Tag: Immigration Detention

HON. JEFFREY CHASE WITH “LAW YOU CAN USE” TO FORCE THIS ADMINISTRATION TO RECOGNIZE REFUGEES FROM THE NORTHERN TRIANGLE — Yes, Many Recently Arrived Refugees From The Northern Triangle Qualify As “Political” Refugees – Here’s How To Argue & Support Their Cases!

https://www.jeffreyschase.com/blog/2018/6/3/3rd-generation-gangs-and-political-opinion

3rd-Generation Gangs and Political Opinion

When Attorney General Jeff Sessions issues his decision in Matter of A-B- (the case he certified to himself to decide whether “being a victim of private criminal activity” can constitute a particular social group for asylum purposes),  it may negatively impact those asylum applicants who fear gang violence on account of their membership in a particular social group. Attorneys representing such claimants should consider whether their clients may alternatively claim a well-founded fear of persecution based on their political opinion under a “third-generation gang” theory, supported by country condition evidence.

In their article ‘Third Generation’ Gangs, Warfare in Central America, and Refugee Law’s Political Opinion Ground,1 Deborah Anker and Palmer Lawrence make a very important point: that “the Refugee Convention’s concept of political opinion incorporates ‘any opinion on any matter in which the machinery of the State, government, and policy may be engaged,’ or that of other persecutory agents where the state is unwilling or unable to provide protection” (citing Canada (Attorney General) v. Ward, [1993] 2 S.C.R. 689, 746 (Can.)).

Relying on this broad interpretation of political opinion, Anker and Lawrence next note that some military and law enforcement experts have concluded that the larger Central American gangs (including MS-13 and Mara 18) “have developed a degree of politicization, sophistication, and international reach to qualify them as ‘third generation gangs,’” which “function as de facto governments, controlling significant territory (competing with the state for power).”  Anker and Lawrence cite Lieutenant Colonel Howard L. Gray, Gangs and Transnational Criminals Threaten Central American Stability, 7 U.S. Army War College, Strategy Research Project (2009)); in documenting such claims, practitioners should also reference John P. Sullivan and Robert J. Bunker, “Third Generation Gang Studies: An Introduction,” 14-4 Journal of Gang Research 1 (Summer 2007), and “Third General Gangs Strategic Note No. 1: Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) 500 Man Commando Unit Planned for El Salvador,” Small Wars Journal, Sept. 10, 2016.  The last article quotes Douglas Farah, Visiting Senior Fellow, National Defense University Center for Complex Operations as stating that “The MS has strong political and military ambitions and now views itself as political/military rather than a gang…MS 13 now has troops, weapons, and a cause…efforts to form a joint force with the 18 is less likely but both sides are in discussion to at least have lines of communication open.”2

Under the definition of political opinion cited above, gangs such as MS-13 and Mara 18 are at least other persecutory agents from which the state is unable or unwilling to provide protection.  Such gangs might also be the de facto “state” itself in areas they control.  The idea that opinions or matters that engage such gangs might constitute political opinion finds support from the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), which has recently published Eligibility Guidelines for Assessing the International Protection Needs of Asylum Seekers from Guatemala (January 2018), El Salvador (March 2016), and Honduras (July 2016).  These can be found on the website Refworld.org. UNHCR has been described as “the entity that most resembles a supervisory body of the [1951] Convention.”3  Although U.S. courts and the BIA have been inconsistent in the deference accorded to its opinions, given the clearly stated intent of Congress in passing the Refugee Act of 1980 to conform U.S. asylum law to the language of the 1951 Convention (which was binding on the U.S. based on its ratification of the 1967 Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees), it has been argued that courts should defer more consistently to UNHCR’s interpretations of the Convention’s provisions.4

UNHCR’s 2016 Eligibility Guidelines for El Salvador includes an “Assessment of International Protection Needs of Asylum-seekers from El Salvador.”  The agency concludes that “depending on the particular circumstances of the case, UNHCR considers that persons perceived by a gang as contravening its rules or resisting its authority may be in need of international protection on the grounds of their (imputed) political opinion…”5  The UNHCR Guidelines report at p. 12 that “gangs are reported to exercise extraordinary levels of social control over the population of their territories.”  According to UNHCR, residents in such gang-controlled zones “are reportedly required to ‘look, listen and keep quiet’ (‘mirar, oir, callar’), and often face a plethora of gang-imposed restrictions on who they can talk with and what about, what time they must be inside their homes, where they can walk or go to school, who they can visit and who can visit them, what they can wear, and even, reportedly, the color of their hair.”

At p. 28 of its Guidelines, UNHCR states:

The ground of political opinion needs to reflect the reality of the specific geographical, historical, political, legal, judicial, and sociocultural context of the country of origin. In contexts such as that in El Salvador, expressing objections to the activities of gangs may be considered as amounting to an opinion that is critical of the methods and policies of those in control and, thus, constitute a “political opinion” within the meaning of the refugee definition. For example, individuals who resist being recruited by a gang, or who refuse to comply with demands made by the gangs, such as demands to pay extortion money, may be perceived to hold a political opinion.

Anker and Lawrence note in their conclusion that many denials of such claims “reflect adjudicators’ and courts’ lack of knowledge (often because they are not presented with evidence) of regarding the political nature and context of the present conflict in that region.”  This is an extremely important point. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit stated in Castro v. Holder6 that “a claim of political persecution cannot be evaluated in a vacuum….”  The court noted that it has “remanded cases in which the agency denied an application for asylum based on its failure to properly engage in the “complex and contextual factual inquiry” that such claims often require…Nevertheless, in this case, the agency has once again embraced an ‘impoverished view of what political opinions are, especially in a country where certain democratic rights have only a tenuous hold’” in denying the asylum claim “without any coherent examination of the surrounding political environment.”

Immigration judges dealing with seriously overloaded dockets, limited authority to grant continuances, and completion quotas will be hard pressed to engage in “complex and contextual factual inquiry.”  Practitioners should do their best to educate adjudicators through country condition evidence, expert testimony, memoranda of law, and through detailed direct examination of the asylum-seeker.

Practitioners should also rely on the BIA’s precedent decision in Matter of S-P-, 21 I&N Dec. 486 (BIA 1996), which held that imputed political opinion may satisfy the refugee definition (relying in part on the UNHCR Handbook and Procedures for Determining Refugee Status under the 1951 Convention; and that asylum applicants need not show conclusively why persecution may occur, but need only produce facts to establish that a reasonable person would fear that the danger arises on account of a protected ground.  The Board in S-P- also set forth five elements to consider in identifying motive, including “indications in the particular case that the abuse was directed toward modifying or punishing opinion rather than conduct (e.g., statements or actions by the perpetrators or abuse out of proportion to nonpolitical ends)” (Id. at 494).  With the support of the UNHCR Guidelines, a strong argument can be made that death threats or actual killings for offenses such as “looking mistrustfully at a gang member,” “wearing certain clothing.” or “accidentally turning up uninvited in a gang zone” constitute “statements or actions…out of proportion to nonpolitical ends” under the criteria found in Matter of S-P-.7

Where another motive exists for the feared harm, practitioners should argue that mixed motives will support a grant of asylum where one of the motives is tethered to a statutory ground.  See Matter of S-P-, supra at 495.  In Osorio v. INS, 18 F.3d 1017 (2d Cir. 1994), the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit responded to INS’ argument that a labor union leader could not establish a nexus to political opinion because his dispute with the Guatemalan government was economic in nature by finding “any attempt to unravel economic from political motives is untenable in this case.”  The court concluded that the petitioner’s union activities “imply a political opinion,” concluding that “the Government’s view of what constitutes a political opinion is too narrow.” Or, as Anker and Lawrence explain, “gangs can, for example, view a person who refuses extortion as an enemy opposing them and, at the same time, also want the funds.”

Copyright 2018 Jeffrey S. Chase.  All rights reserved.

Notes:

1.  14-10 Immigration Briefings 1 (October 2014).

2.  I first heard Farah speak at a country condition training on gang violence in the Northern Triangle held by USCIS for its asylum officers; at my invitation, Farah was a speaker on the same topic at the 2015 EOIR Training Conference for its immigration judges and BIA staff.

3.  American Courts and the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees: A Need for Harmony in the Face of a Refugee Crisis (Note), 131 HARVARD L.R. 1399 (March 2018).

4.  See, e.g., American Courts and the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, supra; Bassina Farbenblum, Executive Deference in U.S. Refugee Law: Internationalist Paths Through and Beyond Chevron,” 60 DUKE L.J. 1059 (2011); Joan Fitzpatrick, The International Dimension of U.S. Refugee Law, 15 BERKELEY J. INT’L L. 1 (1997).

5.  UNHCR, Eligibility Guidelines for Assessing the International Protection Needs of Asylum-Seekers from El Salvador (March 2016) at 30. http://www.refworld.org/cgi-bin/texis/vtx/rwmain?page=search&docid=56e706e94&skip=0&query=guidelines%20on%20&coi=SLV

6.  597 F.3d 93 (2d Cir. 2010).

7.  See UNHCR Guidelines on El Salvador at 29; Matter of S-P-, supra at 494.

 

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Jeffrey S. Chase is an immigration lawyer in New York City.  Jeffrey is a former Immigration Judge, senior legal advisor at the Board of Immigration Appeals, and volunteer staff attorney at Human Rights First.  He is a past recipient of AILA’s annual Pro Bono Award, and previously chaired AILA’s Asylum Reform Task Force.

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One of the best ways of putting an end to the Administration’s “false narrative” that refugees from the Northern Triangle aren’t “real” refugees is by 1) getting everyone competently represented; 2) providing documentary and expert proof of what’s “really” happening in the Northern Triangle (not what bogus and biased  Country Reports prepared by the Trump DOS might say); and 3) vigorously litigating these cases with the appropriate citations and legal arguments up to the U.S. Courts of Appeals where judges a) don’t owe their jobs to Jeff Sessions; and b) aren’t bound by Sessions’s legal misinterpretations and this Administration’s xenophobic policies.

Harm to the most vulnerable among us is harm to all. Join the New Due Process Army and fight for the legal rights of refugees!

PWS

05-04-18

 

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JEREMY STAHL @ SLATE: THE BIG UGLY – SEPARATION OF FAMILIES & DETENTION — TRUMP, SESSIONS, NIELSEN = LIES, IMMORALITY, ILLEGALITY!

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/06/trumps-child-separation-policy-is-a-moral-and-constitutional-abomination.html

JURISPRUDENCE

A Moral and Legal Abomination

The government has offered no substantive legal justification for the Trump administration’s policy of indefinitely separating children from their parents at the border.

By JEREMY STAHL

On Thursday, Sen. Dianne Feinstein proposed a law that would bar the intentional separation of asylum-seeking parents from their children when they cross the border. “It’s hard to conceive of a policy more horrific than intentionally separating children from their parents as a form of punishment,” the California Democrat said in a statement publicizing the move.

Affidavits from a February lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union show precisely what Feinstein describes. The Congolese asylum-seeker at the center of the case, known as “Ms. L,” described having her 6-year-old daughter taken away by the U.S. government without explanation. “She was taken into another room and then I heard her screaming: Don’t take me away from my mommy!” the woman wrote. In court filings, the government questioned whether Ms. L was in fact her child’s mother. The woman had her child returned only after the suit was filed and the government was made to conduct a DNA test that proved her parentage.

“[T]hese terrible policies call into question whether we are in violation of our own laws and our obligations under international law,” Feinstein said in proposing a law to stop the practice of splitting up families at the border. Feinstein is right: There seems to be no coherent legal justification for separating children from their parents, some of whom—like Ms. L—presented themselves at a port of entry as asylum-seekers and have not been charged with any crimes.

