"The Voice of the New Due Process Army" ————– Musings on Events in U.S. Immigration Court, Immigration Law, Sports, Music, Politics, and Other Random Topics by Retired United States Immigration Judge (Arlington, Virginia) and former Chairman of the Board of Immigration Appeals PAUL WICKHAM SCHMIDT and DR. ALICIA TRICHE, expert brief writer, practical scholar, emeritus Editor-in-Chief of The Green Card (FBA), and 2022 Federal Bar Association Immigration Section Lawyer of the Year. She is a/k/a “Delta Ondine,” a blues-based alt-rock singer-songwriter, who performs regularly in Memphis, where she hosts her own Blues Brunch series, and will soon be recording her first full, professional album. Stay tuned! 🎶 To see our complete professional bios, just click on the link below.
Justice Dept. Rank-and-File Tell of Discontent Over Sessions’s Approach
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Justice Department lawyers have raised concerns about Attorney General Jeff Sessions pursuing legally indefensible cases and a lack of support when they tried to warn him.CreditCreditDoug Mills/The New York Times
WASHINGTON — During his 20 months in office, Attorney General Jeff Sessions has swept in perhaps the most dramatic political shift in memory at the Justice Department, from the civil rights-centered agenda of the Obama era to one that favors his hard-line conservative views on immigration, civil rights and social issues.
Now, discontent and infighting have taken hold at the Justice Department, in part because Mr. Sessions was so determined to carry out that transformation that he ignored dissent, at times putting the Trump administration on track to lose in court and prompting high-level departures, according to interviews over several months with two dozen current and former career department lawyers who worked under Mr. Sessions. Most asked not to be named for fear of retribution.
The people interviewed — many yearslong department veterans, and a third of whom worked under both the Bush and Obama administrations — said that their concerns extended beyond any political differences they might have had with Mr. Sessions, who is widely expected to leave his post after November’s midterm elections.
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“Since I’ve been a lawyer, going back to the late 1970s, I can’t recall a time when morale has been as low as I have heard from some former colleagues,” said Robert Litt, a former Justice Department official during the Clinton administration.
A department spokeswoman, Sarah Isgur Flores, said that Mr. Sessions and other senior law enforcement officials were committed to the department’s mission of upholding the rule of law, and that they had heard no complaints about that.
“We know of no department employee who is opposed to policies that uphold the rule of law and protect the American people — which are precisely the policies that this department has implemented and embraced,” Ms. Flores said in a statement.
Driven by Ideology
Mr. Sessions’s shift in the department’s priorities reflected Mr. Trump’s campaign promises to be tough on crime and crack down on illegal immigration, much as former Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. took office in 2009 with a mandate to realize President Barack Obama’s vision on civil rights.
Ms. Flores called Mr. Sessions’s changes “vital to reducing violent crime,” combating the opioid epidemic and securing borders.
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The Justice Department’s effort to crack down on sanctuary cities through the courts has been met with protests, here in Sacramento in June.CreditRich Pedroncelli/Associated Press
But Trump appointees ignored the legal advice of career lawyers in implementing their agenda, four current Justice Department employees said.
In one instance, Mr. Sessions directly questioned a career lawyer, Stephen Buckingham, who was asked to find ways to file a lawsuit to crack down on sanctuary laws protecting undocumented immigrants. Mr. Buckingham, who had worked at the Justice Department for about a decade, wrote in a brief that he could find no legal grounds for such a case.
Reminding Mr. Buckingham of the attorney general’s bona fides as an immigration hard-liner, Mr. Sessions asked him to come to a different conclusion, according to three people who worked alongside Mr. Buckingham in the federal programs division and were briefed on the exchange.
To Mr. Buckingham’s colleagues, the episode was an example of Mr. Sessions stifling dissent and opening the department to losses in court.
Mr. Buckingham resigned a few months later, and Mr. Sessions got his lawsuit. A federal judge dismissed most of the case, and the department has appealed. Both Mr. Buckingham and Ms. Flores declined to comment on the episode.
In stripping protections last year for transgender people under the Civil Rights Act, department leaders failed to consult Diana Flynn, the head of the civil rights appellate division who led the effort to add the protections in 2014, and many of her career staff.
The process left little room for debate. “Edicts came down, and it was up to us to try to implement them,” said Ms. Flynn, who has left the Justice Department for Lambda Legal, a lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender legal aid organization.
Similarly, a flare-up over the Affordable Care Act this summer occurred after the department’s political leaders urged a judge to find unconstitutional two of the law’s key elements, a reversal of the government’s longstanding position.
“This is a rare case where the proper course is to forgo defense” of existing law, Mr. Sessions said at the time, adding that Mr. Trump had approved the step. Three career lawyers withdrew from the case, including Joel McElvain, a 27-year department veteran, who made headlines by resigning in protest.
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To some career Justice Department lawyers, Rod J. Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, represents a measure of independence because his office oversees the investigations into the president and his associates.CreditJim Lo Scalzo/EPA, via Shutterstock
The episode prompted an all-hands meeting in June to address lingering rancor, according to two people who attended and two others briefed on the gathering.
During the standing-room-only meeting, attendees pressed the head of the departmental branch. What were the brief’s legal flaws, they asked. Had political considerations edged out a sound legal opinion? Did department leaders consider them part of the bureaucratic “deep state” that Mr. Trump has accused of conspiring against him?
After more than an hour, the officials running the meeting said they understood the employees’ concerns and simply encouraged them to continue doing good work.
Attorneys general have long confronted resistance when they implement ideological initiatives that career lawyers view as outside the Justice Department’s mission.
During the Bush administration under Alberto R. Gonzales, the department formed a task force to crack down on pornography; investigators focused on only a small swath of the most egregious examples.
When political appointees under Mr. Holder wanted to abandon the government’s defense of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” Jody Hunt, a well-regarded career attorney, argued successfully that the department had a legal duty to defend it.
Mr. Sessions is not bound to follow the advice of career Justice Department lawyers, “and, if he doesn’t like recommendations, to ignore them,” Mr. Litt said. “But it would be inappropriate to ask people to tailor legal judgments to policy preferences.”
Mr. Trump has stoked much of the unease at the Justice Department. He assailed the prosecutors who won a conviction of his former campaign chairman, and he attacked the plea agreement struck with his longtime personal lawyer. He castigated Mr. Sessions for not investigating perceived White House enemies — drawing a rare rebuke from the attorney general — and for daring to pursue cases against Republican lawmakers.
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President Trump stokes much of the unease at the Justice Department.CreditTom Brenner/The New York Times
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The president has also frequently targeted Rod J. Rosenstein, who as deputy attorney general oversees the day-to-day operations at the department as well as the special counsel investigation. In a turnabout this month, Mr. Trump declared his relationship with Mr. Rosenstein good, to the relief of some federal prosecutors. To them, Mr. Rosenstein’s office symbolizes the department’s independence because he oversees its inquiries into the president and his inner circle.
More unnerving, employees said, was the president’s threat to remove the security clearance of Bruce Ohr, a civil servant who worked to combat Russian mobs and oligarchs. The message, said one lawyer in the criminal division: Doing your job can make you vulnerable to a career-ending attack.
Two former attorneys said that they stepped away from Russia-related work as a result.
“The underlying message from Trump is that department employees are either enemies of the White House or vassals doing its bidding,” said Norman L. Eisen, who served as special counsel for ethics and government reform under Mr. Obama. Mr. Eisen is co-counsel for the plaintiffs in a lawsuit accusing Mr. Trump of violating the Constitution by maintaining a stake in his hotel in Washington.
As a target of Mr. Trump’s high-profile rebukes, Mr. Sessions has gained cautious support even from some rank-and-file lawyers who find his culture wars zeal distasteful. They cited instances where he pushed back on Mr. Trump’s broadsides and his simply enduring months of presidential invective.
Empty Spots
Internal events intended to boost morale have also proved tense. Guy Benson, a Fox News commentator, was chosen to speak at a gay pride event over the objections of the department’s L.G.B.T. affinity group, DOJ Pride, Justice Department lawyers said.
DOJ Pride members held a separate event, where one employee spoke about how progress for L.G.B.T. Americans had regressed under Mr. Trump. Department officials would not comment on the episode.
Some of the lawyers interviewed also said that departures of respected leaders and longtime career lawyers has weakened morale. Besides Ms. Flynn, Mr. McElvain and Mr. Buckingham, others who left included Doug Letter, the head of the civil appellate branch, and David Laufman, the chief of the counterintelligence section.
“Any given person wants to spend more time with his family,” said Benjamin Wittes, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and critic of Mr. Trump’s attacks on law enforcement who has heard complaints from department lawyers. “But the sudden decision by large numbers of people to spend more time with their families is a creation of the atmosphere.”
Days after the health law brief was filed, a long-planned happy hour for former and current federal programs lawyers took on the feeling of a support group, according to people who attended. Gathered at an Irish pub near the Justice Department, colleagues told Mr. McElvain they were sorry that he was leaving but that they admired his decision.
Some maligned the Trump administration or poked fun at Mr. Sessions. But when political appointees joined the conversation, the career lawyers, worried about being pegged as dissenters, shifted the discussion to more neutral topics.
Correction:
Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article misstated who Justice Department leaders consulted in stripping protections for transgender people. They spoke to departmental experts, though not to the head of the civil rights appellate division and her team.
Sharon LaFraniere and Glenn Thrush contributed reporting.
I’ve commented numerous times on Sessions’s stunningly “law free approach” to his job as the nation’s top legal official. His positions never appear to be the product of any type of legitimate deliberation and reflection. Rather they essentially are lifted, sometimes almost verbatim, from “position papers” and screeds written by far-right groups, most of them driven by a White Nationalist, racially motivated, religiously intolerant views that have little appeal to the majority of Americans — even among “true conservatives” (as opposed to racists masquerading as “pseudo conservatives.”)
Low morale has often been a significant issue among the much maligned corps of U.S. Immigration Judges. But, I’ve heard the same things reflected in this article — that morale is by far the worst that it has ever been among U.S Immigration Judges who feel that their expertise and abilities have been disrespected, discretion virtually eliminated, and their positions reduced to basically “robed representatives of DHS Enforcement” under Sessions’s White Nationalist, openly xenophobic regime.
Sessions undoubtedly is the most glaringly unqualified Attorney General since the disgraced “John the Con” Mitchell under Nixon. But, in terms of long term damage to the entire system, Sessions probably has surpassed even “the Con.”
Posted by Dan Kowalski at LexisNexis Immigration Community:
Amnesty International Report: Illegal Pushbacks, Arbitrary Detention & Ill-Treatment of Asylum-Seekers in the United States
Amnesty International, Oct. 11, 2018 – “The US government has deliberately adopted immigration policies and practices that caused catastrophic harm to thousands of people seeking safety in the United States, including the separation of over 6,000 family units in a four-month period more than previously disclosed by authorities, Amnesty International said in a new report released today.
USA: ‘You Don’t Have Any Rights Here’: Illegal Pushbacks, Arbitrary Detention and Ill-treatment of Asylum-seekers in the United States reveals the brutal toll of the Trump administration’s efforts to undermine and dismantle the US asylum system in gross violation of US and international law. The cruel policies and practices documented include: mass illegal pushbacks of asylum-seekers at the US–Mexico border; thousands of illegal family separations; and increasingly arbitrary and indefinite detentions of asylum-seekers, frequently without parole.
“The Trump administration is waging a deliberate campaign of widespread human rights violations in order to punish and deter people seeking safety at the US–Mexico border,” said Erika Guevara-Rosas, Americas Director at Amnesty International.”
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No, desperate families seeking refuge at our Southern Border don’t pose any real threat to the U.S., regardless of what Trump might say and whether they ultimately are found qualified or unqualified to enter. What does pose a real threat to our nation and to the legal rights and future of every American is “waging a deliberate campaign of widespread human rights violations in order to punish and deter people seeking safety at the US–Mexico border.”
