"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.
Dalia Castillo-Granados and Yasmin Yavar. So far this year, the Children’s Immigration Law Academy has responded to more than 300 legal technical assistance questions. It has coordinated five in-depth virtual trainings and hosted eight webinars that attracted more than 1,600 attendees.
Dalia Castillo-Granados had just begun her fellowship with the St. Frances Cabrini Center for Immigrant Legal Assistance, a program of Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston, when she met Yasmin Yavar in 2008.
Like Castillo-Granados, Yavar focused a lot of her attention on special immigrant juvenile status cases as the pro bono coordinator of Kids in Need of Defense’s new office in Houston. Despite changes in the law that allowed more children to apply for this form of immigration relief—which gives those who have been abused, neglected or abandoned a pathway to lawful permanent residence in the United States—attorneys were just beginning to test the waters in this area.
After collaborating on a case, Castillo-Granados and Yavar stayed in touch and created their own support system.
“There was a very small community of attorneys, even nationwide, representing unaccompanied children,” says Castillo-Granados. “In Houston, Yasmin and I were trying to get into state court and educating judges about why we were there. We had each other on speed dial, calling to talk over strategy and get suggestions and push the cases forward.”
Several years later, as an increasing number of unaccompanied children crossed the United States-Mexico border, Castillo-Granados and Yavar wanted to support the legal service providers and volunteer attorneys who were taking their cases. They drafted a plan for a legal resource center focused on children’s immigration law, and Yavar, who had worked with the ABA’s South Texas Pro Bono Asylum Representation Project in Harlingen, Texas, shared it with Commission on Immigration Director Meredith Linsky.
At the time, Linsky met regularly with the ABA Working Group on Unaccompanied Minor Immigrants. Its members liked the idea, and in September 2015, Linsky helped Castillo-Granados and Yavar launch the Children’s Immigration Law Academy.
“We decided to do exactly what we did for each other back when we were starting, but for everyone else,” says Castillo-Granados, who serves as CILA’s director.
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Read Amanda’s full article at the link.
Here’s an interesting contrast in problem-solving, creative thinking, dynamic leadership, and effectively using resources. Between 2008, when they met, and 2021, Dalia and Yasmin experienced an approximately 15X growth in the number of unaccompanied children, from 8,000 to 120,000. Faced with this stressful situation and a U.S. Government that under Administrations of both parties has displayed a rather callous indifference to child welfare, it would have been easy to give up and take their talents to another area of law!
Because they worked for an NGO, the couldn’t demand more resources or claim that drastic reductions in children’s rights, harsher enforcement, or “deterrence” were the “only solutions.” Interestingly, these were exactly the type of “rote, alarmist, reactionary reactions” that the Obama Administration had and that the Trump Administration tried to “implement” without the benefit of legislation.
Dalia and Yasmin viewed the problem as challenging, yet solvable, came up with a plan, and sold it to other members of the legal community — on its merits, not its “scare value.” They were able to “leverage” their experience, skills, and dynamic leadership to pool resources, create teamwork, and “teach and inspire others to help those in need.”
They actually expanded, improved quality, and increased efficiency, thus multiplying rather than diluting their effectiveness. The also relied largely on existing tools and frameworks, but “leveraged” them in a creative and more efficient manner.
I submit that this is the exact opposite of how the broken bureaucracies at DHS, DOJ, and ORR have reacted to most immigration issues. Given lots of personnel, considerable resources, a workable, if not “perfect,” legal framework, and ample flexibility to redirect and repurpose wasted or misused resources, the last three Administrations have fallen “flat on their overstuffed and moribund bureaucratic faces.”
With billions in taxpayer dollars, thousands of employees, and a legal framework that actually provides plenty of useful options, the USG has underachieved, to put it charitably. It has fallen back on wasteful, disruptive, andinefficient “proven to fail” deterrence “gimmicks;” ludicrous rhetoric; mythical threats; aimless reshuffling and churning of existing workload; bolloxed priorities; victim shaming and blaming; cruelty; and most disturbingly, massive scofflaw actions, crackpot proposals, and blatant curtailment of important human and legal rights.
To make matters worse, at least the Biden Administration has had access to what is probably the greatest “talent pool” of human rights, immigration, and child welfare experts on the face of the earth — almost all of it in the private/NGO/advocacy/academic sectors! Yet, they have resisted sound expert advice and creative solutions, while largely passing over available dynamic and inspiring leadership to overstuff their bloated immigration bureaucracy largely with a mixture of Trump holdovers, Obama retreads, and lesser lights.
Obviously, talented NDPA superstars like Dalia and Yasmin are the wave of our future — not just in immigration and human rights, but in government, politics, our legal system, and American society! The issue is how we can force unwilling, “stuck in reverse” Dem Administrations to grow some backbone, enforce the values they espouse during elections, “clean house” in the bureaucracy and the ranks of ineffective, often clueless, politicos, and “repopulate and reform” the USG immigration bureaucracy and the beyond dysfunctional Immigration Courts with stars like Dalia and Yasmin. That is, courageous, visionary, experts who can actually solve problems rather than creating new ones and blaming the victims and those striving to hep them!
Many thanks to Roberto Blum, Esquire, of Houston Texas for sending this article my way. Roberto says “they are the real heroes!” I concur, my friend, 100%!
Just think how much better this system would work if Immigration Judges were getting guidance from the BIA to get these correct in the first place.
Also raises additional questions of why: 1) cases like this aren’t precedents; and 2) so-called “Temporary” Appellate Immigration Judges like Judge Gabe Gonzalez are “outperforming” most “permanent” BIA Judges?