The rationale top Trump administration officials have stated publicly—that such a practice will deter undocumented immigrants from seeking asylum at the border—appears to be so patently unconstitutional that the government’s own lawyers have renounced it in court. If the broad outlines here sound familiar, that’s because the legal fight over the policy is shaping up as a replay of the battle over President Donald Trump’s disastrous first travel ban, which was quickly struck down as a blatant violation of due process rights.

A federal judge in San Diego is set to rule any day on the question of whether the government is lawlessly abducting immigrant children at the border. The ACLU is seeking a classwide preliminary injunction to put a stop to the practice. Based on a close reading of legal filings in the case, the public statements of policymakers, and a transcript from a critical hearing last month, it’s difficult to fathom how the judiciary could possibly rule in favor of the government.

In court proceedings last month, Judge Dana Sabraw indicated that the case, Ms. L v. ICE—filed by the ACLU on behalf of Ms. L and other asylum-seeking parents who have had their children taken away—should hinge on the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment. Under a series of Supreme Court precedents, family integrity has long been considered a “fundamental” due process right. Among other rulings, the ACLU’s lawsuit cited the Supreme Court’s opinion in 2000’s Troxel v. Granville, which stated that there is “a fundamental liberty interest of natural parents in the care, custody, and management of their child.” This precedent mandates both that the government show a compelling government interest in separating a child and parent—preventing child abuse, for instance—and that it is using the least restrictive means to fulfill that interest.

In the ACLU’s case, the government has not shown a lawful basis for its policy of indefinitely separating immigrant children from their parents at the border. In fact, government lawyers have denied the existence of any such policy at all. In response to Sabraw’s question about whether the government “has a practice, or perhaps even a policy, of separation of families as a deterrence mechanism,” Justice Department attorney Sarah B. Fabian asserted, “There is not such a policy.”

This claim directly contradicts the administration’s publicly stated reasoning. When asked by CNN in March 2017 about the possibility of separating children from their parents at the border, then­–Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly said, “I am considering, in order to deter more movement along this terribly dangerous network, I am considering exactly that.”

Per the New York Times, that policy was put on hold at the time because it was deemed too controversial. But in the last several months, as Trump has reportedly put intense pressure on his Cabinet to reverse an uptick in border crossings by undocumented immigrants, such a policy appears to have been put into place. Last month, the Washington Post reported that a pilot version of a program of separating families had occurred “in the Border Patrol’s El Paso sector, which includes New Mexico, between July and November 2017, and [the administration] said the number of families attempting to cross illegally plunged by 64 percent.” And in a pair of speeches last month, Attorney General Jeff Sessions seemed to herald the launch of a formal policy, calling it a “zero-tolerance” immigration measure. “If you don’t want your child separated, then don’t bring them across the border illegally,” Sessions said. “It’s not our fault that somebody does that.” Kelly, now Trump’s chief of staff, stated again last month in an interview with NPR that the purpose of “family separation” is deterrence. “The name of the game to a large degree … a big name of the game is deterrence,” he said.

The current secretary of Homeland Security, Kirstjen Nielsen, did not provide a direct answer when asked by NPR if “family separation at the border … [was] meant to act as a deterrent,” explaining that it’s very common for adults to get separated from their children when they commit crimes. In testimony before Congress in April, Nielsen said, “When we separate, we separate because the law tells us to, and that is in the interest of the child.”

In April, the Post reported that portions of the separation policy had been memorialized in a memo—a document that described the maneuver’s deterrent effect:

In a memorandum that outlines the proposal and was obtained by The Washington Post, officials say that threatening adults with criminal charges and prison time would be the “most effective” way to reverse the steadily rising number of attempted crossings. Most parents now caught crossing the border illegally with their children are quickly released to await civil deportation hearings.

“Such a policy would mean separating parents and children, because the parents would be placed in criminal detention, where children cannot be held,” the Post noted.

In a statement provided to the Post, Homeland Security spokeswoman Katie Waldman said, “DHS does not have a policy of separating families at the border for deterrence purposes.” Waldman did justify the splitting of families, though, by claiming it was necessary to combat child smuggling as well as to “protect” children from their own “nefarious” border-crossing parents. “DHS does … have a legal obligation to protect the best interests of the child whether that be from human smugglings, drug traffickers, or nefarious actors who knowingly break our immigration laws and put minor children at risk,” she said.

While the government denies the existence of a concrete policy, the numbers tell a different story. “Customs and Border Protection informed me that 658 children were taken from 638 parents during a 14-day period in May,” Feinstein reported on Thursday. This is a huge uptick from the six-month period between October and April, when the New York Times reported that “more than 700 children”—roughly 120 per month, as compared to 658 in 14 days—were reportedly separated “from adults claiming to be their parents.”

Let’s imagine that, based on all this evidence, Judge Sabraw—who was appointed by George W. Bush—determines there is in fact a new government policy of separating children and parents at the border. The court would then need to examine the government’s stated rationale for enacting such a rule. For the policy to pass constitutional muster, the government needs some legal justification for the indefinite separation of parents from children, even when the parents and children are undocumented immigrants. The Supreme Court held in 2000’s Zadvydas v. Davis that due process rights apply to undocumented immigrants. This holding suggests the government may not separate asylum-seekers from their children indefinitely and without cause. During last month’s arguments, it sounded like the judge believed the policy justification stated by Kelly—deterrence of illegal immigration—was clearly unconstitutional. “A policy of deterring families from entering the United States by separating them … would [that not be] a clear substantive due process violation?” Judge Sabraw asked of Fabian, the government attorney.

“If it was done without any otherwise authority to cause the separation, I think, we might be closer to that problem,” she acknowledged, claiming the government does have such authority stemming from the Immigration and Nationality Act. When Sabraw responded that the government still hadn’t presented a substantive due process rationale, Fabian said the government has a right to separate parents who are jailed for violating the law from their children while those parents are behind bars. The ACLU, in this lawsuit, is not contesting that fact. What it is contesting is the government’s apparent policy of refusing to return children to parents once they’ve served their time—generally around a month for misdemeanor illegal entry—and of taking children from parents who present themselves at a U.S. port of entry seeking asylum and have not been charged with any crime.

When confronted about the legality of these practices, the government has merely asserted they are legal without providing a substantive justification. “They can’t come up with a justification because the truth is that the only justification that makes sense is their perceived view of the deterrence value,” Lee Gelernt, the ACLU attorney litigating the case, told me.

Having reviewed the transcript from the hearing, and having read the government’s legal filings, Gelernt appears to be correct. At May’s hearing, the judge repeatedly questioned Fabian about whether a substantive due process violation had occurred. Fabian asserted it had not. The judge then made clear that the government had to offer an actual argument. “Simply saying there is detention and … therefore the family integrity gives way doesn’t address specifically what’s happening in this case,” Sabraw said. “Doesn’t there have to be some determination in order to comply with Fifth Amendment rights before separately detaining family members?”

Fabian, at this point, simply stated: “We don’t agree that that has to be made.” She then said that when a minor and parent are separated, the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act dictates that the minor be placed with another custodian. But she didn’t explain why the decision to indefinitely separate the minor from the parent would be made in the first place.

Later, the judge specifically addressed those situations in which a person has been convicted of an unlawful entry misdemeanor, had their child lawfully separated from them while they were incarcerated, and then been detained by immigration officials separately from their children while awaiting asylum. “Is there any process that [the Department of Health and Human Services] has or DHS has where after a person has served their time, efforts or a process exists to explore the lawful options of reuniting the parent with the child?” Sabraw asked. “There is not a process that would reunite them at that time because she is in ICE custody and remains unavailable,” Fabian responded. “Shouldn’t there be” some process for reuniting “after a person does their time?” the judge asked. Fabian then argued that it is in the best interests of children to remain separated from their detained parent because such a parent is “not going to be a suitable custodian.”

The notion that a child is better off without his parent not only flies in the face of logic, it also contradicts government policies that allow the detention of some undocumented asylum-seekers with their children. If such parents have historically been considered suitable custodians—and in some cases are still considered suitable custodians—how can other similarly situated parents not be considered suitable custodians?

The government ultimately leaned on the argument that DHS must make decisions in a hurry. “The goal is not to prolong that process but to get folks to the location where they can be housed long-term if that is what is going to happen,” Fabian argued. Again, this argument is illogical: It wouldn’t take any longer to decide to keep parents and children together than it would to decide to separate them. Sabraw also asked if DNA testing might help the government distinguish biological parents from child smugglers, as it had in the case of Ms. L. Fabian said she didn’t know if that was “a feasible option.”

The ACLU has asked the court to allow it to add more plaintiffs to Ms. L v. ICE, which was previously filed with two plaintiffs. One of the motions seeking class certification includes affidavits from several other immigrants who’ve had their children taken away at the border. Those affidavits offer more examples of what it looks like when kids as young as 18 months old are literally ripped away from their parents.

Testimony of Mr. U:

All I can remember is how much my son and I were both crying as they took him away. I do not recall anyone questioning whether I am really his biological father or whether I was a danger to him or abusive in any way. I even had my son’s birth certificate proving I am his father. … It has been six months since I last saw my son.

Testimony of Ms. G:

Shortly after arriving, I was told that I was going to be separated from my daughter. There were no doubts expressed that I was my daughter’s biological mother and I have a birth certificate to show our relationship. They did not say that I was a danger to my daughter or was abusive. … I know that [my children] are having a very hard time detained all by themselves without me. They are only six and four years old in a strange country and they need their parent. I hope I can be with my children very soon. I miss them and am scared for them.

Testimony of Ms. J. I. L.

That day, March 13, a woman came to pick up my kids. I was given only five minutes to say goodbye before J.S.P.L. and D.A.P.L. were torn from me. My babies started crying when they found out we were going to be separated. It breaks my heart to remember my youngest wail, “Why do I have to leave? Mami, I want to stay with you!” … In tears myself, I asked my boys to be brave, and I promised we would be together again soon. I begged the woman who took my children to keep them together so they could at least have each other. She promised she would, and she left with my boys. … I am particularly worried about my older son J.S.P.L. who was not doing well back in El Salvador after he saw MS gang members beat me and threaten me. He did not even want to leave my side to go to the restroom. … Both of my sons need their mother. I do not know if they are eating, sleeping, or even going to the restroom.

Testimony of Mirian:

The U.S. immigration officers then told me that they were taking my [18-month old] son from me. They said he would be going to one place and I would be going to another. I asked why the officers were separating my son from me. They did not provide any reason. … The immigration officers made me walk out with my son to a government vehicle and place my son in a car seat in the vehicle. My son was crying as I put him in the seat. I did not even have a chance to comfort my son, because the officers slammed the door shut as soon as he was in his seat. I was crying too. I cry even now when I think about that moment when the border officers took my son away.

Nielsen has said the government is acting as expeditiously as possible in such cases. “It’s not our intent to separate people one day longer than is necessary to prove that there is in fact a custodial relationship,” she told NPR last month. These affidavits call that claim into question.

Gelernt added that he has never seen anything this dramatic in his many years of working on immigration cases and doesn’t believe the public outrage has been nearly commensurate with the actions taking place.

“I just feel like the debate has become so abstract,” Gelernt told me. “If any policymaker could sit in that room for a day and watch these kids begging and screaming not to be taken away, I don’t know how they could continue this practice.” He says he fears the general population is already forgetting about the stakes of this case: “Roseanne will make another comment and the kids will be sitting there for another eight months, and no one will remember them.”

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Join the New Due Process Army. Fight the Trump/GOP Immigration Abomination!

PWS

06-04-18

Related posts:

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UNFORTUNATELY, AMERICA HAS A LONG HORRIBLE HISTORY OF INFLICTING CHILD ABUSE ON FAMILIES OF COLOR: Don’t Kid Yourself, That’s Exactly The Ugliness Of Our Past That Trump, Sessions, Nielsen, Miller & Their Restrictionist Apologists/Enablers Are Recreating Today! – The Only Real Issue Is How Many Of Us Will Be Complicit In Their Ugliness?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2018/05/31/barbaric-americas-cruel-history-of-separating-children-from-their-parents/?utm_term=.90aaf24758e8

DaNeen Brown writes for the Washington Post:

A mother unleashed a piercing scream as her baby was ripped from her arms during a slave auction. Even as a lash cut her back, she refused to put her baby down and climb atop an auction block.