New Legal Filing Links High-level Trump Officials to Asylum “Turnback Policy” – Al Otro Lado, Inc. v. Nielsen
American Immigration Council, Oct. 16, 2018 – “In a new court filing, asylum seekers and an immigrant rights group are challenging the Trump administration’s policy and practice of turning back asylum seekers at ports of entry along the U.S.-Mexico border. Friday’s filing directly links high-level Trump administration officials to an official “Turnback Policy,” ordering U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officials to restrict the number of asylum seekers who can access the asylum process at ports of entry. The Turnback Policy compounds other longstanding border-wide tactics CBP has implemented to prevent migrants from applying for asylum in the U.S., including lies, intimidation, coercion, verbal abuse, physical force, outright denials of access, unreasonable delay, and threats—including family separation.
The new filing was brought by the Los Angeles and Tijuana-based organization Al Otro Lado, Inc. and individual asylum seekers who are collectively represented by the Center for Constitutional Rights, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and the American Immigration Council. The attorneys allege that the Trump administration policy and practice violate U.S. and international law and subject vulnerable asylum seekers to imminent danger, deportation, or death.
“Every day we work with survivors of horrific physical and sexual violence, doing our best to provide the necessary resources to extremely vulnerable individuals. They come to our border to seek safety for themselves and their children. The United States, in implementing the Turnback Policy, cavalierly rejects thousands of these individuals, retraumatizing them and stranding them alone and destitute. It is hard to overstate the cruelty with which CBP operates,” said Nicole Ramos, Border Rights Project director at Al Otro Lado.
Attorneys say practices under the Turnback Policy are directly attributable to high-level Trump administration officials, including Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen. The filing cites Sessions’ characterization of asylum seekers as deliberately attempting to “undermine our laws and overwhelm our system,” and Nielsen’s reference to the legally required process of receiving and processing asylum seekers at the border as a “loophole.” The filing also quotes U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers as stating, “We have orders not to let anybody in.”
“Internal CBP documents released in this case reveal that high-level CBP officials authorized a Turnback Policy as early as 2016 to restrict the flow of asylum seekers to the U.S-Mexico border,” said Melissa Crow, senior supervising attorney with the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Immigrant Justice Project. “The Turnback Policy has escalated under the Trump administration and has been buttressed by a wide range of unlawful tactics that CBP uses to deny asylum seekers access to the protection they deserve.”
Said Baher Azmy, legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, “Ever since the horrors of World War II, the world’s nations have committed to giving asylum seekers the opportunity to seek safe haven. The Trump administration has turned its back on this most elementary humanitarian principle, in violation of U.S. and international law, and is subjecting vulnerable men, women and children who are fleeing horrific conditions at home to continued terror, violence and in some cases, death.”
Asylum seekers are fleeing persecution in their home countries, and suffer unspeakable harm en route to the United States at the hands of Mexican government officials, cartels, and gangs. When they are turned away at ports of entry, the lawsuit alleges, they are compelled to either enter the U.S. illegally and be prosecuted, stay trapped in Mexico where they are targeted by criminal groups, or return home to face persecution and death. The filing recounts an extensive array of inaccurate information and abusive treatment those seeking asylum have faced at the hands of U.S. border officials, including that the U.S. is no longer providing asylum or that people from specific countries are not eligible; yelling at, harassing, and assaulting asylum seekers and their children; threatening to take children away from their parents; and setting up “pre-checkpoints” that prevent asylum seekers from reaching the U.S. border. Over four consecutive days in March, CBP officials turned away Guatemalan asylum seekers, saying “Guatemalans make us sick.”
The filing amends a previous filing challenging CBP’s turnbacks of asylum seekers at ports of entry. The challenged practices were initially implemented in 2016 and greatly exacerbated by the Trump administration.
American Immigration Council, Oct. 16, 2018 – “In a new court filing, asylum seekers and an immigrant rights group are challenging the Trump administration’s policy and practice of turning back asylum seekers at ports of entry along the U.S.-Mexico border. Friday’s filing directly links high-level Trump administration officials to an official “Turnback Policy,” ordering U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officials to restrict the number of asylum seekers who can access the asylum process at ports of entry. The Turnback Policy compounds other longstanding border-wide tactics CBP has implemented to prevent migrants from applying for asylum in the U.S., including lies, intimidation, coercion, verbal abuse, physical force, outright denials of access, unreasonable delay, and threats—including family separation.
The new filing was brought by the Los Angeles and Tijuana-based organization Al Otro Lado, Inc. and individual asylum seekers who are collectively represented by the Center for Constitutional Rights, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and the American Immigration Council. The attorneys allege that the Trump administration policy and practice violate U.S. and international law and subject vulnerable asylum seekers to imminent danger, deportation, or death.
“Every day we work with survivors of horrific physical and sexual violence, doing our best to provide the necessary resources to extremely vulnerable individuals. They come to our border to seek safety for themselves and their children. The United States, in implementing the Turnback Policy, cavalierly rejects thousands of these individuals, retraumatizing them and stranding them alone and destitute. It is hard to overstate the cruelty with which CBP operates,” said Nicole Ramos, Border Rights Project director at Al Otro Lado.
Attorneys say practices under the Turnback Policy are directly attributable to high-level Trump administration officials, including Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen. The filing cites Sessions’ characterization of asylum seekers as deliberately attempting to “undermine our laws and overwhelm our system,” and Nielsen’s reference to the legally required process of receiving and processing asylum seekers at the border as a “loophole.” The filing also quotes U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers as stating, “We have orders not to let anybody in.”
“Internal CBP documents released in this case reveal that high-level CBP officials authorized a Turnback Policy as early as 2016 to restrict the flow of asylum seekers to the U.S-Mexico border,” said Melissa Crow, senior supervising attorney with the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Immigrant Justice Project. “The Turnback Policy has escalated under the Trump administration and has been buttressed by a wide range of unlawful tactics that CBP uses to deny asylum seekers access to the protection they deserve.”
Said Baher Azmy, legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, “Ever since the horrors of World War II, the world’s nations have committed to giving asylum seekers the opportunity to seek safe haven. The Trump administration has turned its back on this most elementary humanitarian principle, in violation of U.S. and international law, and is subjecting vulnerable men, women and children who are fleeing horrific conditions at home to continued terror, violence and in some cases, death.”
Asylum seekers are fleeing persecution in their home countries, and suffer unspeakable harm en route to the United States at the hands of Mexican government officials, cartels, and gangs. When they are turned away at ports of entry, the lawsuit alleges, they are compelled to either enter the U.S. illegally and be prosecuted, stay trapped in Mexico where they are targeted by criminal groups, or return home to face persecution and death. The filing recounts an extensive array of inaccurate information and abusive treatment those seeking asylum have faced at the hands of U.S. border officials, including that the U.S. is no longer providing asylum or that people from specific countries are not eligible; yelling at, harassing, and assaulting asylum seekers and their children; threatening to take children away from their parents; and setting up “pre-checkpoints” that prevent asylum seekers from reaching the U.S. border. Over four consecutive days in March, CBP officials turned away Guatemalan asylum seekers, saying “Guatemalans make us sick.”
The filing amends a previous filing challenging CBP’s turnbacks of asylum seekers at ports of entry. The challenged practices were initially implemented in 2016 and greatly exacerbated by the Trump administration.
It’s a strange system where the victims of law violations are punished while the “perps” — folks like Sessions, Nielsen, Miller, etc — walk free and are allowed to continue their lawless behavior.
Even stranger: A guy like Sessions — a scofflaw “Jim Crow Throwback” if there ever was one — has the absolute audacity to whine, complain, and even threaten when occasionally Federal Judges intervene in relatively limited ways to force him and even Trump to comply with our country’s laws and our Constitution. But, I suppose that’s what free speech is all about. Nevertheless, Sessions’s freedom to express his opinions that mock, distort, and mischaracterize our laws doesn’t necessarily entitle him to act on those opinions in a manner inconsistent with those law.
On 6 April 2018, the US attorney general, Jeff Sessions, issued a memoto federal prosecutors along the US-Mexico border directing them “to adopt immediately a zero-tolerance policy” for violations of a federal law barring “improper entry” into the country. “You are on the front lines of this battle,” Sessions wrote, as if rallying his troops against an invading army.
Over the next six weeks, the collateral damage of the Trump administration’s policy was revealed: some 2,654 children were taken from their parents or guardians in order to fulfill the mandate that they be prosecuted for a criminal misdemeanor. As of 27 September, 219 children whose parents had already been deported remained in government custody.
Zero tolerance pushed serious fraud, drugs and weapons trafficking offences out of the courtroom to make way for the flood of people whose only crime was crossing the border. Between March and June, federal prosecutions referred by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) in the five districts along the south-west border rose by 74%, from 6,368 to 11,086.
I don’t think this is really about justice anymore Cesar Pierce, defense attorney
Today the Guardian publishes analysis of documents from more than 3,500 criminal cases filed by border district federal prosecutors during a single week of the zero tolerance policy: 13-19 May.
The three-month investigation, the most comprehensive analysis to date of the experiences of thousands of migrants entering the US during that period, shows how:
Zero tolerance churned thousands of migrants through an assembly-line justice system with copy-and-paste criminal complaints converted to hastily accepted guilty pleas.
Just 12.8% of the criminal cases filed by federal prosecutors were the kind of serious crimes – corruption, fraud and trafficking – that citizens expect federal prosecutors to pursue.
Sentence lengths for migrants charged with the same crimes varied dramatically depending on the state where they were arrested.
The court documents shine a spotlight on the migrants’ perilous journeys and the extreme lengths immigration enforcement goes to intercept them. They also reveal the lack of documentation created when children were torn away from families at the point of arrest – a shocking omission.
Four months after thousands were charged, only 23 individuals continue to fight their cases. The overwhelming majority have pleaded guilty, and only one case has actually gone to trial, where the defendant was found guilty.
“I don’t think this is really about justice anymore,” said Cesar Pierce, a defense attorney in Las Cruces, New Mexico, who represented 18 of the individuals in our sample.
“Justice really factors very little into it.”
The week was dominated by low-level immigration charges
Of the cases that we examined, 3,121, or 87.2%, were low-level immigration offences. Only 12.8% of cases were serious crimes like corruption, fraud, and drug or weapons trafficking, or more significant immigration offenses, such as human smuggling.
The majority of prosecutions are for first-time crossers
Of the 3,121 people charged with low-level immigration crimes, the vast majority were accused of illegal entry, a misdemeanor, while 31% were accused of illegal re-entry, a felony. The rest were caught using false immigration documents.
The long, perilous journey
José G left El Salvador for the United States on 3 May. The 43-year-old father had previously been deported from the US and was working as a bus driver, but when a gang threatened his 16-year-old son, Marco, he decided to take the risk of traveling to America again.
“It’s his age,” José said of his son. “It makes me afraid.”
It took six days for father and son to traverse Mexico by car. They were walking across the Rio Grande under a bridge linking Juárez with El Paso, about a mile from the official port of entry, when they were spotted by border patrol and arrested. Even though José had no other criminal record, his “illegal re-entry” after a previous deportation triggered a felony prosecution under zero tolerance.
‘I’ve been separated from my son for four months. I don’t understand why we are still separated’ José G
José was locked up in El Paso county jail to await his criminal case. Marco was sent to a children’s shelter.
“I’ve been separated from my son for four months,” José told the Guardian in mid-September. “I don’t understand why we are still separated.”
José is one of the 3,121 migrants in our sample who risked crossing the border to seek a better life. Just over half were Mexican nationals, closely followed by Guatemalans, Hondurans and Salvadorans. The vast majority are men.
Having made the long, perilous journey from their home countries, some cross at official ports of entry to claim asylum, while others attempt to conceal themselves in trunks of cars, trucks and freight trains.
