergoing FBI fingerprint checks. After more than 1,500 employees had their background checks conducted following the memo, 26 people were terminated because of their results, Frontz said.
An OIG statement was updated to reflect they don’t have information at this time that the lack of background checks resulted in any specific abuse or assault cases.
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Donald Trump, Jeff “Gonzo Apocalypto” Sessions, Kirsten Nielsen, Stephen Miller, and a host of other dangerous child abusers, some masquerading as U.S. Government officials, remain at large. They should be considered armed with lies, false narratives, illegal schemes, and toxic White Nationalist restrictionist agendas and extremely dangerous to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
PWS
09-05-19
Matter of OBSHATKO, 27 I&N Dec. 173 (BIA 2017)
BIA HEADNOTE:
“Whether a violation of a protection order renders an alien removable under section 237(a)(2)(E)(ii) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, 8 U.S.C. § 1227(a)(2)(E)(ii) (2012), is not governed by the categorical approach, even if a conviction underlies the charge; instead, an Immigration Judge should consider the probative and reliable evidence regarding what a State court has determined about the alien’s violation. Matter of Strydom, 25 I&N Dec. 507 (BIA 2011), clarified.”
PANEL: BIA APPELLATE IMMIGRATION JUDGES PAULEY, MALPHRUS, GREER
OPINION BY: JUDGE PAULEY
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COMMON THREAD: The Respondent loses, even though he prevailed before the Immigration Judge.
PWS
11-18-17
https://www.justice.gov/eoir/page/file/983601/download
BIA Headnote:
“An offense may be a “specified offense against a minor” within the meaning of section 111(7) of the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act of 2006, Pub. L. No. 109-248, 120 Stat. 587, 592, even if it involved an undercover police officer posing as a minor, rather than an actual minor.”
BIA PANEL: Vice Chair/Appellate Immigration Judge Adkins-Blanc; Appellate Immigration Judges Guendelsberger and Mann
OPINION BY: Judge Ana L. Mann
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PWS
07-22-17