The woman pleaded for God’s mercy, Henry Bibb, a former slave, recalled in an 1849 narrative that is part of “The Weeping Time” exhibit at the Smithsonian’s Museum of African American History and Culture, which documents the tragic history of children being separated from their parents during slavery. “But the child was torn from the arms of its mother amid the most heart-rending shrieks from the mother and child on the one hand, and the bitter oaths and cruel lashes from the tyrants on the other.”

Her mother was sold to the highest bidder.

Enslaved mothers and fathers lived with the constant fear that they or their children might be sold away.

“Night and day, you could hear men and women screaming … ma, pa, sister or brother … taken without any warning,” Susan Hamilton, another witness to a slave auction, recalled in a 1938 interview. “People was always dying from a broken heart.”

The Trump administration’s current crackdown on families that cross the border illegally has led to hundreds of children, some as young as 18 months, being separated from their parents. The parents are being sent to federal jails to face criminal prosecution while their children are being placed in shelters operated by the Department of Health and Human Services. Often, the children have no idea where their parents are or when they will see them again.

[Trump’s ‘zero tolerance’ at the border is causing child shelters to fill up fast]

The policy has generated outrage among Democrats and immigration advocates. And it has conjured memories of some of the ugliest chapters in American history.

“Official US policy,” tweeted the African American Research Collaborative over the weekend. “Until 1865, rip African American children from their parents. From 1870s to 1970s, rip Native American children from their parents. Now, rip children of immigrants and refugees from their parents.”

Henry Fernandez, co-founder of the collaborative and a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, said he drafted the tweet based on his research into several periods in U.S. history when government officials sanctioned the separation of children from their parents, including during slavery.

[Missouri v. Celia, a Slave: She killed the white master raping her, then claimed self-defense]

Another period of family cruelty, Fernandez said, began in the late 1800s and lasted well into the 1970s, when indigenous children across the country were forcibly separated from their families and sent to “Indian schools.” At the boarding schools, the children were required to assimilate. They were stripped of their language and culture. Often they were physically and sometimes sexually abused.

“In each case, we look back at the programs as barbaric,” Fernandez said. “History will similarly consider the Trump administration’s ripping children from their parents as an unconscionably evil government action.”

According to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, beginning in the late 1800s, thousands of American Indian children were sent to government-run or church-run boarding schools.

“Families were often forced to send their children to these schools, where they were forbidden to speak their Native languages,” according to the museum.

The exhibit includes a quote from Richard Henry Pratt, founder of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School: “In Indian civilization I am a Baptist,” Pratt wrote, “because I believe in immersing the Indian in our civilization and when we get them under, holding them there until they are thoroughly soaked.”


A teacher and students at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania in 1901. (Library of Congress)

At boarding schools, “children were forced to cut their hair and give up their traditional clothing,” according to the museum. “They had to give up their meaningful Native names and take English ones. They were not only taught to speak English, but were punished for speaking their own languages. Their own traditional religious practices were forcibly replaced with Christianity. They were taught that their cultures were inferior. Some teachers ridiculed and made fun of the students’ traditions. These lessons humiliated the students and taught them to be ashamed of being American Indian.”

“They tell us not to speak in Navajo language. You’re going to school. You’re supposed to only speak English. And it was true. They did practice that, and we got punished if you was caught speaking Navajo,” John Brown Jr., a Navajo who served in World War II as a code talker, using his Navajo language for tactical communications the Japanese could not decode, told the National Museum of the American Indian in a 2004 interview.

“When we got talking, ’cause we’re not allowed to talk our tribal language, and then me and my cousin, we get together and we talk in Indian, we always hush up when we see a teacher or faculty coming,” Charles Chibitty, a Comanche code talker, told the museum in 2004. “And then we always laughed and said, ‘I think they’re trying to make little white boys out of us.’ ”


Government Indian school on the Swinomish Reservation in La Conner, Wash., in 1907. (Library of Congress)

Until the end of the Civil War, it was common for slave owners to rip families apart by selling the children or the parents to other slave owners.

“Along with ongoing rape and the use of the whip to discipline human beings,” Fernandez said, “destroying families is one of the worst things done during slavery. The federal government maintained these evils through the fugitive slave laws and other rules which defined African Americans as property with which a slave owner could do whatever they wanted.”

Each of these U.S. policies, Fernandez said, begins with the assumption “that the idea of family is simply less important to people of color and that the people involved are less than human. To justify ripping families apart, the government must first engage in dehumanizing the targeted group, whether it is Native Americans, African Americans or immigrants from Central America fleeing murder, rape, extortion and kidnapping.”

Trump, he noted, dehumanized immigrant children by saying, “ ‘They look so innocent. They’re not innocent.’ ”

“There is no question these children are innocent,” Fernandez said, “but Trump associates them with the idea that these are not like your children and thus less than human.”

Slave narratives reveal the heart-wrenching stories of children taken from families.

According to the Maryland State Archives:  “For most slave children, the separation from their parents and the siblings was the hardest aspect of being sold. Slaves went to great lengths to keep their family together, but there was often limits to what they could do.”

[Hunting down runaway slaves: The cruel ads of Andrew Jackson and ‘the master class’]

The report includes a narrative from Charles Ball, who was enslaved as a child and remembered the day he was sold away from his mother.

“My poor mother, when she saw me leaving her for the last time, ran after me, took me down from the horse, clasped me in her arms, and wept loudly and bitterly over me,” Ball recalled. “My master seemed to pity her and endeavored to soothe her distress by telling her that he would be a good master to me, and that I should not want anything.”

Still, his mother would not let go. She walked beside the horse, begging the slave owner to buy her and the rest of her children.

“But whilst thus entreating him to save her and her family,” Ball recalled, “the slave-driver, who had first bought her, came running in pursuit of her with a raw hide in his hand. When he overtook us, he told her he was her master now and ordered her to give that little Negro to its owner and come back with him. My mother then turned to him and cried, ‘Oh, master, do not take me from my child!’ Without making any reply, he gave her two or three heavy blows on the shoulders with his raw hide, snatched me from her arms, handed me to my master, and seizing her by one arm, dragged her back towards the place of sale.”

After the end of the Civil War, thousands of former slaves looked for lost relatives and children who had been sold away from their families. They placed thousands of ads in newspapers.


Mary Bailey searches for her children, Nancy, Ben, Polly, Tempa and Isham Bailey. The ad ran in the Daily Dispatch newspaper in Richmond on Nov. 24, 1866.

Those ads are now being digitized in a project called “Last Seen: Finding Family After Slavery,” which is run by Villanova University’s graduate history program in collaboration with Philadelphia’s Mother Bethel AME Church.

[‘My mother was sold from me’: After slavery, the desperate search for loved ones in ‘last seen ads’]

The ads started appearing about 1863. By 1865, when the Civil War ended, they were coming out in streams, thousands of “Information Wanted” notices in black-owned newspapers across the country, seeking any help to find loved ones.

Mothers looked for their children; children looked for their mothers; fathers placed ads for lost sons; sisters looked for sisters; husbands sought their wives; wives tried to find their husbands.

The ads often gave detailed physical descriptions of the missing, names of former slave owners, locations where family members were last seen, and sometimes maps, tracing how many times they were sold from one owner to the next until they were so far from family members all they had to cling to were sketchy memories.

Elizabeth Williams, who had been sold twice since she last saw her children, placed a heart-wrenching ad in the Christian Recorder newspaper in Philadelphia:

“INFORMATION WANTED by a mother concerning her children,” Williams wrote March 17, 1866.

In four column inches, the mother summed up her life, hoping the details would help her find the children. She listed their names — Lydia, William, Allen and Parker — and explained in a few words that she last saw them when they were “formerly owned together” by a man named John Petty, who lived about six miles from Woodbury, Tenn.

She explained how her family was split apart when she was sold again and taken farther south into captivity.

“She has never seen the above-named children since,” the ad said. “Any information given concerning them, however, will be gratefully received by one whose love for her children survives the bitterness and hardships of many long years spent in slavery.”

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

Resist the toxic, inhumane, immoral, and illegal immigration policies of Trump, Sessions, Nielsen, Miller, and the rest of their White Nationalist Gang. “Just say no” to the “Make America Grotesque Again” Mob. Join the New Due Process Army and stand up for the Constitutional rights of everyone in America, regardless of color, creed, or status!

PWS

06-02-18

Related posts:

  1. MARK JOSEPH STERN @ SLATE: GONZO’S GONE! — Bigoted, Xenophobic AG Leaves Behind Disgraceful Record Of Intentional Cruelty, Vengeance, Hate, Lawlessness, & Incompetence That Will Haunt America For Many Years!
  2. Michael Paarlberg @ THE GUARDIAN: HOW WACKO & COUNTERPRODUCTIVE IS TRUMP/SESSIONS “GONZO” IMMIGRATION ENFORCEMENT? — Who Screws Their Friends & Productive Residents While Empowering Multinational Gangs? — “[MS-13] can’t really be described accurately as a single gang but is rather a network of gangs with little centralized authority and a franchised name, whose street value only increases with each press conference by Trump and Sessions. . . . There aren’t many beneficiaries of Trump’s immigration policy, but there’s at least one: MS-13 couldn’t have asked for a better president than Trump.”
  3. TRUMP TREATS KIDS AS HUMAN PAWNS IN UGLY POLITICAL CHESS GAME – Administration’s Continued Spreading Of False Narrative On Migration Makes Continuing Migration Outside of Legal System Inevitable!
  4. REPORT FROM FBA, AUSTIN: Read My Speech “JUSTICE BETRAYED: THE INTENTIONAL MISTREATMENT OF CENTRAL AMERICAN ASYLUM APPLICANTS BY THE EXECUTIVE OFFICE FOR IMMIGRATION REVIEW”

LAW YOU CAN USE: ALL-STAR PROFESSOR LINDSAY MUIR HARRIS TELLS US HOW TO STOP THE TRUMP, SESSIONS, NIELSEN PLAN FOR A “NEW AMERICAN GULAG:” “CONTEMPORARY FAMILY DETENTION AND LEGAL ADVOCACY” — 136 Harvard Latinx Law Review Vol. 21 — “This is our time to act and proudly join the brigade of “dirty immigration lawyers” to ensure protection and due process for the most vulnerable!”

FULL ARTICLE:

SSRN-id3179506

ABSTRACT:

Abstract

This essay explores the contemporary practice of detaining immigrant women and children — the vast majority of whom are fleeing violence in their home countries and seeking protection in the United States — and the response by a diverse coalition of legal advocates. In spite of heroic advocacy, both within and outside the detention centers from the courts to the media to the White House, family detention continues. By charting the evolution of family detention from the time the Obama Administration resurrected the practice in 2014 and responsive advocacy efforts, this essay maps the multiple levels at which sustained advocacy is needed to stem crises in legal representation and ultimately end family detention.

Due to a perfect storm of indigent detainees without a right to appointed counsel, remote detention centers, and under-resourced nonprofits, legal representation within immigration detention centers is scarce. While the Obama Administration largely ended the practice of family detention in 2009, the same administration started detaining immigrant families en masse just five years later. In response to the rise in numbers of child migrants seeking protection in the United States arriving both with and without their parents, and with the purported aim of deterring future flows, the Obama administration reinstituted the policy of detaining families. The Ad- ministration calls these detention centers “family residential centers,” while advocates use the term “baby jail.”

The response from the advocate community was swift and overwhelming. Lawyers and law students from all over the country traveled to the detention centers, in remote areas of New Mexico and later Texas, to meet the urgent need for representation of these asylum-seeking families. This essay calls for continued engagement by attorneys throughout the nation in filling the justice gap and providing representation to these asylum-seeking families and other detained immigrants.