Many are opting to trek across the border in more remote, dangerous desert and mountain regions. Others wade, raft or swim across the Rio Grande, which defines nearly the entirety of the Texas-Mexico border.
Most came from Latin America
With Mexico dominating, followed by Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. There were also a small number of migrants from China (three), India (nine), Chile (one), Peru (three) and Canada (one).
Number of migrants by country of origin
1
400
800
1200
1600+
In cases where a migrant’s country of origin was not recorded, we used the country to which the individual had previously been deported. We were not able to determine country of origin for another 58 people.
Far more men were arrested than women
Court documents do not record gender so we made educated guesses based on individuals’ first names and the pronouns used in the documents.
Previous deportation is not a deterrent
Of those who have been previously deported, many attempt to come back within a year or two, with 28 attempting the crossing within a matter of days.
Arrest location: a third were caught crossing the Rio Grande
In criminal complaints detailing the river crossings, Border Patrol recorded that 33% crossed by wading, 34% by rafting and 4.6% by swimming.
Number of arrests by county
1
100
200
300
400+
Extreme tactics at the border
The documents reveal the lengths to which the US Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) go to capture migrants.
Border Patrol uses an armory of technology including “seismic intrusion devices” (sensors that send an alert when they detect the vibrations created by footstep), giant towers packed with cameras and sensors, and mobile video surveillance systems – trucks that have extendable masts fitted with an array of cameras, radar and laser range finders, frequently referred to as “scope trucks”.
At least six migrants were arrested during “immigration inspections” of commercial passenger buses at a border patrol checkpoint in Texas – a practice that has been harshly criticized as unconstitutional by the American Civil Liberties Union, which is calling on Greyhound buses to stop allowing border patrol agents on board. All six have pleaded guilty; three received prison sentences ranging from 64 days to four months; the other three are still awaiting sentencing.
Others were arrested at motels, based on anonymous tips or pro-active surveillance. In one case, border patrol agents were surveilling the Cotton Valley Motel in Clint, Texas. After observing “two individuals wet and muddy from the knees down” enter, the agents obtained consent from the motel manager to search the room, where they found six people hiding in the bathroom.
It was a shock for everyone. You had 75 people in chains Daniela Chisolm, El Paso attorney
In some cases, migrants end up turning themselves in. On 16 May, Marin M, a migrant from Guatemala, called 911 from the desert in Otero county, New Mexico, when he and his traveling companions found they could walk no farther.
“Please come get us,” the men can be heard asking in the 911 call, which the Guardian obtained through a public records request. They ask repeatedly for water.
The Otero county sheriff’s department dispatched Border Patrol agents who transported the men to a local hospital for treatment. Marin was then taken to the Alamogordo Border Patrol station for processing, and charged with felony re-entry. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 57 days in federal prison.
Many of those arrested try to claim asylum because they are fleeing from gang violence, corruption, political instability and natural disasters. Those opting to seek asylum the “legal” way, by presenting themselves at a US port of entry, have been thwarted by officials who say they don’t have the capacity to process them. Border Patrol has started blocking anyone without a US passport from stepping onto US soil, leaving a backlog of asylum seekers camping on international bridges between the US and Mexico for weeks as they wait to be processed.
This crackdown on legal asylum is pushing some desperate migrants to enter illegally, say attorneys.
One Tucson-based lawyer, who did not wish to be named, described a client who crossed illegally only after being blocked from seeking asylum at a US port of entry.
“The mafia said if my client didn’t work for them they’d rape his six-year-old son,” she said. “So his only decision was to get to the US. Am I going to leave my child? No, I’m going to bring my child. Anybody would.”
“People were panicking,” recalled Carlos Quinonez, a defense attorney in El Paso, Texas. “I’ve never seen so many people.”
“It was a shock for everyone,” said Daniela Chisolm, another El Paso attorney. “You had 75 people in chains: 18-year-old girls from Guatemala, 70-year-old men from Honduras … The first day, I had 15 clients, and nine of them had children taken from them.”
Defense attorneys spoke of an “exponential” increase in the number of cases they were assigned, made all the more challenging by their clients’ anxiety after losing their children. “I spent a lot of time having to refocus my clients,” said Quinonez. “They were focused on where their kids were.”
While federal public defenders usually represent indigent defendants charged with felonies, the task of representing the thousands of misdemeanor illegal entry cases often fell to private defense attorneys like Quinonez and Chisolm, whose fees the government pays. Pierce, the Las Cruces defense attorney, said he came to consider those payments “blood money”. “We get paid to do this, but it’s not really what we signed up for,” he said. “You want to defend people in a criminal case, not because someone crossed the border looking for work.”
Maxine Dobro, a defense attorney in San Diego, was one of several defense attorneys to express disgust with what she called “a misguided decision by a misguided administration: the mass scooping up of minnows will go down as one of the darkest hours of our nation.”
“The sharks swim away and the minnows are prosecuted,” she added. Indeed, an analysis by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse found that between March 2018 and June 2018, federal prosecutions of non-immigration crimes fell in the five border districts, both as a percentage of total prosecutions and in absolute terms.
Some defense attorneys, including Jose Troche, an El Paso attorney who represented 11 clients in our sample, were supportive of zero tolerance. “Look, I represent them, but some of these parents need to be prosecuted for child endangerment,” Troche said. “They brought these kids through Mexico, through that pigsty, and dumped them here.” As for the children themselves: “The centers are the safest place these kids have ever been,” he said.
While defense attorneys were struggling to represent the thousands of newly criminalized migrants, federal prosecutors had challenges of their own. In at least 15 cases, the criminal complaints charging migrants with illegal entry included obvious errors suggesting that whoever had filled them out had failed to complete a prepared template.
Ananias B, a migrant from Honduras, was charged with entering the country by “wading the Rio Grande River near, #PLACE OF ENTRY#”. Angel A, from El Salvador, was charged with a crime that “took place on #DATE OF ENTRY#”. Perhaps most egregiously, seven migrants in Arizona were charged based on complaints that included the phrase, “Agents observed the Defendant #DOING WHAT? PICK ONE DELETE THE REST#”, followed by a list of apparently common behaviors.
The Guardian made numerous attempts to contact the federal prosecutors responsible for prosecuting the cases in our sample. None agreed to speak either on or off the record.
Cosme Lopez, a spokesman for the US attorney’s office in Arizona, said by email that one of the incomplete complaints had been filed with Pacer “due to an apparent error in the uploading process”. Lopez said that a “hard copy” was used in court “that included all the necessary information.” Lopez declined to provide a copy of this hard copy, and neither responded to questions regarding the uploading error nor explained how the document in Pacer came to be signed by a judge.
One federal magistrate judge who has handled zero tolerance cases and who spoke to the Guardian on condition of anonymity said that the incomplete complaints certainly represented “shoddy work”, but added that he would not “ascribe to it any sinister motives”.
The mass scooping up of minnows will go down as one of the darkest hours of our nation Maxine Dobro, defense attorney
He compared the criminal justice system to a boa constrictor that can open its mouth wider and wider to swallow increasing numbers of defendants, but cannot increase its capacity to digest those cases. “Historically, the government puts lots of resources into the law enforcement mouth, but the judicial resources to address that lump of new cases don’t get increased correspondingly,” he said.
That judge, like others who spoke with the Guardian, described a dramatic increase in misdemeanor and petty offenses in his courtroom. William P Johnson, the chief US district judge of New Mexico, shared with the Guardian a letter he had sent seeking authorization to fill a vacant magistrate judge position in which he highlighted the “drastic increase” of 1,100% in misdemeanor illegal entry cases from 2017 to 2018.
Within the pages of the more than 6,000 court documents the Guardian examined there is a striking omission: the fact that many migrants were travelling with children at the time of their arrests was recorded in only 10 of the 3,121 cases we examined.
José G is one of those 10. When he appeared in court on 14 May, five days after his apprehension by Border Patrol, the criminal complaint against him included a reference to his child. The fact that his son was in the US, and by then was being kept in a shelter for migrant children in El Paso, was not referenced in the prosecution’s motion asking a judge to deem José a flight risk and detain him without bond – a request that the judge in the case granted.
José spent two months in the El Paso county jail before the case against him was simply dropped. The prosecution’s motion for the case to be dismissed states only that “the government does not wish to prosecute at this time”. José was moved to an immigration detention center to start the separate process of immigration court. He did not pass the “credible fear” interview that would have allowed him to seek asylum.
He is yet to be reunited with Marco.
Assembly-line justice
The right to a fair trial, enshrined as the sixth amendment in the Bill of Rights, is as American an ideal as the Statue of Liberty.
But of the 3,121 migrants whose cases we examined, only one has gone to trial so far. Prosecutors dismissed the charges against 70 defendants – a few times because no translator was available or after a defense attorney filed a motion challenging the prosecution’s case, but largely without providing any explanation. Four migrants were found not competent to stand trial and were committed to mental institutions. Nine cases were terminated without any record of the outcome that we could find.
Over the summer, many migrants pleaded not guilty and remained incarcerated while awaiting trial. That number has dwindled to just 23 as of the end of September, however, as more and more holdouts change their pleas to guilty.
The vast majority – 3,014 – have now pleaded guilty.
Some judges defended the rate of guilty pleas, noting that it is difficult to mount a defense against a charge of improper entry if the defendant is found in the US. But many defense attorneys argued that it was impossible for defendants to make “knowing and voluntary” pleas when they had such limited access to legal advice or were preoccupied with worry for their children.
For those who pleaded guilty, the sentences they received ranged widely. The median time spent incarcerated for those who pleaded guilty to misdemeanor improper entry was five days, but it was significantly longer for those in California (16 days) than in Arizona (two days). Those charged with felony re-entry received a median sentence of 2.5 months (75 days). Here again the length of sentence varies by state, however, with those sentenced in the southern district of Texas receiving a median sentence of 4.3 months (130 days), compared to 1.4 months (43 days) in New Mexico.
As of 30 September, when we completed our data analysis, 266 migrants remained incarcerated, awaiting sentencing. Some were not scheduled to see a judge again until 2019.
Case outcomes: almost all pleaded guilty
Though as of 30 September, 23 continued to pursue their cases.
Most judges sentenced first-time entrants to time served
This meant that the time defendants spent incarcerated varied according to how quickly the court could process cases. For the vast majority, this resulted in less than 30 days in prison.
Those who had previously been deported received longer sentences
The longest sentences went to those with other criminal convictions.
First-time migrants in the southern district of California spent the longest time incarcerated
This is likely because California was not yet using a “fast track” system of prosecuting migrants, resulting in a longer wait for sentencing. California began using the new system, “Operation Streamline”, in July.
The southern district of Texas hands outs the longest sentences for re-entry cases
This data is incomplete, however, because almost all of the 266 migrants still awaiting sentencing were charged with felony re-entry.
Families still separated
After José’s criminal case was dismissed, he was transferred to an Ice immigration detention facility in Sierra Blanca, about 90 miles south-east of El Paso.
Immigration detention is the likely next step for most of the other 3,120 migrants once they complete their criminal sentences, though some are deported immediately after release from prison. For those who are transferred to Ice custody, they can either attempt to claim asylum, mount a case in immigration court that they should be allowed to stay, or be deported. But the paper trail ends with the criminal cases: immigration courts produce no comparable record of their proceedings.
José is allowed visitors, but only from behind a thick plate of glass. He is diminished; his weight has dropped from 180lbs to 152lbs while he has been incarcerated, he says.
“The stress is enormous,” he said, fighting back tears. He has not been allowed to see his son, and though he is allowed to speak to Marco by phone, he lacks the funds to do so. A 20-minute call to a US number from the detention facility costs about $10, with a $3 service fee.
José doesn’t have an immigration attorney and doesn’t know the status of his immigration case. “About a month ago I signed a form saying I want deportation,” he said. “But Ice hasn’t said anything to me about when I will be deported.”