The crisis in representation for detained immigrants is deepening. Given the success of intensive representation at the family detention centers discussed in this article, advocates are beginning to experiment with the same models in other locations. For example, at the Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, Georgia, the Southern Poverty Law Center, in conjunction with four other organizations, launched the Southeast Immigrant Freedom Initiative in 2017. This initiative enlists and trains lawyers to provide free legal representation to immigrants detained in the Southeast who are facing deportation proceedings. The American Immigration Lawyers Association and the American Immigration Council have partnered to create the Immigration Justice Campaign, where pro bono attorneys are trained and mentored when providing representation to detained immigrants in typically underserved locations. Given the expansion of the volunteer model of providing legal services to detained immigrants, opportunities will continue to arise for lawyers, law students, and others to engage in crisis lawyering and advocacy. This article provides the background to understand the government’s practice of detaining families, to the extent that it can be understood, and to emphasize a continuing need for legal services for this population.

The introduction explains the population of asylum seekers and the law and procedure governing their arrival, detention, and release into the United States. The essay then traces the evolution of the U.S. government’s most recent experiment in detaining families from the summer of 2014 to present. The next part outlines the access to counsel crisis for immigrant mothers and children in detention and highlights the difference that representation makes. The article concludes with a call to action to attorneys and non-attorney volunteers nationwide to commit and re-commit to providing services to detained immigrant families and individuals.

MY FAVORITE QUOTE:

We are in an era of incredible need for immigration legal services. That need is most acute within detention centers located outside of major metro- politan areas, including within the family detention centers.

Ultimately, neither the Trump nor the Obama administration can claim to have won or be “winning” with the policy of family detention. The vast majority of women and children still receive a positive result during their credible fear interviews, because they are indeed individuals fleeing persecu- tion under the Refugee Convention. It is a poor use of resources, then, to continue to detain this population. Instead, tax-payer dollars, government energy, and resources, should be invested in providing representation and case management for this population to ensure that they appear in court and follow all required procedures to pursue their claims for protection.125 In the current era of intense immigration enforcement, combined with the Trump Administration’s plans to increase detention bed space and Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Session’s clear attacks on asylum-seekers,126 family de- tention is, however, likely here to stay.

In light of this reality, crowdsourcing refugee rights, as Stephen Man- ning articulates, is more important than ever.127 It is heartening to see the expansion of the model of lawyering within immigration detention centers expand to centers in Georgia and Louisiana, where asylum grant rates are dismal, conditions of detention dire, with a historical extreme lack of access to counsel. Lawyers are needed to ensure that individuals can properly ac- cess their due process rights and to help the immigration court system run more smoothly.128

Lawyers, specialized in immigration or not, must arm themselves with the knowledge and tools to join this fight. Just as non-immigration lawyers quickly rose to a call to action in January at the airports,129 lawyers must again rise, and continue rising, to provide representation for families and individuals held in immigration detention. This is our time to act and proudly join the brigade of “dirty immigration lawyers” to ensure protection and due process for the most vulnerable.

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

Lindsay is “one of the best.” We were colleagues at Georgetown Law when I was an Adjunct Professor and she held the prestigious “CALS Fellowship” working with  Professors Andy Schoenholtz and Phil Schrag (of “Refugee Roulette fame”). Lindsay was a guest lecturer in my Refugee Law & Policy class, and I have since returned the favor at both George Mason Law and UDC Law where she now teaches with another of my good friends and superstars, Professor Kristina Campbell. Indeed, my friend Judge Dorothy Harbeck and I are “regulars” at their class and are in the process of planning another session this fall.

Lindsay and Kristina “talk the talk and walk the walk.” They appeared before me frequently at the Arlington Immigration Court with their clinical students.  The have also gone “on site” at some of the worst immigration detention facilities in the country to help refugees in need.

In a truly unbiased, merit-based, independent, Immigration Court system (of the future) they would be ideal judges at either the trial or appellate level. They possess exactly the types of amazing scholarship, expertise and “hands on” experience representing actual individual clients before our Immigration Courts that is sorely lacking in, and in my view has largely been systematically banished from, the 21st Century immigration judiciary, to the detriment of our Immigration Courts, Due Process, and the entire American justice system. That’s one reason why our Immigration Courts are functioning so poorly in basic areas like efficiency, deliberation, quality control, and fundamental fairness!

Some important “take aways” from this article:

  • Contrary to Administration propaganda and false narratives, most of the recent arrivals who have lawyers are found to have credible claims for protection under our laws.
  • Similarly, if given fair access to competent counsel and time to prepare and present their claims in a non-coercive setting to a truly unbiased decision-maker, I believe that majority would be granted asylum, withholding of removal, or protection under the Convention Against Torture (“CAT”).
  • This is the truth that Trump, Sessions, & Company don’t want revealed: most of the folks we are so cavalierly mistreating are, in fact, legitimate refugees, even under current legal rulings that have been intentionally and unfairly skewed against asylum applicants from Central America for years!
  • Even those who don’t currently fit the arcane legal categories for protection probably have a legitimate fear of harm or death upon return. They certainly are entitled to fully present and litigate their claims before being returned to life-threatening situations.
  • Finally, a better country, with better, wiser, more humane leaders, would devise ways of offering these individuals fleeing the Northern Triangle at least temporary protection, either here or in another stable country in this hemisphere, while doing something constructive to address the severe, festering, chronic human rights problems in the Northern Triangle that are sending us these refugees.
  • The “enforcement only” approach has failed over and over in the past and will continue to do so until we get better political leadership in the future.
  • In the meantime, join Lindsay, Kristina, and the other “Charter Members of the New Due Process Army” in resisting the evil, immoral, and illegal policies of the Trump Administration.
  • Due Process Forever! Harm to the most vulnerable among us is harm to all!

PWS

06-02-18

Related posts:

  1. TRUMP TREATS KIDS AS HUMAN PAWNS IN UGLY POLITICAL CHESS GAME – Administration’s Continued Spreading Of False Narrative On Migration Makes Continuing Migration Outside of Legal System Inevitable!
  2. JOURNAL ON MIGRATION & HUMAN SOCIETY (“JMHS”) PUBLISHES MY TRIBUTE TO JUAN OSUNA (1963-2017): “An Overview and Critique of US Immigration and Asylum Policies in the Trump Era”
  3. GONZO’S WORLD: THIS IS WHY HE STAYS: UNDERNEATH ALL THE “TRUMP NOISE” SESSIONS IS METHODICALLY ERADICATING DUE PROCESS, PERVERTING THE LAW, & TURNING ONE OF THE LARGEST FEDERAL COURT SYSTEMS INTO A “KILLING FLOOR” TARGETING OUR MOST VULNERABLE & DESERVING REFUGEES! — “[Sessions] is dumbing down the judges and treating them like assembly-line workers whose only job is to stamp out final orders of removal.”
  4. COMPLICITY HAS COSTS:  Article III Judges’ Association Apparently Worries That Trump, Barr, GOP Toadies Starting To “Treat Them Like Immigration Judges” — Do They Fear Descent To Status Of Mere Refugees, Immigrants, “Dreamers,” Unaccompanied Children, Or Others Treated As “Less Than Persons” By Trump, 5th Cir., 11th Cir., 9th Cir., & The Supremes’ “J.R. Five?” 

“DUH” OF THE DAY: Official Policies Of Child Abuse, The “New American Gulag,” & Routinely Denying Constitutional Due Process Fail To Stem Refugee Tide On Southern Border!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/illegal-border-crossings-remained-high-in-may-despite-trumps-crackdown/2018/06/01/aab543ae-65a9-11e8-a768-ed043e33f1dc_story.html?utm_term=.3943d1d60e43

Nick Miroff reports for WashPost:

The number of migrants attempting to cross illegally into the United States remained high last month, according to administration officials and Border Patrol agents, an early indication that “zero tolerance” measures separating parents from their children and President Trump’s deployment of National Guard troops have not had an immediate deterrent effect.

The Department of Homeland Security is expected to publish its closely watched monthly arrest totals in coming days, and Trump administration officials are bracing for a new eruption from the president. He has treated the statistics as a gauge for the success of his hard-line immigration policies, and when border arrests fell to historic lows in the months after his inauguration last year, Trump touted the decrease as a personal triumph.

Since then, migration trends have reversed. In March and again in April, border arrests exceeded 50,000, the highest monthly totals of Trump’s presidency, sending him into fits of rage, aides say. Trump unloaded on DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen during a Cabinet meeting May 9, scorching her for nearly 30 minutes over the spike in illegal crossings, while demanding she “close” the border.

The Trump administration is preparing to renew its push for an $18 billion border wall plan that would also tighten asylum procedures and overhaul other laws Trump officials say are encouraging illegal behavior. Trump has threatened to shut down the government this fall if Democrats don’t provide the funds.

But with midterm elections approaching and the president preparing to campaign on his border crackdown, Nielsen and other Homeland Security officials do not appear to be satisfying his strict enforcement targets. May’s arrest totals are expected to be at least as high as the previous two months, administration officials and Border Patrol agents said.

Large groups of Central American migrants have been taken into custody in the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas in recent weeks, according to Border Patrol agents, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to discuss operations. During one 24-hour span last month, 434 migrants were processed at the Border Patrol station in McAllen, agents said.

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and President Trump have had a contentious relationship as illegal border crossings increase. (Patrick Martin/The Washington Post)

“The numbers have been very high,” said one agent assigned to the Rio Grande Valley, the nation’s busiest corridor for illegal migration. “It’s to the point that we have had to bring in buses to come out and load these folks up, or send four of five vans at a time.”

 

 

Another agent said so many migrants were apprehended in the Rio Grande Valley last month that many were diverted to other sections of the border for processing. The Justice Department has reassigned additional prosecutors to the border region to increase the number of migrants it charges with federal crimes, but one veteran border agent said it was “too early to tell” if the tougher enforcement measures were giving pause to migrants thinking of making the journey from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala.

“It’s going to take longer for the message to get back to those countries,” the agent said.

On Friday, Homeland Security officials would not say whether the tougher enforcement measures were meeting their goals. They said the May border arrest totals were not ready for publication, and they would not confirm whether the figures have been sent to the White House.

“The bottom line is Congress needs to act and close loopholes that serve as a tremendous pull factor for illegal immigration,” said Tyler Houlton, a DHS spokesman. “The Trump administration is restoring the rule of law by increasing prosecutions of illegal border crossers.”

According to a Trump adviser, the president was warned this spring that illegal border crossings were likely to increase. Trump said at the time he would not be satisfied with any such surge and everything needed to be done to block it. That led to the decision to deploy the National Guard.

The number of illegal border crossings “is going to go higher and higher yet,” said the adviser. “You’re going to see a line that goes up all summer long.”

Trump has not been briefed on the May arrest numbers yet, two advisers said.

In a statement late Friday, Trump senior adviser Stephen Miller blamed Democrats for blocking the president’s immigration overhaul.

“The illegal migrant crisis is the exclusive product of Democrats’ shameless refusal to close catch-and-release loopholes that cartels exploit to smuggle illegal aliens into the United States at great cost in taxpayer dollars, jobs and, too often, lives,” Miller said.

Weak border enforcement remains the biggest incentive to illegal migration, according to Miller. “We must end catch-and-release by reforming our asylum laws, and establishing expedited removal, to stop the smuggling and defend the nation,” he said.

As in recent years, many of those taken into custody last month were teenagers or parents traveling with children, and the administration has triggered broad condemnation for separating more families with its push to prosecute anyone who crosses illegally.

More than 10,800 migrant children were in federal custody as of May 31, according to the Department of Health and Human Services, up 21 percent since the end of April. The agency’s shelters are 95 percent full, and HHS officials say they are preparing to add thousands of additional beds to cope with the increase.