Marco was eventually released to José’s brother in North Carolina, a fact that has both assuaged and increased his anxiety. The Trump administration has begun requiring family members to submit their fingerprints in order to receive family members – potentially placing them at risk of Ice themselves.
“My brother and my sister-in-law are both here without papers,” said José. “They gave up their fingerprints with their consent and in good faith to take in Marco.
“But I’m still here in detention. I haven’t seen Marco and that’s why it’s so bad here. All the time I have spent crying here about the separation,” he added, his voice trailing off.
“Nobody tells us anything. There’s no light at the end of the tunnel.”
Median sentence length for felony illegal re-entry0 days204060801001201401600 días20406080100120140160California southern60 daysArizona60 daysNew Mexico43 daysTexas western105 daysTexas southern130 days
Credits
ReportersJulia Carrie Wong, Olivia Solon, Margaret Katcher and Patrick Timmons
Reporting assistantSimon Campbell
Data AnalysisPamela Duncan
Design and developmentSam Morris
IllustrationKatherine Lam
Copy EditingCharlotte Simmonds
TranslationKatie Schlechter
Special thanks toFrancisco Navas and Chris Taylor
Methodology
One unintended consequence of zero tolerance was to create the means for greater transparency. US immigration courts are notoriously opaque, but proceedings in federal criminal courts are filed in Pacer, an electronic database. By insisting on criminalizing migrants prior to seeking to deport them, zero tolerance created a vast paper trail that sheds light on the mechanics and malfunctions of the policy.
To perform our data analysis for this article, we searched Pacer for all criminal cases filed by the US government in the five border districts during the first six weeks of zero tolerance, 7 May-25 June, the period during which family separations were taking place. The five districts are the southern district of Texas, the western district of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and the southern district of California.
The nearly 25,000 criminal cases filed during that period were more than we had capacity to investigate, so we decided to limit our analysis to one calendar week: 13-19 May. This resulted in a sample of 3,579 cases.
We divided that sample into two groups: those who were charged with low-level immigration offenses and everyone else. The charges that we considered low-level immigration offenses are: 8 USC § 1325; 8 USC § 1326; 9 USC § 1459; 18 USC § 1028, 1544 and 1546.
Because of the way that Pacer works, our sample includes two sets of cases: those that were originally filed during the week in question, and a smaller set of cases that were re-filed in criminal court during that week.
This distinction is the result of the way federal courts handle their workload. Low-level immigration offenses are usually filed in magistrates court where they are overseen by magistrates judges, whose job it is adjudicate minor or petty offenses, while felonies are handled in criminal court by district judges. In many cases, illegal re-entry charges are originally filed in magistrates court, then transferred to criminal court for sentencing.
We decided to keep these transfer cases in our sample because they represent a portion of the caseload that was burdening the courts overall during the week we examined.
We worked with PacerMonitor to download the criminal complaints and judgments for all of the cases in our sample, then used optical character recognition technology to convert as many of the documents as possible into a machine readable format. We then built our own database of the cases and all the information we could glean from the documents, such as demographic information about the migrants themselves, where and how they were arrested, who prosecuted them, and what the outcome of their court cases were. We are referring to migrants by their first names and last initials, and have changed the name of a minor.
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Go to the original article at the link to get the charts in their proper format.
No amount of doubletalk and false narratives by the Trump Administration will change the reality of what they are doing, its intentional cruelty, and its utter failure to deter migration. Sadly, it’s quite possible, but not necessarily inevitable, that Trump, Sessions, Miller, and the others who have formulated these travesties will escape legal judgement in the present. But, they won’t escape the judgment of history; nor will those who have enabled, or worse yet, actively supported them.
We can can diminish (and are diminishing) ourselves as a nation, but it won’t stop human migration!
But the prospect is now on the horizon of asylum seekers remaining in detention regardless of being able to establish a credible fear of persecution.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions is now reviewing that BIA decision to determine whether it should be overruled in light of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Jennings v. Rodriguez.
The Ninth Circuit had held that an alien who establishes a credible fear of persecution cannot be held indefinitely under the expedited removal provisions of the Immigration and Nationality Act without bond hearings every six months at which the government has the burden of showing that further detention is necessary.
The pertinent provision states when it’s been determined that a person has a credible fear of persecution, he “shall be detained for further consideration of the application for asylum,” and the Supreme Court held that this language “mandate(s) detention of aliens throughout the completion of applicable proceedings and not just until those proceedings begin.”
In other words, mandatory detention continues to apply until they have been granted asylum, deported, or – and this is key – they choose voluntarily to leave on their own.
If aliens placed in expedited removal proceedings have to be detained until they can be deported or are granted asylum, most of them will go home rather than stay at a detention center on a military base for several years with no realistic hope of being granted asylum.
According to Adam Cox, a leading expert on immigration and constitutional law, Justice Department lawyers under both Democratic and Republican administrations have argued that undocumented aliens apprehended at the border lack due process protections, and the Supreme Court has never clearly resolved the dispute.
There was an uproar – and some backtracking – over detaining children for even relatively short periods. How will the American public react to people – men, women, and children – being put in mandatory detention that can last for months or even years?
. . . .
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Go on over to The Hill at the above link to see Nolan’s complete article.
It’s likely that “Our Gang” of retired Immigration Judges will be weighing in on this issue in the near future. So, stay tuned for further developments.
TORNILLO, Texas — Having immigrant teens live in the “tent city” in Tornillo, Texas, was always supposed to be a temporary solution, after the Trump administration’s policy of separating immigrant families at the border meant the government didn’t have enough beds in the shelter system.
It opened in June, and the contractor running the site had a 30-day contract. At that time, 326 children were being housed there.
But four months after its opening, the shelter 30 miles outside of El Paso has grown into a bustling town. It now holds nearly five times its initial population — roughly 1,500 teens — and its contract has been extended until at least Dec. 31.
The tent city’s purpose has changed as well. Officials at the Department of Health and Human Services, the federal agency responsible for the care of unaccompanied child immigrants, say none of the teens currently housed there were detained as a result of family separations. It now holds immigrant children who crossed the border without an adult, in theory as a last stage of their stay in the vast US shelter bureaucracy.
And as the shelter expands, administrative issues have cropped up concerning legal representation and FBI background checks — extending many teens’ stays longer than what HHS says is the average.
Tornillo now has a new football field, math and English classes, and more than 100 tent structures. Staffers zipped around in carts between dozens of portable offices offering mental health services, emergency medical care, legal services, and even a barber. A huge emergency tent has been turned into a sleeping hall for 300 teenage girls, decorated with paper chains and lanterns.
BuzzFeed News toured the Tornillo facility for the second time on Friday, as part of a group of reporters. Like the first and only other tour, instructions were strict. No photographs or recording devices were allowed, and reporters were not permitted to use the names of employees or speak with the teens living at the camp — though HHS was more lenient on the last rule during Friday’s tour. The only photos were provided by the government.
HHS
The facility in Tornillo, Texas.
“I frankly thought we were done here in July,” the facility’s incident commander, who works for the contractor BCFS, told reporters Friday. He spoke from a new command center that is nearly triple the size of the office he occupied in June.
“I’m still here, ’cause otherwise, where are these kids going?” the commander said.
Only children between ages 13 and 17 stay at the Tornillo facility, which is now the largest in the HHS’s nationwide system. Pregnant teens, and teens requiring behavioral medication, are not allowed — “we’re too big, too high-profile,” the incident commander explained.
Officials said the average length of time that teens spend at Tornillo is 25 days. Yet many of the teens living at the camp have spent weeks or even months in HHS shelters before arriving at Tornillo. In order to clear out those other facilities, teens are sent to the tent shelter to await final processing before they are released to a sponsor in the US.
“This is a last stop, if you will,” said Mark Weber, a spokesperson for HHS.
Ten teens in Tornillo BuzzFeed News encountered had spent between three to five months in government detention — significantly more than the 59 days that HHS says is the average stay for an unaccompanied immigrant minor in its care. That average is up from 48 days in 2017, and around 30 days during the Obama administration.
Christopher Smith / HHS Photo Christopher Smith
And even after arriving in Tornillo, the young occupants find themselves facing a fresh final set of administrative hurdles that threaten to complicate or delay their stay in the US shelter system.
One of the teens BuzzFeed News spoke with last week, a 16-year-old girl from Guatemala, told reporters that she’d been in Tornillo exactly one month on Saturday. Before being transferred to Texas, she had spent four months in an HHS shelter in Miami, meaning she’d already spent five months in HHS care. She was uncertain how much longer she’d remain there.
Her brother, who lives in Texas and had been in the US for a decade, is trying to sponsor her, which should secure her release. But he is undocumented, and he told her that her caseworker is not sure if he will be able to act as a sponsor.
She didn’t want to go back to Guatemala, where her parents are. “I suffered a lot in the journey [to the United States], and what, for nothing?” she said.
Another teenage girl standing next to her told reporters she’d also come to Tornillo from the Miami shelter at the same time, and that she’d crossed the border four months earlier.
The delays stem in part from a new requirement — that the FBI perform a fingerprint background check — imposed by the Trump administration on family members and other adults who wish to sponsor an unaccompanied immigrant minor.
Those changes are delaying how long kids are staying in care, and have created the ongoing need for Tornillo to operate as a temporary shelter to handle the overflow from permanent HHS shelters, said the incident commander. He added that more than half of the children at the Tornillo shelter are there because of FBI delays.
Christopher Smith / HHS Photo Christopher Smith
“It is the extra precaution that HHS has put in place for sponsors,” said the incident commander on Friday. “That is absolutely what has caused this, without any question whatsoever.”
While he applauded the extra care HHS has taken to ensure the safety of unaccompanied minors, the incident commander criticized the length of time the FBI takes to do fingerprint checks. On Friday, 826 of the kids in Tornillo were still awaiting the results of fingerprint checks, the final step needed before they are released, he said.
“I think it should be done quickly,” the incident commander said. “I don’t understand why it’s taking so long. It seems like a system issue. … That is frustrating to me.”
He noted that it takes time to do background checks, but said that HHS is “working through the process [with the FBI] and working to speed it up.” He did not provide further details.
Asked if the teens who end up in Tornillo spend longer than the average stay in the shelter system, Weber replied: “I don’t think that’s [true]. … These kids are very close to being released.”
Weber also argued that the need for the Tornillo facility is “driven by the number of kids crossing the border” — which this year, he said, is set to be the third highest on record. Around 50,000 unaccompanied minors are expected to cross the border this year.
Christopher Smith / HHS Photo Christopher Smith
On Thursday, BuzzFeed News visited the juvenile immigration proceedings in downtown El Paso. Eleven teenage boys from the Tornillo facility, aged between 15 and 17, had been given notice to appear in court on that day.
The boys were dressed in new, matching navy and white polo shirts, denim jeans or khakis, and black, braided leather belts. They had fresh haircuts.
The judge asked the boys if they had copies of their Notices to Appear, a charging document issued by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement informing them of removal proceedings, and read the date on which each NTA had been issued. Dates ranged from June 6 until July 1, meaning the teenagers had been in HHS care for a minimum of over three months — longer than the average stay.
None of the boys had legal representation at the court hearing — they were just accompanied to court by a BCFS employee. All of them asked the judge to delay their cases so they could find an immigration lawyer. They were given until late January to do so.
The HHS spokesperson said it’s just not his agency’s job. “Yes, children are appearing in court, but that is not part of HHS’s responsibility,” Weber told reporters on Friday. “Those legal options are pursued basically after they are released from us.”
Juveniles facing immigration proceedings do not have the right to a government-appointed lawyer. Weber said the children who appeared in court would absolutely have received legal help beforehand.
Everyone in HHS care receives a “Know Your Rights” training, Weber said, and upon arrival to Tornillo, the teenagers are again reminded that they are able to speak with a lawyer. Ten legal representatives — a combination of lawyers and social workers from different legal organizations — are on hand on weekdays in Tornillo to meet with children.
But those lawyers don’t formally represent them. They offer advice to the children.