A Border Patrol agent in South Texas said the family separation measures were not being applied as broadly as assumed. Some parents who face federal charges are apart from their children for only several hours, then released and assigned a court date, the agent said.

“To us, that’s still ‘catch-and-
release,’ ” the agent said. “People are going to continue to come.”

Arrests along the Mexican border peaked at more than 1.6 million in 2000, then fell sharply during the Obama administration. During the government’s past fiscal year that ended in September, U.S. agents made 303,916 arrests, the lowest total since 1971.

Trump’s fixation is driven, in part, by a view that border security is paramount to his most fervent supporters and that immigration is a winning issue for Republican candidates in November’s congressional elections.

“I’m very proud to say that we’re way down in the people coming across the border,” Trump said in January. “We have fewer people trying to come across, because they know it’s not going to happen.”

The arrest numbers began shooting upward soon after that, from 36,682 in February to 50,296 in March. The yearly total for 2018 is on pace to approach or exceed 400,000, a level more consistent with migration patterns of the past five years, DHS statistics show.

[Trump ‘zero tolerance’ at the border is causing child shelters to fill up fast]

During a visit Thursday to the Nogales border crossing in southern Arizona, Nielsen called the increase in illegal migration a crisis and said Homeland Security officials were working to “end this lawlessness.”

The country’s borders are being violated “by criminals, by smugglers and by thousands of people who have absolutely no respect for our laws,” she said.

“This is changing, it will change, and we will do all that we can to change this,” Nielsen added, emphasizing that the “zero-tolerance” approach announced in April will be applied as aggressively as possible.

“If you come here illegally, whether you’re single, whether you have a family, whether you’re a smuggler or whether you’re a trafficker, you’ve broken the law, so we’re prosecuting,” she said.

On Friday, Democratic members of the House Judiciary Committee sent a letter to Nielsen and Attorney General Jeff Sessions demanding information on the administration’s enforcement efforts, including the number of children who have been separated from their parents and whether there are formal procedures to reunite them.

Border arrests typically rise during spring months, when seasonal labor demands increase. Farms across the Midwest are becoming desperate for workers, with the U.S. unemployment rate at the lowest level since 2000. Lawmakers from both parties have told Nielsen that worker shortages are squeezing an array of industries in their states, and the DHS said last week that it will issue 15,000 seasonal guest-worker visas.

But border agents said much of the increase this spring seems to be driven by the same groups — families and teenagers traveling alone — who have been straining Homeland Security capacity since the 2014 crisis that left Border Patrol stations overflowing.

Photos of recent mass arrests provided by one agent show migrants of all ages walking through willow groves along the Rio Grande or lined up in federal custody along the river levees, waiting to board government buses.

Josh Dawsey contributed to this report.

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

No surprises here. “Toldja so” back when Trump unwisely declared “Victory at Sea” after a few months of reduced border apprehensions. Since Trump is proudly ignorant of history, he apparently didn’t study what happened to Bushie II after he declared “Victory in Iraq” or his “Heck of Job, Brownie” moment. Nor does he have any idea of the actual dynamics driving human migration. That’s the problem with policies driven by racism, bias, xenophobia, and White Nationalism.

Also, trying to rewrite the Constitution and international protection law, as Trump, Sessions, Miller, Cotton, and the rest of the White Nationalist Gang would dearly like to do, to deny established legal rights won’t work either. In fact, it would make things 10X worse.

The laws aren’t the problem!  The problem is the people charged with implementing them.

We can diminish ourselves as a nation, (and in fact, we are diminishing under Trump) but it won’t stop human migration!

 

PWS

06-02-18

Related posts:

  1. TRUMP TREATS KIDS AS HUMAN PAWNS IN UGLY POLITICAL CHESS GAME – Administration’s Continued Spreading Of False Narrative On Migration Makes Continuing Migration Outside of Legal System Inevitable!
  2. VICTORY DANCE! — ICE’S HOMAN SAYS CLIMATE OF FEAR HAS STEMMED BORDER CROSSINGS & PROVES UNRESTRAINED, ARBITRARY IMMIGRATION ENFORCEMENT WORKS! — “There’s no population that’s off the table,” he said. “If you’re in the country illegally, we’re looking for you and we’re looking to apprehend you.” — America Won’t Be Truly Safe Until The Last Cook, Gardner, Construction Worker, Nanny, Janitor, Tree Cutter, Mechanic, Handyman, Carpenter, Home Health Aide, Computer Programmer, Healthcare Worker, Lettuce Picker, Cow Milker, Landscaper, Lawnmower, Bricklayer, Roofer, Window Washer, Waiter, Sandwich Artist, Teacher, Minister, Coach, Student, Parent, Clerk, Fisherman, Farmer, Maid, Chicken Plucker, Meat Processor, Etc., Without Docs Is Removed And US Citizens Take Over All These Jobs!
  3. REPORT FROM FBA, AUSTIN: Read My Speech “JUSTICE BETRAYED: THE INTENTIONAL MISTREATMENT OF CENTRAL AMERICAN ASYLUM APPLICANTS BY THE EXECUTIVE OFFICE FOR IMMIGRATION REVIEW”
  4. HAPPY NEW YEAR FROM COURTSIDE! — I Take A Look Forward @ 2019’s Big Immigration Stories

A DESPERATE CRY FOR HELP FROM DEEP WITHIN OUR BROKEN U.S. IMMIGRATION COURT SYSTEM: “Yesterday as I left court after an individual hearing for a 237(a)(1)(H) waiver, my client told me she felt like she was not a human being because of the way she was treated during the trial.” – JOIN THE “NEW DUE PROCESS ARMY” & STOP THE DEHUMANIZATION OF INDIVIDUALS SEEKING DUE PROCESS!

Here’s what a practicing immigration attorney has to say about what’s really happening in our broken U.S. Immigration Court system:

I was at the FBA conference in Denver and your keynote speech made me feel like someone actually understands the tragedies that are unfolding in our immigration court system, and is trying to do something about it. Each time I go into court I try to look at the system with new eyes and refreshed hope that today’s trial will be different. Each time I leave court I am reminded of how blatantly biased the judges can be, how the government attorneys are given special treatment, how our clients are badgered and treated inhumanely, and how the “dirty immigration lawyers” such as myself are treated with disdain. I know that I will be ok, but worry to the point of losing sleep over how my clients are treated. Yesterday as I left court after an individual hearing for a 237(a)(1)(H) waiver, my client told me she felt like she was not a human being because of the way she was treated during the trial. I consider myself a part of the due process army and want to know what else I can do to advocate for serious changes, including a complete overhaul, of the EOIR system. I thank you for your time and look forward to hearing from you.

Here’s my response:

You can:
1) Take cases to the Article III Courts. They still have no idea of how Due Process is being mocked every day in the Immigration Courts. They need to be forced to accept responsibility for this travesty which they have the power to end.
2) Make a record of how the IJs are ignoring facts of record and applicable law because they have prejudged cases.
3) Get out the vote for candidates who put Dreamer relief, an independent  Immigration Court, and an end to unnecessary and expensive immigration detention at the top of their legislative “to do” list. (Something that the Dems conspicuously failed to do when Obama was elected in 2008).
4) Actively support candidates for state and local office who are pledged to resist the divisive and racially motivated immigration policies of this Administration to the extent possible under the law.
5) Support efforts for universal representation.

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

It’s both telling and disturbing that most of us who understand the system’s failings and are committed to fixing them are now outside the system — where our voices actually can be heard, our views are taken seriously, and the truth about the national disgrace taking place in our U.S. Immigration Courts under Trump & Sessions can be spoken. 

Yes, there are many conscientious, courageous, and hard-working Immigration Judges still in the system. But, they have been “muzzled, degraded, and disrespected.” Instead, those Immigration Judges who are biased against respondents, particularly asylum seekers, willing to cut corners, and oblivious to what Constitutional Due Process actually means for individuals are being empowered and encouraged by Sessions.

How is it fair or reasonable to have a so-called “court system” where conscientious attorneys like this are “losing sleep” over the unfair, degrading, and dehumanizing treatment that they are receiving at the hands of supposed Federal Judges in what purports to be a Federal Court system? Totally outrageous!

Attorneys — particularly those appearing pro bono and “low bono” — are the undisputed heroes of this system, the only ones standing between the Immigration Courts and unimaginable chaos and injustice at the hands of Jeff Sessions. Indeed, notwithstanding this reprehensible mistreatment, private attorneys are leading the battle for true judicial independence in the Immigration Courts over the objections of the DOJ and EOIR. What does that tell you about this system?

A “real” Attorney General, who took his oath of office seriously, would slow down this entire farce and direct retraining of every judge in the system in what “guaranteeing fairness and Due Process for all,” carrying out the generous standards for asylum seekers set forth by the Supreme Court in Cardoza-Fonseca, the BIA in Mogharrabi, and actually reflected in the current regulations really mean in practice!

If Due Process, asylum law, withholding law, and the CAT were properly and fairly applied, the vast majority of applicants and recent arrivals could be competently represented and granted some type of protection either by the DHS or in “short block” Immigration Court hearings. That would both fulfill the law and help reduce the backlog pressure on Immigration Courts, as well as reducing the number of needless petitions for review being filed in the Courts of Appeals to correct basic errors committed by the BIA and the Immigration Courts!

Instead, we are stuck with a “scofflaw” Attorney General who intends to establish and reinforce “worst practices.” It will take a concerted effort on the part of the New Due Process Army to halt the Trump Administration’s attack on human decency and our constitutional rights in the Immigration Court system!

Harm to the most vulnerable among us is harm to all!

PWS

05-31-18

Related posts:

  1. NY TIMES: Trump Mocks & Dehumanizes Vulnerable Refugees & His Administration Claims It’s OK To Return Them to Honduras; BUT The Facts Say The Opposite: Honduras Is An Armed Conflict Zone Where Gangs Exercise Quasi-Governmental Control & Those Who Resist Are Severely Punished, Often Maimed, Tortured Or Killed!
  2. COMPLICITY HAS COSTS:  Article III Judges’ Association Apparently Worries That Trump, Barr, GOP Toadies Starting To “Treat Them Like Immigration Judges” — Do They Fear Descent To Status Of Mere Refugees, Immigrants, “Dreamers,” Unaccompanied Children, Or Others Treated As “Less Than Persons” By Trump, 5th Cir., 11th Cir., 9th Cir., & The Supremes’ “J.R. Five?” 
  3. REPORT # 2 FROM FBA, AUSTIN: Read My Speech “APPELLATE LITIGATION IN TODAY’S BROKEN AND BIASED IMMIGRATION COURT SYSTEM: FOUR STEPS TO A WINNING COUNTERATTACK BY THE RELENTLESS ‘NEW DUE PROCESS ARMY’”
  4. HOW “AMERICA’S KILLER COURTS” PROMOTE “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” — HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH: TRUMP & HIS WHITE NATIONALIST SYCOPHANTS & TOADIES TOUT LAWLESS POLICIES THAT VIOLATE LEGAL OBLIGATIONS & HELP KILL, RAPE, TORTURE THOSE RETURNED TO EL SALVADOR — Supremes & Article III Judiciary Complicit In Gross Human Rights Violations! 

WHILE SESSIONS “BLOWS OFF” VIEWS OF “OUR GANG” OF RETIRED US IJs & BIA JUDGES, ARTICLE III (“REAL’) COURTS (& EVEN “OIL”) ARE PAYING ATTENTION – J.C. Andre of Sidley Austin Reports That 10th Circuit Has Remanded Matumona v. Sessions On The Issue Of Access To Counsel!

Judge Schmidt –

 

Thank you so much for the flattering post about our work with you all in recent months.

 

On that front, we have two updates for you all.

 

First, please see attached the as-filed versions of all three briefs filed last week in Cantarero-Lagos v. Sessions, CA5 No. 18-60115 (the petitioner’s brief, our amicus brief, and the nonprofit immigration legal services’ amicus brief).  As some of you will see, there were a couple of you whom we could not include as signatories to our brief because we received your joinders too late.  Our apologies for not being able to work those of you in by name, but we had a hard filing deadline of 10 p.m. PST on May 23.  Rest assured, however, that the helpful comments you gave us along the way are reflected in the brief.

 

Second, in case some of you were not yet aware, all of our work two months ago in Matumona v. Sessions, CA10 No. 18-09500, paid off.  On the government’s concession, the Tenth Circuit last week remanded the case to the BIA.  A copy of the remand order also is attached.

 

It’s been a pleasure and an honor to work with you guys so much over the last two months.

 

Hope everyone had a great Memorial Day weekend,

 

jc

 

JEAN-CLAUDE ANDRÉ

SIDLEY AUSTIN LLP
+1 213 896 6007
JCAndre@Sidley.com

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

Here’s a copy of the remand order:

2018-05-22_Order Remanding

And, here’s a link to Hon. Jeffrey Chase’s previous blog on the Matumona Amicus effort:

https://wp.me/p8eeJm-2ko

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

The pleasure is all ours, J.C.!  Thanks for everything that you and Katelyn Rowe have done for us and to Sidley Austin for agreeing to undertake this important pro bono project!

Always interesting how folks sometimes give your views more attention after you’re gone.

Sessions is setting a course for disaster in the Article III Courts. If he keeps on interfering with the judicial process and listening to only one side (as he has done all his life), DHS & DOJ are likely to get themselves so tied up in litigation that nobody will be deported as the Immigration Court system disintegrates and the Article IIIs move in to clean up the mess.

My current Immigration Law & Policy students at Georgetown Law seemed surprised to learn that there is a so-called “court system” in America where the Chief Prosecutor appoints the judges, sets the rules, and can change the result of any decision that he doesn’t like.  Sure sounds like something out of a Kafka novel or the Country Report on a Third World dictatorship.

PWS

05-30-18

 

Related posts:

  1. THE LATEST FROM THE HON. JEFFREY CHASE: “Amicus Brief Filed in 10th Cir. Petition for Remotely-Detained Asylum Seeker” — PLUS: A Link To The Actual Brief! — MATUMONA V. SESSIONS, 10th Cir.
  2. HON. JEFFREY CHASE: In-Depth Analysis Of “Our Gang’s” Amicus Brief In Matter of W-Y-C- & H-O-B-
  3. ANOTHER AMICUS OPPORTUNITY FOR RETIRED IMMIGRATION JUDGES AND BIA APPELLATE JUDGES – Join My Friend & Colleague Judge Eliza Klein, Pro Bono Counsel Sidley Austin, The Heartland Alliance, & Me In A 10th Circuit Case Involving Access To Counsel In Immigration Detention (There Isn’t Any, For All Practical Purposes)
  4. THE FURTHER EXPLOITS OF “OUR GANG” – 5th Circuit Grants Oral Argument In Matter of W-Y-C- & H-O-B- (requiring asylum applicants to clearly delineate the PSG before the IJ)!

THE GIBSON REPORT – 05-29-18 – COMPLIED BY ELIZABETH GIBSON, ESQUIRE, NY LEGAL ASSISTANCE GROUP — Highlighting Significant, Yet Unfortunately Unpublished, BIA Holding That 2 Weeks Was An Inadequate Continuance To Seek an Attorney!

 

THE GIBSON REPORT 05-29-18

TOP UPDATES

 

TRAC Finds ICE Deportations Dropped by Almost Half Over Past Five Years

TRAC released a report on ICE deportations, updated through October 2017, finding that deportation levels have dropped by almost half since October 2012. TRAC also provided updated web tools on ICE deportation data including a breakdown on convictions and number of ICE deportations. AILA Doc. No. 18052231

 

BIA Holds Two-Week Continuance Not Sufficient Time to Find an Attorney

Unpublished BIA decision finds that IJ denied respondent’s right to counsel by providing only two weeks to find an attorney. Special thanks to IRAC. (Matter of Santos-Gijon, 6/22/17) AILA Doc. No. 18052337

 

Neglect and Abuse of Unaccompanied Immigrant Children by U.S. Customs and Border Protection

ACLU: Documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union featured in a new report released today show the pervasive abuse and neglect of unaccompanied immigrant children detained by U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

 

She came to the US for a better life. Moments after arrival, she was killed

CNN: Claudia Patricia Gomez Gonzalez traveled 1,500 miles to the United States, hoping to find a job and a better future. Shortly after she set foot in Texas, a Border Patrol agent shot and killed her.

 

Border Patrol union calls Trump’s National Guard deployment ‘colossal waste’

LA Times: A month after President Trump called for sending National Guard troops to the U.S.-Mexico border, the head of the national Border Patrol union called the deployment “a colossal waste of resources.” “We have seen no benefit,” said Brandon Judd, president of the union that represents 15,000 agents, the National Border Patrol Council.

 

Swept up in the Sweep: The Impact of Gang Allegations on Immigrant New Yorkers

NYIC: Through an extensive field study, the report shows how Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), with other federal agencies and law enforcement, uses arbitrary methods to profile immigrant youth of color to allege gang affiliation.

 

Deportation by Any Means Necessary: How Immigration Officials Are Labeling Immigrant Youth as Gang Members

ILRC: This report details findings from a national survey of legal practitioners concerning the increased use of gang allegations against young immigrants as a means of driving up deportation numbers, at the encouragement of the Trump administration.

 

Pretermitting Gang PSGs

AILA Listserv: It appears that, at least in some jurisdictions, DHS is moving to pretermit gang PSGs for asylum before merits hearing. Looks like we must also be prepared to respond to these arguments going forward. See useful gang PSG resources attached.

 

Civil rights groups slam DeVos for saying schools can report undocumented students

WaPo: Civil rights groups slammed Education Secretary Betsy DeVos for saying Tuesday that schools can decide whether to report undocumented students to immigration enforcement officials, saying her statements conflict with the law and could raise fears among immigrant students.

 

DHS Prosecutes Over 600 Parents in Two-Week Span and Seizes their Children

AIC: Following implementation of a “zero tolerance” policy, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced that 638 parents who crossed with children had been prosecuted in just a 13-day span this month.

 

New RFE Policy

From the USCIS District Director’s meeting: Starting immediately if you are issued an USCIS RFE that you need to submit to 26 Federal Plaza they will be issuing a notice giving you a time to hand deliver it.  The dates will always be on Fridays and the notice will state that you can come in anytime between 7am-12pm on that date to hand the RFE response in at the indicated window.  There will be no interview – you will just hand in the response and get your copy stamped.  They are moving away from mail in RFE responses because of too many problems with the post office.

 

U-visa Categories (attached)

ASISTA: The AAO seems to have paid attention to our amicus arguments on U visa crimes as “categories” in their decision in the case underlying our amicus, see attached redacted decision and the amicus.  We will need to keep pushing this framework, however, so please continue using the arguments in the amicus when arguing crime categories.  We do not, for instance, agree that the DV category contemplates only the facts involving relationships; many crimes are DV depending on the facts of the crimes, not just the relationships.  See attached.

 

Stay Requests

HerJustice: On this topic, I learned last year that ICE ERO (NYC) wasn’t even accepting applications for stay of removal if the applicant didn’t have a current passport—is this still the case?

LSNYC: As I understand it, it’s always been ICE’s policy that the applicant for a stay (I-246) must have a current passport. Really, the Officers are all over the place when it comes to stays.  Some say they are not accepting stays, some say so long as the client has something pending (appeal, MTR, U/VAWA/T, etc) no removal will be effectuated and that no stay is needed until removal is imminent.

Sanctuary: Our office recently filed a stay of removal, and in the alternative request for deferred action, for a client with a removal order from 2009 whose son has hemophilia. ERO accepted the stay without her passport. ERO said that they would make a decision on within 3 months, and if not, she is to return for another check-in at the end of June.

 

Immigrant Legal Aid Group Withdraws Request for Montgomery County Funding with Carve Out

Bethesda Mag: A Washington, D.C., nonprofit set to receive about $374,000 in Montgomery County funds to provide deportation defense to detained immigrants has withdrawn its request for the money in response to an updated list of criminal convictions that would bar certain immigrants from receiving legal aid.

 

Anti-Immigrant Extremist Nominated to Run Refugee Office at State Department

HRF: In response to the nomination of Ronald Mortensen to serve as Assistant Secretary of State for Population, Refugees and Migration, the senior-most American diplomat representing the United States in matters relating to the most vulnerable populations in the world, Human Rights First’s Jennifer Quigley issued the following statement: “Mortensen has spent the past several years working at an anti-immigrant hate group, spewing vile, extremist views that have no relation to reality.”

 

Immigration dominating GOP candidates’ TV ads in House contests across the country

USA Today: House Republican candidates are blanketing the airwaves with TV ads embracing a hard line on immigration — a dramatic shift from the last midterm elections in 2014 when immigration was not on the GOP’s political radar, according to a USA TODAY analysis of data from Kantar Media.

 

U.S. Immigration Courts, Long Crowded, Are Now Overwhelmed

The Wall Street Journal reports on the U.S. immigration court system’s backlog increasing 25 percent since President Trump took office, with insights on the situation from AILA National Secretary Jeremy McKinney. AILA Doc. No. 18052342

 

This Salvadoran Woman Is At The Center Of The Attorney General’s Asylum Crackdown

NPR: Attorney General Jeff Sessions is stirring panic in immigrant communities by moving to limit who can get asylum in the United States. Perhaps no one is more alarmed than one Salvadoran woman living in the Carolinas…Now Sessions has personally intervened in her case, questioning whether she and other crime victims deserve protection and a path to American citizenship.

 

LITIGATION/CASELAW/RULES/MEMOS

 

SIJS Family Court Appellate Case

2d dept remanded and ordered a new judge be assigned after a Nassau County Fam Court Judge dismissed a mother’s petition for guardianship and refused to set the motion for special findings, without any hearing. They also made note of the judge’s wildly inappropriate remarks.

 

Supreme Court Delays Further in Deciding Certiorari Petition in Case Involving Abortion by Undocumented Teen

ImmProf: [May 21], the Supreme Court granted certiorari in four cases and also issued orders (denied cert, etc.) in a number of cases.  The press room, as it has been for so many weeks, was buzzing about the possible disposition of the U.S. government’s cert petition in Azar v. Garza, a case involving the undocumented pregnant teenager. The government wants the Supreme Court to vacate the D.C. Circuit decision that cleared the way for her to get an abortion.  The Court did not act on the case this morning.

 

Detainees in Stewart Detention Center File Suit Challenging Forced Labor Practices

Plaintiffs filed a class action suit against private prison company CoreCivic challenging its practice of depriving detained immigrants of basic necessities so they are forced to work at well below minimum wage to purchase items at the prison commissary. (Barrientos v. CoreCivic, 4/17/18) AILA Doc. No. 18052163

 

DOJ Announces Airlines Staffing Executive Sentenced for Immigration Fraud

DOJ announced that Eleno Quinteros, Jr., the former vice president of operations for two airline mechanic staffing companies, was sentenced today to 12 months in prison for making false statements in support of legal permanent resident petitions for dozens of the companies’ mechanics. AILA Doc. No. 18052162

 

DOJ Settles Immigration-Related Discrimination Claim Against University of California, San Diego

Posted 5/25/2018

DOJ announced a settlement agreement with the University of California, San Diego. The settlement resolved whether the University’s Resource Management and Planning Vice Chancellor Area discriminated against workers in violation of the INA when verifying their continued authorization to work.