And those representatives only meet with detainees if the teen specifically asks to see a lawyer, the incident commander said. He estimated that of the approximately 3,100 teens who have been housed at Tornillo since it opened, only about 400 had requested and received a meeting with a legal representative.
Christopher Smith / HHS Photo Christopher Smith
Moreover, to organize a meeting with the lawyers, the children must fill out a form — a difficult task for many of the children at Tornillo. The incident commander said most of the facility’s residents are at a fourth-grade learning level.
Asked how children in the care of HHS with very little education were supposed to be able to navigate the legal system alone, or even the process of arranging and interacting with a lawyer, Weber acknowledged that “negotiating the legal system is incredibly difficult.”
Although the incident commander is hopeful the facility will close on Dec. 31, Weber didn’t commit to that deadline. “It depends how many kids come,” he said.
The facility — its population peaked at 1,637 on Sept. 28 — has 1,400 beds on standby in two giant tents. This is in case the Homestead shelter in Florida — another temporary facility that opened during the family separation crisis — needs to evacuate due to a hurricane.
In immigration court Thursday, Judge Robert S. Hough, who oversees all juvenile immigration proceedings in El Paso, asked the BCFS employee assisting the children before him about Tornillo’s supposed Dec. 31 closing date.
“Hurry up and wrap it up before you get any bigger,” suggested the judge.
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Once the smokescreen of all the Trump lies and racism clears, how could we ever explain to future generations what we have done to the most vulnerable among us and to children, young people, and young families that are our world’s future? I guess it will go along with explaining how have we let Trump and his grifter buddies destroy, pollute, and poison the universe that also belongs to future generations.
Elsa, a Guatemalan living in Southern Mexico, knew something was wrong. Her husband began traveling a lot without explanation, and physically abusing her and their two kids. When she eventually figured out that he’d gone to work for a cartel, she left him. But in 2016, the gang came after her to collect on debts the ex-husband had skipped out on. She fled to other Mexican towns, but the cartel men tracked her down. Then she went back to Guatemala, but they found her there, too. Finally, in September, Elsa decided to gamble on Uncle Sam — but the foot of the Reynosa-Hidalgo bridge was as far as she would get.
The Trump administration has repeatedly insisted that asylum-seekers should follow the rules by turning themselves in at ports of entry. Elsa tried to do just that. As a legal Mexican resident, she even had proper documentation for herself and her two children. Still, a Mexican customs agent stopped her at the turnstile and told her she couldn’t pass. He yelled at her that they were abusing their Mexican status by seeking asylum in the United States, and he threatened to tear their papers to shreds. Scared, the family slunk back into narco-ravaged Reynosa, and into total uncertainty.
The story of Elsa, whose name the Observer has changed for her protection, was included in a petition filed last week with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, a 59-year-old organization based in Washington, D.C., that investigates abuses in the Americas and issues recommendations to offending nations. The petition, filed by immigration attorneys working in the Rio Grande Valley, describes a systematic conspiracy between U.S. and Mexican customs agents to prevent asylum-seekers from requesting protection. The attorneys are asking the commission to tell both nations to stop stonewalling the law-abiding migrants.
U.S. customs agents blocking entry at the international boundary line on the Gateway International Bridge, Brownsville, July 2. COURTESY/FILING WITH THE INTER-AMERICAN COMMISSION ON HUMAN RIGHTS
Since June, the lawyers allege, Mexican customs officials along the Texas-Mexico border have been doing something virtually unprecedented: stopping asylum-seekers from entering the bridge, and if the migrants lack proper Mexican travel documents, the Mexican agents detain and even deport them. If an asylum-seeker makes it onto the bridge, U.S. customs officials call their Mexican counterparts to retrieve them; the Observerdocumented this phenomenon in a June story cited in the petition. In Nuevo Laredo, according to sworn affidavits from two Central American asylum-seekers, Mexican agents have demanded bribes of $500 per person to get onto the bridge. And in September, in Reynosa, they also started rejecting people, like Elsa, with Mexican papers.
“This petition highlights the reality of the U.S. working hand in glove with the Mexicans to completely shut down bridges, in violation of a number of human rights prohibitions,” said Jennifer Harbury, a longtime Rio Grande Valley attorney. Harbury has spent months documenting problems at the bridges and provided the majority of the information in the filing. According to Harbury and an affidavit from longtime Brownsville activist Mike Seifert, the international collaboration began after public outcry over long lines of asylum-seekers baking in the sun for weeks on the U.S. side of the bridges.
Harbury says in the filings that numerous Mexican agents at the Reynosa bridge have privately told her that the two governments are working together, and they’ve expressed frustration at doing the United States’ “dirty work.” Two other witnesses — a journalist and an activist — wrote similar affidavits. But U.S. customs agents have told Harbury that the Mexicans are acting alone, and a September letter she sent to Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen has gone unanswered. The United States began pressuring Mexico to stop migration at its southern border in 2014, and last month, Trump signaled he would redirect $20 million in foreign aid to beef up Mexico’s deportations. Neither U.S. nor Mexican immigration officials responded to Observer requests for comment.
The United States is unlikely, Harbury said, to heed the eventual request from the human rights commission. For one, the U.S. government rejects the authority of the commission’s enforcement arm, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in San José, Costa Rica. (The same court recently ruled that many Latin American countries must recognize same-sex marriage.) But Harbury has higher hopes for Mexico, which is subject to the court and has an incoming leftist president in Andrés Manuel López Obrador. “I think the new president of Mexico is not going to want the commission saying they’re running dogs for Uncle Sam,” she said.
If Mexico stops its collaboration, then the United States would have to do its own “dirty work” of stopping asylum-seekers, and hold all liability for the potentially illegal actions. In California, a lawsuit was filed last year after border agents briefly turned away asylum-seekers all along the U.S.-Mexico border on the false premise that Trump’s inauguration had abolished asylum. That suit continues to play out.
In turning the bridges into hostile territory for asylum-seekers, the Trump administration has made a mockery of its own stated immigration goals.According to Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the point of the “zero tolerance” policy was to force families to use official ports of entry instead of crossing illegally. But U.S. customs agents started stonewalling asylum-seekers at the bridges. Now, with the threat of separation gone and the bridges still a dicey proposition, families have responded accordingly: More are crossing the river illegally to turn themselves in to Border Patrol. Immigration officials, in turn, are using this apparent spike to sound the alarm about another border crisis.
Meanwhile, many asylum-seekers from Central America, Africa and the Caribbean remain stranded, paralyzed by uncertainty in dangerous Mexican border towns where gangsters prey on refugees. In an affidavit, one would-be asylum-seeker wrote that she hears “shooting day and night” in Reynosa; another simply wrote, “many people die here.” As Harbury, the attorney, put it, “they’re like a snowball in Hell down there.”
Gus Bova reports on immigration, the U.S.-Mexico border and grassroots movements for the Observer. He formerly worked at a shelter for asylum-seekers and refugees. You can contact him at bova@texasobserver.org.
Jeff Sessions is a key part of this legal charade and scofflaw behavior. He disingenuously asserts that individuals should be using the legal system while doing everything in his power to make it impossible for individuals to present their asylum claims at ports of entry and have them fairly heard by fair and unbiased judges in Immigration Court.
The results of these shortsighted, cruel, illegal, and ultimately ineffective policies are to: 1) enrich smugglers, 2) make the trip more dangerous for asylum seekers, virtually insuring that more will die or be abused during the journey, and 3) to enlarge and promote the already robust “extralegal system” for immigrants and refugees. When orderly processing and the legal system for immigration are shut down or made less “user friendly,” the result is unlikely to be less overall immigration; just less immigration through legal channels and more “extralegal immigration” driven by Trump, Sessions, and their fellow White Nationalists.
Remember, we can diminish ourselves as a nation (and are doing so under Trump, Sessions, Nielsen, & Miller), but that won’t stop human migration!
Many thanks to Dan Kowalski over at LexisNexis Immigration Community for forwarding to me this timely and excellent reporting.
Judges in the nation’s federal criminal courts increasingly are balking at what they call unlawful efforts by U.S. immigration authorities to continue to detain people charged with entering the country illegally, even after they have been granted bail.
The rulings complicate the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” crackdown on defendants who are charged with illegally crossing the border but whom judges have determined do not pose a flight or safety risk.
The decisions force prosecutors to make a choice — charge defendants with illegal entry or reentry and risk that a federal judge releases them pending trial, or keep suspects locked up in civil detention pending deportation proceedings and forgo criminal prosecution.
A recent ruling by a federal judge in Washington highlights the human and legal issues at stake, the case of a dishwasher from El Salvador who has a wife and two children in the District, where he returned after two deportations.
The surge in such criminal cases stems from an April 2017 announcement by U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions prioritizing Justice Department prosecutions of entry and reentry crimes. More than 60,000 people have faced such criminal charges since then, with twice as many new prosecutions this July, the most recent month for which data is available, compared with the same month in 2017, according to Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, which monitors cases.
Individuals caught without documents on a first offense can be charged with a misdemeanor, but anyone caught in the United States after a prior deportation can be charged with a felony and face more than a year in prison. Immigration-related prosecutions are now the majority of all federal criminal cases, stretching far beyond states bordering Mexico.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions early this month in Ohio. (Adam Cairns/Columbus Dispatch/AP)
Advocates for immigrants say the recent court rulings may limit the use of the criminal charges to pressure defendants to abandon efforts to stay in the United States. The impact on overall removal efforts remains to be seen, but courts appear to be pushing back at an expansion of authority by prosecutors and Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
In the District, one rejection of the tougher tactics came from U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth, a 1987 appointee of President Ronald Reagan. On Sept. 26. Lamberth said the government cannot have it both ways — asking federal courts to deny bail to defendants awaiting criminal trial and then, if a judge disagrees, holding them anyway in the immigration system.
The decision came in the case of Jaime Omar Vasquez-Benitez, 38, who court papers say was picking food up at a restaurant in July when D.C. police stopped him for suspected gang activity and turned him over to ICE. Federal public defenders say Vasquez-Benitez had quit a gang and fears for his life if he is deported.
He was charged in August with felony reentry despite deportation orders in 2008 and 2014.
A federal magistrate and district judge ruled Vasquez-Benitez should be released on bail, but U.S. marshals returned him to ICE custody. Defense attorneys moved to enforce the release order, and the case ended up in front of Lamberth after Vasquez-Benitez was indicted.
Lamberth ruled that a landmark 1966 U.S. bail statute specifically covers migrants and must “trump” more-general immigration laws, releasing Vasquez-Benitez into a high-intensity supervision program. He wrote that courts have long “upheld as sacrosanct” the principle that no one can act as prosecutor and judge at the same time, and that the Justice Department cannot ignore bail rulings any more than it can shrug off a defendant’s right to a speedy trial.
The judge said prosecutors can pursue both criminal charges and civil removal cases against defendants but must abide by a judge’s decision to grant bail. Or they can forgo charges and keep defendants locked up in civil detention while pursuing deportation.
People detained without valid immigration documents may well be worse off if uncharged, “languishing” indefinitely without speedy trial or access to bail in ICE detention camps far from families or counsel, the judge noted.
“Nevertheless, the government can do that” under immigration law, Lamberth wrote. “But so long as the government invokes the jurisdiction of a federal court, the government must consent to the Court’s custodial dominion over the criminal defendants before it.”
A decision on whether to appeal is pending. Bill Miller, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office for the District, said the office was reviewing the ruling.
In a July 2017 Justice Department bulletin to 94 U.S. attorney offices nationwide, Oregon federal prosecutor Gregory R. Nyhus said that federal criminal statutes and civil immigration laws “are reconcilable” and that “courts should be encouraged to harmonize these statutes rather than focusing on [one] to the complete exclusion of the other.”
The government’s position — that it can hold Vasquez-Benitez strictly for deportation on a reinstated removal order, unrelated to his prosecution — has yet to be decided by an appeals court.