AILA Doc. No. 18052532

 

Documents Relating to Los Angeles’s Challenge to Immigration Enforcement Conditions on Federal Law Enforcement Grants

The court issued an order granting the government’s request to expedite the case. The case will be calendared for September 2018. (Los Angeles v. Sessions, 5/15/18) AILA Doc. No. 18041638

 

BIA Holds Two-Week Continuance Not Sufficient Time to Find an Attorney

Unpublished BIA decision finds that IJ denied respondent’s right to counsel by providing only two weeks to find an attorney. Special thanks to IRAC. (Matter of Santos-Gijon, 6/22/17) AILA Doc. No. 18052337

 

BIA Holds Child Abuse Ground of Deportability Does Not Apply to Attempt Crimes

Unpublished BIA decision holds that attempt to endanger the welfare of a child under N.Y.P.L. 260.10 is not a crime of child abuse because INA §237(a)(2)(E)(i) only applies to completed crimes. Special thanks to IRAC. (Matter of B-Q-, 6/20/17) AILA Doc. No. 18052432

 

BIA Finds Wisconsin Prostitution Statute Is Categorically an Aggravated Felony

The BIA reinstated removal proceedings, after finding that INA §101(a)(43)(K)(i) encompassed offenses related to the operation of a business that involves engaged in, or agreeing or offering to engage in, sexual conduct for anything of value. Matter of Ding, 27 I&N Dec. 295 (BIA 2018) AILA Doc. No. 18052164

 

BIA Holds Possession of Drug Paraphernalia in Arizona Is Not a Controlled Substance Offense

Unpublished BIA decision holds possession of drug paraphernalia under Ariz. Rev. Stat. 13-3415(A) is not a controlled substance offense because the state schedule is overbroad and the identity of the drug is not an element of the offense. Special thanks to IRAC. (Matter of Lopez, 6/16/17) AILA Doc. No. 18052160

 

BIA Reverses Discretionary Denial of Adjustment Application

Unpublished BIA decision reverses discretionary denial of adjustment application where respondent had five U.S. citizen children, was active in church, and last DUI offense was more than eight years prior. Special thanks to IRAC. (Matter of Rodriguez, 6/15/17) AILA Doc. No. 18052230

 

BIA Limits Application of Firm Resettlement Bar

Unpublished BIA decision holds that the firm resettlement bar does not apply to asylum applicants who fear persecution in the country of alleged resettlement. Special thanks to IRAC. (Matter of L-K-U-, 6/16/17) AILA Doc. No. 18052332

 

CA4 Upholds CBP Search of Smartphone Seized While Defendant Was Exiting the United States

The court found it was reasonable for the CBP officers who conducted a month-long forensic analysis of the defendant’s smartphone to rely on precedent allowing warrantless border searches of digital devices based on at least reasonable suspicion. (U.S. v. Kolsuz, 5/9/18, amended 5/18/18) AILA Doc. No. 18052165

 

White House Releases Fact Sheet on MS-13

The White House released a purported fact sheet on MS-13, in which it refers to these individuals as “animals.” AILA Doc. No. 18052232

 

USCIS Issues Policy Guidance on CSPA

USCIS issued policy guidance in the USCIS Policy Manual regarding the Child Status Protection Act (CSPA). This guidance is controlling and supersedes any prior guidance on the topic. Comments are due by 6/6/18. AILA Doc. No. 18052339

 

USCIS Notice on the Termination of the Designation of Nepal for Temporary Protected Status

USCIS notice on the termination of the designation of Nepal for TPS on 6/24/19. Holders of TPS from Nepal who wish to maintain their TPS and receive an EAD valid through 6/24/19 must re-register for TPS in accordance with the procedures set forth in the notice. (83 FR 23705, 5/22/18) AILA Doc. No. 18052236

 

EOIR Released Percentage of Detained Cases Completed Within Six Months

EOIR released statistics on the percentage of detained cases completed within six months. As of 3/31/18, 89 percent of initial case completions were completed in less than six months. AILA Doc. No. 18052237

 

ICE Announces 24-Month Imprisonment for ICE Agent Impersonator

ICE announced that Matthew Ryan Johnston was sentenced to 24 months in federal prison after possessing multiple destructive devices and using fake ICE badges and uniforms to falsely represent himself as an ICE agent to unsuspecting members of the public. AILA Doc. No. 18052561

 

ACTIONS

 

 

RESOURCES

 

 

EVENTS

 

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The second item on Elizabeth’s List is well worth a look. Although the BIA has stayed away from addressing in a precedent the length and number of continuances required to meet minimum standards of Due Process, this unpublished BIA decision finds that a two-week continuance to locate counsel was inadequate.

That certainly would have been the case in Arlington when I was there, particularly given the unnecessary pressure being put on pro bono counsel by the Obama’s Administration’s policies of “ADR” and “gonzo scheduling” of so-called “priority cases.”

This decision also confirms and reinforces what many of us retired U.S. Immigraton Judges and BIA Appellate Immigration Judges have been saying all along: by pushing the court system to move more cases, faster, and with limited continuances, Immigration Judges are effectively being encouraged to deny Due Process to respondents who do have a right to be represented at no expense to the Government. That right clearly includes reasonable access to, and a resonable opportunity to locate, pro bono counsel. Clearly that didn’t happen here. I suspect it’s also not happening in thousands of other cases — particularly detained cases — across the country.

Instead of protecting Due Process and encouraging “best practices” by U.S. Immigration Judges, Sessions and EOIR Management are feverishly working to instill “worst practices” in the Immigration Courts. The BIA won’t catch all of them, particularly in the absence of helpful precedents. Indeed, and quite remarkably, even this modest declaration of minimum Due Process produced a “split” BIA panel with Judge Roger Pauley signing the order, joined by Judge Edward Grant, but with Judge Ana Mann “dissenting without opinion.”

All of this is likely to mean 1) more denials of Due Process in Immigration Court; 2) more lives ruined; and 3) more “otherwise avoidable” remands from the Courts of Appeals.

Just like mother always said:  “Haste Makes Waste!”

PWS

05-30-18

Related posts:

  1. THE GIBSON REPORT — 05-13-19 — Compiled By Elizabeth Gibson, Esquire, NY Legal Assistance Group
  2. BIA’S “GONZO HIRING PLAN” & OTHER TALES FROM THE TRUMP REGIME TWILIGHT ZONE – The Gibson Report – 01-20-21 — Compiled By Elizabeth Gibson, Esquire, NY Legal Assistance Group
  3. HALLOWEEN HORROR STORY: Opaque & Biased Politicized Judicial Hiring Denies Migrants The Fair & Impartial Adjudication To Which They Are Constitutionally Entitled – Given The Generous Legal Standards, A Worldwide Refugee Crisis, & Asylum Officers’ Positive Findings In Most Cases, Asylum Seekers Should Be Winning The Vast Majority Of Immigration Court Cases — Instead, They Are Being “Railroaded” By A Biased System & Complicit Article III Courts!
  4. PURE BS 💩 — TRUMP’S “BIG LIE” ABOUT MIGRANT APPEARANCES FOR HEARINGS BOGUS AS $3 BILL 🤮👎🏻— Replacing DHS/EOIR With Rational, Qualified, Fact-Based Governance & Real Judiciary Could Bring Appearance Rate Close To 100%!  — Two Items From ImmigrationProf Blog!

CATHERINE RAMPELL @ WASHPOST: “Cruelty and unconstitutionality: the platform of today’s Republican Party.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/republicans-inhumanity-at-the-border-reveals-their-grand-scam/2018/05/28/b3b18d9c-62b0-11e8-a768-ed043e33f1dc_story.html?utm_term=.38485dbb9b85

Republicans’ inhumanity at the border reveals their grand scam

By Catherine Rampell

Since October, more than 700 minor children have been separated from their parents at the border. More than 100 have been under 4 years old.

Some, like an 18-month-old Honduran boy torn from his mother in February, are just toddlers.

“The immigration officers made me walk out with my son to a government vehicle and place my son in a car seat in the vehicle. My son was crying as I put him in the seat,” the boy’s mother said in a sworn statement. “I did not even have a chance to try to comfort my son, because the officers slammed the door shut as soon as he was in his seat. I was crying, too. I cry even now when I think about that moment when the border officers took my son away.”

This mom was not trying to “sneak across” the border, by the way. She had crossed an international bridge into Brownsville, Tex., and presented herself to immigration authorities to request asylum from political violence.

Instead of receiving refuge, she lost her child. It was months before they were reunited.

Such stories are enraging and shameful. They also put the lie to sacred principles that Republican politicians have long claimed to stand for, chiefly: family values and rule of law.

For decades, Republicans have championed traditional family values and having parents, rather than the state, take responsibility for their children.

This Republican administration’s inhumane treatment of helpless children — who are ripped from their mothers’ arms, detained in human warehouses and drop-kicked into “foster care or whatever” — reveals such rhetoric to have been a scam.

The Trump administration’s goal is to inflict pain upon these families. Cruelty is not an unfortunate, unintended consequence of White House immigration policy; it is the objective.

After all, if forced separations are sufficiently agonizing, fewer families will try to come here, no matter how dangerous their home countries are. Administration members have argued as much.

Last year, then-Homeland Security secretary John F. Kelly acknowledged he was considering separating children from their parents at the border “to deter” potential border-crossers. Again this month, he said “a big name of the game is deterrence.”

This vile and unpopular policy has been roundly condemned, including by prominent conservatives. So President Trump did what he always does when facing backlash for using children (remember the “dreamers” and children’s health insurance?) as a bargaining chip: Blame the Dems.

“Put pressure on the Democrats to end the horrible law that separates children from there [sic] parents once they cross the Border into the U.S.,” Trump tweeted Saturday.

Got that? Our law-and-order-obsessed president is merely enforcing an evil Democratic law!

There is, however, no statute — supported by Democrats or otherwise — that requires immigrant families to be torn apart.

The most cogent possible point Trump could have been making is one that other Republicans have made: that crossing the border unlawfully is a crime. If you prosecute every border crossing criminally — as Trump’s administration says it now does, even for asylum seekers — that means parents will go to jail.

And as Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen put it, when parents go to jail, whether for unlawful entry or another crime, that requires separating them from their children.

Which is true, to a point; prisons generally can’t house children.

But here’s the part Trump apologists neglect to mention: The government is keeping immigrant families forcibly separated even after criminal proceedings are over and the parents get released from jail.

Take the case of a Brazilian family that also crossed the border to seek asylum.

The mother, named in court documents as “Ms. C.,” was prosecuted for entering the country illegally in August 2017, a misdemeanor for which she spent 25 days in jail. Her 14-year-old son was sent to a facility in Chicago.

After she was released, she passed a “credible fear interview” and began the process of applying for asylum. She was sent first to an immigration detention center, then released to a nonprofit shelter in El Paso. This shelter is willing to take in her son.

But the government still refuses to release him. She has been out of detention for five weeks and still hasn’t been allowed to see her boy.

“What they’re really basically saying is that these people don’t have a due-process right to remain with their child,” says American Civil Liberties Union Immigrants’ Rights Project Deputy Director Lee Gelernt, who is representing Ms. C. and other asylum-seeking immigrants challenging Trump’s family separation policy. The Constitution, of course, guarantees due process for all, regardless of immigration status.

Cruelty and unconstitutionality: the platform of today’s Republican Party.

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

Yup.

PWS

05-30-18

 

 

Related posts:

  1. CATHERINE RAMPELL @ WASHPOST: Trump & His GOP’s Cowardly “War On Children” Should Outrage Every American! — Join The “New Due Process Army” & Fight To Save Humanity!
  2. HON. JEFFREY CHASE: Speaking Out Against The “Notable Minority” Of U.S. Immigration Judges Who Demonstrated Bias Against Women & Asylum Seekers – “Think about that: some federally appointed immigration judges cheered the fact that women who had been violently raped and beaten in their country can no longer find refuge here, and will be sent back to face more violence, and possibly death. Will there be any consequences for their actions? Were the many outstanding immigration judges who have been proud to grant such cases in the past, who were saddened and sickened by this decision, able to openly jeer or weep or curse this decision? Or would that have been viewed as dangerous?”
  3. KAREN TUMULTY @ WASHPOST: Trump Is The Ugliest American – Amazingly, He Keeps Getting Uglier!
  4. SPRINT TO THE BOTTOM: Trump Administration Trashes Refugees & Human Rights In A Despicable Return To “1939-Style Fascism Lite!” — America’s Rancid Conduct & Negative Leadership Presages Another Worldwide Refugee Tragedy — This Time The Blood Will Be Directly On Our Hands!