Rulings by trial judges in similar cases have varied.
Since July 2017, federal judges in Washington, Manhattan, Brooklyn, Detroit, Cleveland and Austin have rejected the government’s approach, drawing on a 2012 district court opinion in Oregon and a similar 2015 ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit that “the executive branch has a choice to make” between holding an undocumented person for deportation or prosecuting that person under criminal law and the Constitution.
Federal judges in Buffalo and Philadelphia have come down on the other side, saying that criminal and immigration laws can “coexist” on “parallel” tracks. Before the Trump administration, prosecutors would typically drop criminal charges to pursue civil removal if a previously deported defendant won bail.
Yihong “Julie” Mao, staff attorney with the National Immigration Project of the National Lawyers Guild, said the group was “heartened” by court rulings upholding undocumented immigrants’ right to bail and pretrial release based on family and community ties. She added: “This is fundamentally a separation-of-powers issue. The Department of Justice cannot be both judge and prosecutor.”
Mary Petras, an assistant federal public defender who is representing Vasquez-Benitez in the District, declined to comment.
In court filings, Assistant U.S. Attorney Kenneth Clair Kohl argued that the defendant’s case is not covered by the 2012 ruling, because ICE is holding him solely to deport him, not to prosecute him.
The Salvadoran man was first arrested in 1997, falsely claimed Mexican citizenship and was allowed to go to Mexico, according to court papers. He was deported in 2008 after serving a three-year sentence for felony obstruction of justice in the District and again in 2014, before he was caught for a fourth time this July.
Prosecutors would have prosecuted Vasquez-Benitez even in past years because of what they said in court papers was his “threatening, violent behavior” and felony criminal conviction. Vasquez-Benitez was convicted of obstruction of justice for telling a woman in 2005 she would “pay the consequences” if she called the police, and a 2014 arrest warrant in El Salvador said he has been charged with extortion, prosecutors said.
“There may come a time . . . [when] immigration proceedings have concluded . . . forcing the United States to choose between physical removal and continuation of this criminal case. That time, however, has not yet come,” wrote Kohl and Assistant U.S. Attorney Elizabeth Dewar in an unsuccessful effort to detain the man.
Petras told the court the man is a longtime restaurant worker, and his wife works part time as a hotel housekeeper. Both have family nearby, and the couple’s 3-year-old daughter and 9-year-old son attended a recent court hearing.
Petras argued the man posed no flight risk, because he is seeking to halt his deportation after gang members in El Salvador sent him a message warning that he had “signed his death warrant” by quitting the gang and removing gang tattoos.
The lawyer said the fact that her client has lived in the Washington area for years and returned shows that he “wants to be here and that he has no intent or incentive to flee.”
Read more:
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Compare what is happening in DC and some other jurisdictions with the “go along to get along” approach by some U.S. District Judges and U.S. Magistrate Judges along the border whom I have criticized in prior posts. The latter have allowed Sessions, Nielsen, and co. to turn their courts into “assembly line justice” — the kind that Session is implementing in his “wholly owned” U.S. Immigration Courts.
It’s pretty clear from the published reports that almost none of those being railroaded through that system actually understand the full immigration implications of their guilty pleas, nor do they understand how they can apply for asylum and what other rights they might have under the “civil immigration system.” Indeed, accepting guilty pleas without insuring that those entering the pleas fully understand the civil immigration situation and implications, including the likelihood of indefinite civil immigration detention and possible denial of a chance for a full hearing before an Immigration Judge, is arguably a violation of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Padilla v. Kentucky.
I also have a “personal recollection” of Judge Royce Lamberth from decades ago when he was the Chief of the Civil Division at the U.S. Attorneys Office for DC and I was the Deputy General Counsel/Acting General Counsel at the “Legacy INS.” On several occasions I had to trek over from the “Central Office” in the “Chester Arthur Building” at 4th and Eye St., NW to the U.S. Courthouse complex on 5th Street to explain and justify the INS position to Royce.
He was known as a formidable individual, even in those days — a chief litigator who brooked no-nonsense from USG Agencies and who was concerned with maintaining the Government’s reputation for integrity and legal excellence before the U.S. Courts. That probably has much to do with how he got nominated and confirmed to be a U.S. District Judge and why he still brooks no-nonsense from the “Masters of Nonsense” in the Trump Administration.
Nick Miroff, Josh Dawsey, & Maria Sacchetti report for WashPost:
The White House is actively considering plans that could again separate parents and children at the U.S.-Mexico border, hoping to reverse soaring numbers of families attempting to cross illegally into the United States, according to several administration officials with direct knowledge of the effort.
One option under consideration is for the government to detain asylum-seeking families together for up to 20 days, then give parents a choice — stay in family detention with their child for months or years as their immigration case proceeds, or allow children to be taken to a government shelter so other relatives or guardians can seek custody.
That option — called “binary choice” — is one of several under consideration amid the president’s frustration over border security. Trump has been unable to fulfill key promises to build a border wall and end what he calls “catch and release,” a process that began under past administrations in which most detained families are quickly freed to await immigration hearings. The number of migrant family members arrested and charged with illegally crossing the border jumped 38 percent in August and is now at a record level, according to Department of Homeland Security officials.
Senior administration officials say they are not planning to revive the chaotic forced separations carried out by the Trump administration in May and June that spawned an enormous political backlash and led to a court order to reunite families.
But they feel compelled to do something, and officials say senior White House adviser Stephen Miller is advocating for tougher measures because he believes the springtime separations worked as an effective deterrent to illegal crossings.
At least 2,500 children were taken from their parents over a period of six weeks. Crossings by families declined slightly in May, June and July before surging again in August. September numbers are expected to be even higher.
While some migrants worried about separations, others felt seeking asylum was worth the risk
For some seeking asylum, family separations were worth the risk: ‘Whatever it took, we had to get to this country’(Zoeann Murphy, Jorge Ribas/The Washington Post)
While some inside the White House and DHS are concerned about the “optics” and political blowback of renewed separations, Miller and others are determined to act, according to officials briefed on the deliberations. There have been several high-level meetings in the White House in recent weeks about the issue. The “binary choice” option is seen as one that could be tried out fairly quickly.
“Career law enforcement professionals in the U.S. government are working to analyze and evaluate options that would protect the American people, prevent the horrific actions of child smuggling, and stop drug cartels from pouring into our communities,” deputy White House press secretary Hogan Gidley said in an emailed statement.
Any effort to expand family detentions and resume separations would face multiple logistical and legal hurdles.
It would require overcoming the communication and data management failures that plagued the first effort, when Border Patrol agents, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials and Department of Health and Human Services caseworkers struggled to keep track of separated parents and children.
The Trump administration believes it is on solid legal ground, according to two officials, in part because U.S. District Judge Dana M. Sabraw, who ordered the government to reunite separated families in June, approved the binary-choice approach in one of his rulings. But a Congressional Research Service report last month said “practical and legal barriers” remain to using that approach in the future and said releasing families together in the United States is “the only clearly viable option under current law.”
‘Administration officials said the CRS report cited earlier legal rulings. But the American Civil Liberties Union, which launched the separations lawsuit, disputed that interpretation and said it would oppose any attempt at expanded family detentions or separations.
“The government need not, and legally may not, indiscriminately detain families who present no flight risk or danger,” ACLU attorney Lee Gelernt said in an email. “It is deeply troubling that this Administration continues to look for ways to cause harm to small children.”
Another hurdle is that the government does not have detention space for a large number of additional families. ICE has three “family residential centers” with a combined capacity of roughly 3,000 parents and children. With more than four times that many arriving each month, it is unclear where the government would hold all the parents who would opt to remain with their children.
But Trump said in his June 20 executive order halting family separations that the administration’s policy is to keep parents and children together, “including by detaining” them. In recent weeks, federal officials have taken steps to expand their ability to do that.
In addition to considering “binary choice” and other options, officials have proposed new rules that would allow them to withdraw from a 1997 federal court agreement that bars ICE from keeping children in custody for more than 20 days.
The rules would give ICE greater flexibility to expand family detention centers and potentially hold parents and children longer, though lawyers say this would be likely to end up in court.
Officials have also imposed production quotas on immigration judges and are searching for more ways to speed up the calendar in its courts to adjudicate cases more quickly.
Federal officials arguing for the tougher measures say the rising number of family crossings is a sign of asylum fraud. DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen has blasted smugglers for charging migrants thousands of dollars to ferry them into the United States, knowing that “legal loopholes” will force the administration to release them pending a court hearing. Federal officials say released families are rarely deported.
Advocates for immigrants counter that asylum seekers are fleeing violence and acute poverty, mainly in Central America, and deserve to have a full hearing before an immigration judge.
“There is currently a crisis at our southern border,” DHS spokeswoman Katie Waldman said in a statement, adding, “DHS will continue to enforce the law humanely, and will continue to examine a range of options to secure our nation’s borders.”
In southern Arizona, so many families have crossed in the past 10 days that the government has been releasing them en masse to shelters and charities. A lack of available bus tickets has stranded hundreds of parents and children in Tucson, where they sleep on Red Cross cots in a church gymnasium.
At a Senate hearing Wednesday, Sen. John Kyl (R-Ariz.) told Nielsen that migrants were “flooding into the community” and that authorities there had “no ability to do anything about it.”
Nielsen said lawmakers needs to give DHS more latitude to hold families with children in detention until their cases can be fully adjudicated — a process that can take months or years because of huge court backlogs.
DHS officials have seen the biggest increase this year in families arriving from Guatemala, where smugglers called “coyotes” tell migrants they can avoid detention and deportation by bringing a child, according to some community leaders in that country.
On Friday, Nielsen called for a regional effort to combat smuggling and violence in the region and to “heighten our penalties for traffickers.”
“I think there’s more that we can do to hold them responsible, particularly those who traffic in children,” she said in a speech in Washington at the second Conference on Prosperity and Security in Central America.
More than 90,000 adults with children were caught at the southwest border in the first 11 months of fiscal 2018. The previous high for a single year was 77,600 in 2016
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My recollection is that 1) the DOJ conceded in court that a policy of intentionally separating families is unconstitutional; and 2) Federal Courts have held that detention of individuals who are neither security risks nor likely to abscond for the primary purpose of “deterrence” is illegal.
So, if this facially illegal program is put into action, why shouldn’t Stephen Miller go to jail and be held personally liable for all the damages he causes with his scofflaw racist policies? Why shouldn’t Nielsen, Sessions, and others who are part of the Miller White Nationalist scheme also be held personally liable?
More cruelty, more wasting of taxpayer resources, more abuse of the judicial process by the Trump Administration.
Oh, and by the way. although today’s out of control U.S. Immigration Court backlogs began with “Aimless Docket Reshuffling” during the Bush II and Obama Administrations, Sessions and the Trump Administration have pushed them to astounding new levels with their incompetence and anti-asylum bias. Don’t blame the victims for the Government’s irresponsible actions!
If folks who believe in human decency and the rule of law don’t get out and vote, these abuses and degradations of our national values will continue.
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Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse
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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Greetings. The vast majority (58%) of individuals in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody as of June 30, 2018 had no criminal record. An even larger proportion – four out of five – either had no record, or had only committed a minor offense such as a traffic violation. Case-by-case records on each of these 44,435 individuals held in ICE custody were recently obtained by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University. These data provide a detailed snapshot of ICE custody practices.
Individuals were mainly from four countries. Forty-three percent were from the Central American countries of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, while an additional 25 percent were Mexicans. At least 18 percent had resided continuously in the U.S. for ten years or more, and one out of four had been in the country for at least five years.
Many individuals had been held in ICE custody for a relatively short period of time. Forty-one percent had thus far stayed in ICE custody for 30 days or less. At the other extreme, almost 2,000 individuals had been detained for more than a year, and a few individuals had already been continuously detained according to ICE records for over ten years.
The data document the dominance of private for-profit prisons in the large-scale detention of ICE detainees. Overall, fully 71 percent of detainees were housed in facilities operated by private companies. The rest of the facilities were operated by government, including by counties, cities, and the federal government. Texas held 29 percent of all ICE detainees.
Access the brand new free web query tool to examine who ICE has in custody and where they are being held. Details on state, county, facility name, nationality, gender, length of time in the U.S., green card status, if convicted the most serious criminal offense, and much more are available at:
In addition, there are many additional TRAC free query tools – which track Border Patrol arrests, ICE detainers and removals, the Immigration Court’s backlog, the handling of juvenile cases and more. For an index to the full list of TRAC’s immigration tools go to:
TRAC is self-supporting and depends on foundation grants, individual contributions and subscription fees for the funding needed to obtain, analyze and publish the data we collect on the activities of the U.S. federal government. To help support TRAC’s ongoing efforts, go to:
David Burnham and Susan B. Long, co-directors
Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse
Syracuse University
Suite 360, Newhouse II
Syracuse, NY 13244-2100
315-443-3563
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Expensive, divisive, often counterproductive, and overall serving no discernible national interest: That’s the Trump immigration policy!
In a case that the ACLU says could affect thousands of immigrants, the Supreme Court on Wednesday considered when the government has the right to detain a class of immigrants without a bail hearing.
Under a 1996 law, the federal government is allowed to detain immigrants whose criminal conviction or involvement in terrorism-related activities would make them inadmissible or deportable. The law says the government “shall” take any of those immigrants into custody “when the alien is released” from criminal custody. The question before the justices is: What happens if the Department of Homeland Security doesn’t do so immediately?
The arguments on Wednesday focused on the technicalities of the 1996 law, rules of grammar, and timelines — not the sort of fiery rhetoric usually favored by President Donald Trump or Attorney General Jeff Sessions when talking about immigrants.
And while the case was granted to resolve the question of whether the statute still applied if DHS does not act immediately — whether there is any time restriction — the arguments shifted to a question of what limitation would be reasonable.
After a back-and-forth with Justice Sonia Sotomayor and a question from Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Justice Neil Gorsuch spoke up early in the Wednesday arguments, asking, “[D]oes the government have any view about if ever the obligation [to take an immigrant into custody] lapses? Could it be 30 years? … Thirty years, and the government was aware of him the entire time and chose not to act. … Is there any limit on the government’s power?”
The government lawyer, Zachary Tripp from the Solicitor General’s Office, said the law created “a continuing obligation” that “does not lapse.”
Later, when Justice Stephen Breyer raised a similar question and Tripp began answering about when certain underlying crimes would be covered under the detention provision, Gorsuch interjected, said that back-and-forth was “quibbling,” and redirected Tripp to the larger question: “Justice Breyer’s question is my question, and I really wish you’d answer it.”
Breyer then stated his question more directly: “Is the government’s position that this paragraph, which says shall be arrested upon release, applies to a person who has been released 50 years before?”
Tripp, not giving in at all, said the government’s position is “absolutely that this applies regardless of the time” that’s passed.
. . . .
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Read the complete article at the link.
I had predicted the possibility that Justice Gorsuch’s past jurisprudence questioning the extent of and deference to Executive Power could make him an “honest broker” in some immigration cases.
I’d like to believe Justice Kavanaugh’s testimony that he will approach cases in a fair and impartial manner. But, neither his partisan outburst during his conformation nor his fawning performance during the unnecessary “formal swearing in” that became a Trump campaign rally were very encouraging from a fairness and impartiality standpoint.
Both his reputation and the country would be better served if he filled the “open minded conservative” role played by his predecessor and mentor Justice Kennedy rather than the “bought and paid for partisan vote” that all the Senators and Trump expect him to be.
Indeed, the one unifying theme of the Senate confirmation process was that all believed that he would perform as a totally predictable right-wing partisan vote. If he doesn’t live up to this expectation, the Dems will be (pleasantly) shocked and the GOP outraged at his “betrayal.” That’s why he would do well to at least occasionally listen carefully to the analysis of some of his more “liberal leaning” colleagues.
Recently I got involved in explaining how one could respond to this “restrictionist editorial” from Investor’s Business Daily, asserting that any Democrat who refused to buy into the Trump Administration’s draconian, and often illegal, immigration enforcement program was in favor of “open borders” and claiming to provide some (actually highly bogus) examples. “https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/illegal-immigration-democrats-open-borders/
Gotta hope that these dudes do a better job on investment news than they do on immigration policy! So here are some “talking points” that I prepared to help set the record straight!
Since Congressional Resolutions are nonbinding, they commonly are used as a political stunt by the party in control of a particular branch of Congress. The idea is to force members of the opposition party to “vote no” so that can be used against them in political campaigns. (Sadly, many voters have no idea what a “Resolution” is, so they are misled into thinking it’s opposition to an actual bill or law.)
So, given the bad reputation of ICE immigration enforcement, it’s hardly surprising that Democrats (and perhaps some thoughtful GOP legislators) don’t want to be “hoodwinked” into a political scheme of carte blanche endorsing an agency and its employees who have credibly been accused of many abuses.
Democrats don’t deny that civil immigration enforcement (apprehensions and removals) is necessary. But, it is certainly debatable whether ICE as currently structured, staffed, “branded,” and led is the right way to go about it. Even then, the “Abolish ICE” movement has not gained majority support among Democrat politicians. To view it as the “policy” of the Democratic Party or the majority of Democrats is simply wrong and misleading.
It’s possible to debate whether President Obama deserved his “Deporter-in- Chief” title.It’s also possible to debate the immigration enforcement strategies his Administration adopted. But, it’s beyond reasonable debate that Obama 1) gave immigration enforcement a very high priority; and 2) was in some enforcement areas, from a purely statistical basis, more effective than his predecessors and than Trump. Here’s a good analysis of the Obama immigration enforcement program: file:///Users/paulwickhamschmidt/Documents/The%20Obama%20Record%20on%20Deportations:%20Deporter%20in%20Chief%20or%20Not%3F%20%7C%20migrationpolicy.org.webarchive
Contrary to the false scenarios and manipulated statistics presented by the Trump Administration, the Department of Justice, and immigration restrictionists, the Government’s own statistics show that when released from detention and represented by counsel, asylum seekers show up for their hearings nearly all the time: http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/immigration/sd-me-family-asylum-20180817-story.html
In those cases where they don’t appear, it is often because of defective notices from overwhelmed Government immigration agencies or because nobody has clearly explained their rights and responsibilities to them in language they can understand. Indeed, many “in absentia” removal orders are subsequently vacated and reopened by the Immigration Courts.
Even in this highly anti-asylum administration, applicants who actually manage to get a hearing on the merits of their asylum claims win about one in three times, certainly a high enough chance of success to encourage most to show up.
Detention is both incredibly expensive and dehumanizing. DHS detention is tied up in numerous court cases. Since asylum applicants as a group are seldom either security or flight risks, looking for ways to process them outside detention makes more sense than building more expensive and substandard private jails.
“Sanctuary Cities” is largely a misnomer, because all jurisdictions provide some degree of cooperation to DHS consistent with law. Two things drive this phenomenon. First, courts have held that detainers issued by DHS for civil removal purposesare not legally enforceable because a judicial official does not issue them based on probable cause to believe that a crime has been committed. Second, ICE’s enforcement efforts aimed at non-criminal community members have sown fear and mistrust that has undermined local law enforcement. Victims are afraid to report serious crimes and individuals are unwilling to cooperate with local police or be witnesses in criminal prosecutions because of fear of deportation. Consequently, many localities have limited cooperation with DHS to that legally required: cooperating in the apprehension and removal of serious criminals, answering specific requests for information, or honoring criminal warrants issued by Article III Federal Judges.
Actually, it’s the Trump Administration not “Sanctuary Jurisdictions” that are scofflaws, engaging in illegal actions.
Whether or not all residents of San Francisco should be able to vote for school board is a local matter that is not indicative of any national position of the Democratic Party. All children in the United States, regardless of their status or the status of their parents, are entitled to public education under the Supreme Court’s ruling in Plyler v. Doe; and many undocumented individuals pay taxes, and nearly all would if there were a better system to allow them to do so. Therefore, on it’s face letting all residents have a say in how the local schools are run is hardly an unreasonable approach, regardless of whether or not it’s the best approach.
Moreover, what’s happening in San Francisco is by no means indicative of what Democrats elsewhere in the country think. Neither the Democratic Party nor the majority of Democrats has specifically endorsed letting undocumented individuals vote for school board.
Approximately 11 million individuals reside in the US without documents. The vast majority are law-abiding, productively employed members of our community, many with relatives who are citizens or Green Card holders. While those who have committed serious crimes or mean our country harm should of course be identified and removed (which has been a priority of every Administration over the past 50 years), the vast majority of the rest are not going to be forcibly removed no matter how nasty and cruel immigration enforcement policies become.
Therefore, developing some type of “earned legalization” that would either give them a path to citizenship, or at least make it possible for them legally to live, work, pay taxes and raise their families in the US makes more sense than forcing them to live in an underground status.
Unlike massive, ultimately ineffective enforcement programs, legalization programs are “self-funded” through application fees so they don’t add to the deficit like expanded enforcement programs.
In the long run, we need wiser leaders who will implement a larger and more realistic legal immigration system that gives more credence both to the forces abroad that force individuals to come here and the U.S. market forces that make employers in the U. S want and need to employ immigrants.
We are a nation of immigrants. We are not going to stop human migration; however, we could harness its power to maximize use of our legal immigration system, minimize the number of future migrants who come by way of the “extra legal” system, and make immigration enforcement more reasonable, achievable, and publicly acceptable.
Here’s an excerpt from Justine van der Luen’s much longer article “A Culture of No,” published in the Fall 2018 issue of VQR (quoting me, among many others).
. . . .
“Here in the US, there is democracy, but we still have fear,” he said. “I got asylum but if they want to make a problem, they can do it.” He was terrified that the smallest misstep, no matter how apparently meaningless, how accidental or random, could signal the difference between freedom and imprisonment—and from there, between life and death.
To beat the extreme odds in El Paso, Isaac had spent fifteen months in detention and paid thousands of dollars in legal fees to an elite lawyer who then worked dozens of pro bono hours on his appeal. This feat required an enormous amount of translated and notarized evidence discretely sent overseas by family members in Syria, the emotional and financial support of his brother and his lawyer, and the wherewithal to withstand a complex, taxing, humiliating process. How many asylum seekers could or should have to endure such an ordeal in order to gain internationally recognized rights meant to protect the persecuted?
As Isaac started over in America, other asylum seekers I had been tracking were less fortunate. Jesus Rodriguez Mendoza, the Venezuelan, had been transferred to a notorious detention center in Miami, which his legal team believed was punishment for his public protests; he remained on the El Paso docket, but now was physically separated from his lawyers, his fourth parole request denied. Berta Arias, the Honduran grandmother whose relief Judge Abbott had granted and then quickly rescinded, lost her appeal and was deported without the granddaughter she had raised. The Central American man whose brother, with an identical case, had won protection in New York City, remained in the Camp. It wasn’t only those from the Americas who were out of luck. Cambodians, Cameroonians, Guineans, and Kenyans I’d followed all had their claims denied; they had since been deported or were waiting on appeals.
One young Central American woman who had been repeatedly raped had managed to win relief, but only after her lawyer, unable to bear the thought of her client being sent home to be violated yet again, paid over $2,000 from her own pocket to fly two expert witnesses into Texas to clinch the case.
“I think in El Paso, they want to see that people died,” a young Salvadoran asylum seeker told me. He was an Evangelical Christian, who preached to local kids. Members of MS-13 had shot at him with a machine gun, killing a pedestrian who happened to be standing nearby, and kidnapped and murdered his fifteen-year-old friend who had joined him in proselytizing. The young man, his mother, and his brother made their way to the US. Despite having a devoted pro bono lawyer, he lost his asylum case, as well as his appeal, on the grounds of credibility (the judge believed he was simply an economic migrant who had invented the threats); his mother also struggled to find legal relief in El Paso.
“Maybe if I died, and then my mom asked for asylum, maybe then she can get protection,” he told me calmly. “They tried to kill me, but I didn’t die, so it’s not good enough for them.”
Justine van der Leun is the author of several books, including We Are Not Such Things (Random House, 2016), a New York Times Editors’ Choice and Spectator Book of the Year. Her work has appeared in theNew York Times, Harper’s, the Guardian, and Oprah Magazine. She is an International Women’s Media Foundation reporting fellow and a grantee of the Investigative Fund at the Nation Institute.
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I encourage you to read the full article at the above link, which is accompanied by some great original illustrations by Alan Vest!
Justine highlights the real role of attorneys in our asylum system. Many of them are working on a pro bono or low fee basis or actually paying out of their own pockets! They persist under horrible working conditions and often rude, insensitive, and unprofessional treatment from judges and other government officials that would persuade most other professionals to take up another line of work. The cases are complicated and (unnecessarily) fact intensive, often requiring not only extensive research and legal knowledge, but also skilled use of expert testimony and sources translated from foreign languages.
In courts like El Paso, getting a fair result in an asylum case too often depends on making the record below and then taking an appeal — the latter itself a time-consuming “hit or miss” proposition depending on the BIA “panel” (it could be a single judge) or the Circuit in which the case arose (sadly, the 5th Circuit is notorious for taking a cavalier and tone-deaf attitude toward the law and fundamental fairness in immigration matters).
Indeed, conscientious, dedicated attorneys are far more interested in making the system function in a fair and efficient manner consistent with our Constitution than the DOJ politicos who run today’s broken court system.
Compare the reality with the intentionally false and totally disingenuous picture painted by our White Nationalist Attorney General Jeff Sessions. He refers to “dirty lawyers” who are “gaming” the system.
Apparently, Sessions’s view of “gaming” means providing vigorous and effective representation and forcing him and some of the anti-asylum judges working for him to comply with asylum law!
It’s also painfully clear that no unrepresented asylum applicant would have any chance whatsoever of receiving fairness and Due Process in El Paso.
But, instead of working with the private bar to facilitate representation and repair the damage to the Immigration Courts, Sessions has gone to great lengths to prevent effective representation of asylum seekers. He has arranged for the detention of asylum seekers in horrible conditions in obscure places where there are no lawyers; he has “speeded up” the system to make it more difficult for lawyers to effectively represent their clients; he has used unconstitutional intentional family separation to duress individuals with valid claims into abandoning them; he has made pejorative remarks about asylum seekers and their lawyers in front of Immigration Judges; and he has manipulated the substantive law against bona fide asylum seekers.
Yes, many, many Immigration Judges “buck the odds” to honor their oaths of office and guarantee fairness and Due Process for asylum seekers and other respondents. Justine points out how results differ dramatically in Immigration Courts where judges apply the law and treat respondents and their lawyers in a fair and impartial manner.
So, how can I be such a strong advocate for independence of a system that I know is badly flawed? Those of us who have actually worked in the system know that it can’t be fixed overnight.
But, getting the system out of the hands of Sessions and the DOJ politicos is an absolutely essential first step. With the advent of a true merit judicial hiring system, such as that recommended by Professor Andy Schoenholtz and others, and the establishment of a more diverse and representative Appellate Division that acts like an independent Federal Court to rein in those judges who are unfairly treating asylum applicants and force them to correctly and fairly apply the law, there will be a return of meaningful judicial dialogue and deliberation which leads to progress over time.
Notably, in Isaac’s case, the system actually worked! After many months of expensive, wasteful, and unnecessary detention and an incorrect decision below, the BIA summarily corrected the Immigration Judge’s clearly erroneous denial of Isaac’s asylum case. But corrective action by the BIA to bring anti-asylum judicial “outliers” under control is exactly what Sessions has disabled in his decision in Matter of A-B-. He basically encourages “worst practices” and enables biased Immigration Judges while criticizing the BIA’s modest attempts to bring legality and order to an out of control system. What an outrageous perversion of justice and Due Process by someone who constantly makes bogus claims to be “enforcing the rule of law!”
Additionally, by returning control over dockets and court administrationto sitting judges, rather than non-judicial DOJ politicos and their agency subordinates, an independent Immigration Court can make progress toward reducing backlogs while promoting, rather than “demoting,” Due Process.
The current Immigration Court System is a farce that should outrage and disgust every fair-minded American! It will continue to malfunction and deny Due Process until we have an independent Immigration Court where all judges are required to respect the Constitution and the individual rights of those coming before them.
Join the “New Due Process Army” and force the Immigration Courts and the Article IIIs to live up to their unfilled promise of “guaranteeing fairness and Due Process for all!”
Matter of VELASQUEZ-RIOS, 27 I&N Dec. 470 (BIA 2018)
BIA HEADNOTE:
The amendment to section 18.5 of the California Penal Code, which retroactively lowered the maximum possible sentence that could have been imposed for an alien’s State offense from 365 days to 364 days, does not affect the applicability of section 237(a)(2)(A)(i)(II) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, 8 U.S.C. § 1227(a)(2)(A)(i)(II) (2012), to a past conviction for a crime involving moral turpitude “for which a sentence of one year or longer may be imposed.”
PANEL: BIA APPELLATE IMMIGRATION JUDGES GUENDELSBERGER, MALPHRUS, and LIEBOWITZ
OPINION BY: Judge John Guendelsberger
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Criminal lawyers take note: This Respondent received a sentence of only 12 days in jail! A great deal, right? Not if you look at the immigration consequences! Also, given the change of removability, he would be subject to “mandatory detention.” Therefore, I’m sure that he spent far more than 12 days in ICE custody awaiting this unfavorable result.
A federal judge’s ruling blocking a Trump administration order to end immigration benefits for nearly 300,000 foreign nationals is the latest in a series of judicial setbacks for the Trump administration’s immigration policies.
Federal District Judge Edward Chen late Wednesday blocked the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) order to end Temporary Protected Status (TPS) that allows citizens of Sudan, El Salvador, Haiti and Nicaragua to live and work in the United States, raising hopes for activists who have fought to make the program permanent.
The preliminary injunction granted by Chen, an appointee of President Obama, follows a trend of court reversals that have slowed the administration’s proposed overhaul of American immigration laws.
The administration’s first judicial setbacks on immigration came weeks into Trump’s presidency, as a New York court stopped in January of 2017 the application of the first version of a travel ban that blocked immigrants and visitors from seven majority-Muslim countries.
After a series of court battles, a third version of the travel ban — which includes non-Muslim countries North Korea and Venezuela — was eventually upheld by the Supreme Court in June of this year.
Trump’s termination of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival (DACA) program is still up in the air.
Because of court action, DHS is still receiving DACA renewal applications, which under Trump’s original order should have ended in October of 2017.
Both the travel ban and termination of DACA tied into Trump’s campaign promises on immigration, but TPS is a relatively obscure program that had been more or less summarily renewed by both Republican and Democratic administrations.
Under TPS, nationals of countries that undergo natural or man-made disasters are allowed to live and work in the United States until their home countries recover.
Chen’s decision only blocks the DHS orders while the lawsuit is in place, but he hinted in his decision that he’s unlikely to change his mind in the final ruling.
The decision came as a surprise, as TPS statute gives a wide berth to the secretary of Homeland Security to determine who receives its benefits.
DHS declined to comment on the case, but Department of Justice spokesman Devin O’Malley panned Chan’s decision, saying it “usurps the role of the executive branch in our constitutional order.”
Emi Maclean, an attorney with the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON), called it “an extraordinary decision.”
“This is the first time in the history of the TPS statute, a statute from 1990, that there has been a court order halt for any TPS determination,” said Maclean.
“It’s hugely important in what it says about the Trump administration making policies in the arena of immigration, and it’s obviously important for hundreds of thousands of people and their families and communities,” she added.
In his decision, Chen referred to the “animus” behind the administration’s TPS strategy, echoing district and appeals courts decisions on the travel ban, which used Trump’s campaign rhetoric as evidence of discriminatory intent.
Chan said he found “evidence that this may have been done in order to implement and justify a pre-ordained result desired by the White House.”
“Plaintiffs have also raised serious questions whether the actions taken by the Acting Secretary or Secretary was influenced by the White House and based on animus against non-white, non-European immigrants in violation of Equal Protection guaranteed by the Constitution,” he added.
Justice took a different view.
“The Justice Department completely rejects the notion that the White House or the Department of Homeland Security did anything improper. We will continue to fight for the integrity of our immigration laws and our national security,” said O’Malley.
Although the decision is only a temporary setback for the administration, TPS activists — who want to turn their TPS benefits into permanent residency permits — say they’re encouraged to raise the political profile of the program and its beneficiaries.
“While this decision helps us to at least breathe and be comfortable that our friends with TPS are not going to lose immigration status, it also motivates us to continue organizing and hoping that Congress will understand the importance of this,” Jose Palma, the Massachusetts coordinator for the National TPS Alliance, said in a call with reporters.
Immigration causes have been front and center in U.S. politics during the Trump administration.
But TPS has received relatively little attention.
“We were doing some lobbying and some Congresspeople didn’t know what TPS was,” said Palma. “We were asking for support for TPS and they were asking, ‘What is TPS? We don’t know,’”
And while TPS recipients had been included in previous attempts at comprehensive immigration reform, most bills that got traction in 2018 focused solely on Dreamers.
The exception was a bipartisan bill proposed by Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), which would have pulled immigrant visas from the diversity visa program to grant permanent residency to certain TPS holders, including some from Haiti.
That bill was shot down in January by Trump at a White House meeting with Graham and Durbin, where he allegedly called Haiti and some African countries “shithole countries.”
Still, TPS advocates say they’ve been able to raise awareness for the program since Haiti’s designation was terminated in November.
Palma pointed to seven legislative proposals in the current Congress that would either extend TPS benefits or give current beneficiaries permanent residency.
Another proposal from Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.) would transfer the responsibility of designation from DHS to Congress and restrict access of undocumented immigrants to TPS.
Palma added that the ultimate goal of many TPS recipients, particularly those who have been in the United States for long periods of time, is to achieve permanent residency.
“If we’re going to take the future of this campaign based on what we have achieved from there to now, I feel confident that it’s not going to be easy but it’s something we can definitely achieve,” he said.
Chen’s order covers only El Salvador, Haiti, Nicaragua and Sudan, which account for a majority of TPS holders.
The most numerically significant TPS countries not included in the lawsuit are Honduras, which has about 57,000 citizens in the program, and Nepal, which has about 9,000. They are not included because their terminations had not been announced at the time the lawsuit was filed.
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What is missing here is decisive, bipartisan Congressional action to resolve some of these issues in a way that the Trump White Nationalists can’t easily undo. Barring that, various aspects of the White Nationalist anti-immigrant agenda will continue to “bop along” through the lower Federal Courts: sometimes winning, but often losing.
While the GOP right is obviously feeling a sense of invincibility with the likely advent of Justice Kavanaugh, Trump can’t necessarily count on the Supremes to bail him out by intervening in controversial immigration cases. It would be better for the Court, and particularly for Chief Justice Roberts, presumptive Justice Kavanaugh, and the other “GOP Justices” to take on some less controversial issues — ones where they might actually achieve unanimity or near-unanimity first, and save the inevitable, partisan “5-4s” for a later date. That might mean that he fate of many of Trump’s most controversial immigration schemes could remain in the hands of the lower Federal Courts until sometime after October 2019.
Of course, that isn’t necessarily good news for those opposing the Trump agenda: Trump is quickly turning the lower Federal Courts into bastions of right-wing doctrinaire jurisprudence, just as the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society, and other right-leaning legal groups have mapped it out.