GONZO’S WORLD: Ann Telnaes: Where Cruelty, Immorality, & Intellectual Dishonesty Rule!

Opinions

The evil of separating children from their parents

By Ann Telnaes May 29 at 6:13 PM

Just because Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that every illegal immigrant crossing the border would be prosecuted (resulting in parents being separated from their children), that doesn’t mean it’s morally defensible.

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

Yup! Captures the essence of the man.

 

PWS

05-30-18

Related posts:

  1. NATION OF CHILD ABUSERS: WHILE MANY RIGHT WING APOLOGISTS (ALONG WITH ALAN DERSHOWITZ) PAN NAZI COMPARISON, ACTUAL HOLOCAUST CHILD SURVIVOR YOKA VERDONER UNDERSTANDS THE PARALLELS! — Child Abuse Is Child Abuse —Evil Is Evil — Damage Is Irreparable!
  2. EUGENE ROBINSON @ WASHPOST: RACIST, WHITE NATIONALIST ADMINISTRATION DEHUMANIZES MIGRANTS OF COLOR — “All of this is happening because Trump has no respect for law or due process and no sense of empathy. He was reportedly upset this spring by a rise in border crossings by asylum-seekers, who by law had to be allowed to stay pending resolution of their claims. He and Sessions seized upon the pretext — for which they have not provided evidence — that children were being “trafficked” into the country for some reason.”
  3. KAREN TUMULTY @ WASHPOST: Trump Is The Ugliest American – Amazingly, He Keeps Getting Uglier!
  4. COMPLICITY HAS COSTS:  Article III Judges’ Association Apparently Worries That Trump, Barr, GOP Toadies Starting To “Treat Them Like Immigration Judges” — Do They Fear Descent To Status Of Mere Refugees, Immigrants, “Dreamers,” Unaccompanied Children, Or Others Treated As “Less Than Persons” By Trump, 5th Cir., 11th Cir., 9th Cir., & The Supremes’ “J.R. Five?” 

REIGN OF LIES: Trump, Sessions, & Nielsen Continue Lie About Separating Migrant Children – NO, It Isn’t Required By Law!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-is-blaming-democrats-for-separating-migrant-families-at-the-border-heres-why-this-isnt-a-surprise/2018/05/27/c07810d8-61d3-11e8-a69c-b944de66d9e7_story.html

reports for the Washington Post:

President Trump’s attempt to blame Democrats for separating migrant families at the border is renewing a political uproar over immigration, an issue that has challenged Trump throughout his presidency and threatens to grow more heated as he imposes more restrictions to stem the flow of illegal immigration.

In one of several misleading tweets during the holiday weekend, Trump pushed Democrats to change a “horrible law” that the president said mandated separating children from parents who enter the country illegally. But there is no law specifically requiring the government to take such action, and it’s also the policies of his own administration that have caused the family separation that advocacy groups and Democrats say is a crisis.

In April, more than 50,000 migrants were apprehended or otherwise deemed “inadmissible,” and administration officials have made clear that children will be separated from parents who enter the country illegally and are detained. The surge in illegal border crossings is expected to continue as the economy improves and warmer weather arrives.

 “I keep imagining somebody taking my kids from me. My kids are 2 and 4 years old, and that’s the age of some of the children that have been separated from their parents at the border,” said Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Tex.), who is helping to organize a Thursday rally in San Antonio to highlight the issue. “When a lot of people hear the story, they get a similar reaction. They can’t imagine why this would be a standard government practice.”

Trump’s deflection offers a familiar playbook, critics of the administration’s policies say. In their view, Trump’s most recent comments are strategically similar to tactics he used when he ended the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program and then insisted on hard-line measures in a bill to permanently protect “dreamers.”

“He used DACA kids as a bargaining chip, and it didn’t work,” said Kevin Appleby, the senior director of international migration policy at the Center for Migration Studies, a nonpartisan think tank. “So now he’s using vulnerable Central American families for his nativist agenda. It’s shameless.”

. . . .

“The law does not require this inhumane and immoral action – DHS could stop it today. We do not need a law. This is a punt. They literally just ran this bad-faith play with DACA,” Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) tweeted Sunday. “They are going to use the suffering of children as political leverage for the wall, and we must refuse to participate, because if this kind of hostage taking is ever successful it will never stop.”

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Read the complete article at the link.

No, protections for refugees and children aren’t “loopholes!” They are important protections for those who have a right to seek a fair determination of their applications for refuge in the United States under our laws!

The statement that families can be “deported together” is simply more proof that Trump, Nielsen, and Sessions have already prejudged these cases. Although many are in fact denied, many more would be granted, possibly a majority, if individuals were given fair access to counsel, as the law contemplates, and the Government were actually required to correctly apply asylum and protection laws. Instead, for years the government has been getting away with politically influenced, unduly restrictive legal constructions and also coercing individuals with detention, entering bogus “in absentia orders” against them, or otherwise hustling them through the system without Due Process. Most of these tactics are directed specifically against those seeking protection from the Northern Triangle of Central America — one of the most dangerous regions in  the world.

Join the New Due Process Army and stand up against the dishonest scofflaw public officials administering Trump’s sick immigration policies.

PWS

05-28-18

Related posts:

  1. TRUMP TREATS KIDS AS HUMAN PAWNS IN UGLY POLITICAL CHESS GAME – Administration’s Continued Spreading Of False Narrative On Migration Makes Continuing Migration Outside of Legal System Inevitable!
  2. NATION OF CHILD ABUSERS: WHILE MANY RIGHT WING APOLOGISTS (ALONG WITH ALAN DERSHOWITZ) PAN NAZI COMPARISON, ACTUAL HOLOCAUST CHILD SURVIVOR YOKA VERDONER UNDERSTANDS THE PARALLELS! — Child Abuse Is Child Abuse —Evil Is Evil — Damage Is Irreparable!
  3. HOW “AMERICA’S KILLER COURTS” PROMOTE “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” — HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH: TRUMP & HIS WHITE NATIONALIST SYCOPHANTS & TOADIES TOUT LAWLESS POLICIES THAT VIOLATE LEGAL OBLIGATIONS & HELP KILL, RAPE, TORTURE THOSE RETURNED TO EL SALVADOR — Supremes & Article III Judiciary Complicit In Gross Human Rights Violations! 
  4. GROSS NATIONAL DISGRACE: “A Fucking Disaster That Is Designed to Fail”: How Trump Wrecked America’s Immigration Courts — Fernanda Echavarri Reports For Mother Jones On How Our Failed Justice System Daily Abuses The Most Vulnerable While Feckless Legislators &   Smugly Complicit Article III Judges Look On & Ignore The Human Carnage They Are Enabling — “ Two days after US immigration officials sent her to Tijuana, she was raped.”

THE HILL: Nolan On Who Really Benefits From Cal’s “Sanctuary Cities” Laws

http://thehill.com/opinion/immigration/389600-the-people-really-benefiting-from-californias-sanctuary-laws

Family Pictures

Nolan writes:

. . . .

But are California’s sanctuary laws really protecting them from being deported?

According to a report from the Migration Policy Institute (MPI), Trump’s immigration enforcement efforts have been hurt by pushback from California and cities such as Chicago, New York, and Boston that have sanctuary policies.

Sanctuary policies prevent local police departments from turning inmates over to ICE when they are released from custody, which has resulted in returning some dangerous criminal aliens to the community.

ICE had to change its enforcement operations from taking custody of aliens at police stations to looking for undocumented aliens in the community, which resulted in arresting approximately 40,000 noncriminal aliens in FY 2017.

The main obstacle to deporting removeable aliens is the immigration court backlog crisis.

According to TRAC Immigration, as of the end of April 2017, when the backlog was 585,930 cases, most aliens were waiting around 670 days for a hearing.

At a panel discussion last year on the backlog, Immigration Judge Larry Burman said:

“I cannot give you a merits hearing on my docket unless I take another case off. My docket is full through 2020, and I was instructed by my assistant chief immigration judge not to set any cases past 2020.”

From April 2017 to April 2018, the backlog for the immigration courts in California increased by almost 20 percent to 692,298 cases.

These lengthy wait times make it necessary to release newly arrested aliens until hearings can be scheduled for them, which gives them time to disappear into the shadows.

Conclusion.

Apparently, the main beneficiaries of California’s sanctuary policies are deportable aliens in police custody who otherwise would be turned over to ICE when they are released and unscrupulous employers who exploit undocumented immigrant workers.

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Go on over to The Hill to read Nolan’s complete article! this article also was featured on ImmigrationProf Blog.

PWS

05-28-18

Related posts:

  1. NEW FROM THE HILL: N. RAPPAPORT SAYS “NO” TO MOST OF CAL SB 54, BUT WOULD LIKE TO FIND A COMPROMISE LEGISLATIVE SOLUTON TO HELP DREAMERS AND OTHER UNDOCUMENTED RESIDENTS!
  2. THE HILL: N. RAPPAPORT SAYS THAT EXPEDITED REMOVAL IS THE ANSWER TO IMMIGRATION COURT BACKLOGS – I DISAGREE!
  3. THE HILL: NOLAN HAS SOME IDEAS ON HOW TO DEAL WITH FAMILIES AT THE BORDER!
  4. THE HILL: NOLAN COMMENTS ON RISING IMMIGRATION COURT BACKLOG!

MASHA GESSEN IN THE NEW YORKER: THE GREAT MORAL DILEMMA OF THE TRUMP ERA: Total Resistance Or “Damage Control?” — “In our case, stepping outside the lie means refusing—stubbornly, consistently, incrementally—to lend credence to the opposite of politics, the opposite of diplomacy, and the opposite of sanity. That would require thinking, reading, and speaking critically: not treating an outburst as though it were politics, a tantrum as though it were diplomacy, and a delusion as though it were aspiration.”

https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/in-the-trump-era-we-are-losing-the-ability-to-distinguish-reality-from-vacuum

Gessen writes:

The Trump Presidency is an age of unanswerable questions and lose-lose propositions. How is one to maintain sanity, decency, and a measure of moral courage? In a pair of thoughtful essays in Slate, Dahlia Lithwick tackles the problems of dealing with the everyday nature of our current political disaster and of deciding on the best way to try to save the country from Donald Trump: by staying close to him, or by walking away. The latter is a question for members of the Administration and for congressional Republicans. “This is the time,” Lithwick writes, to “think about what combination of exit and voice can make a meaningful difference if a real crisis were to happen. Or rather, when the real crisis happens—if we are not there already.”

This is not a new question. Many people will continue posing it to themselves and others with ever more frustrating results, because it cannot be answered. Is the possibility of moderating the damage done by this Administration worth sacrificing one’s moral principles? Should one protect one’s individual integrity by sacrificing the chance to moderate damage done by this Administration? We can’t possibly know. We don’t have the information necessary to evaluate these options in the short term. Did H. R. McMaster, during his tenure as Trump’s national-security adviser, prevent an unknown number of disasters? If he did, was it worth whatever psychic and intellectual price he paid? It’s likely that he himself doesn’t know. For those who have so far decided to stay, whether in the Administration or in the Republican Party, small daily sacrifices of personal integrity become part of their sunk cost in the project of staying in; these people inevitably grow more committed and less critical. The landscape keeps shifting, the stakes keep changing, and the crises keep mounting.

The overstimulation of the age of Trump, meanwhile, makes us lose track of time and whatever small sense humans normally have of themselves in history. We forget what happened a month ago. If we look away for a day, we miss news that seems momentous to others—only to be forgotten, too, in a week. Living in a shared reality with our fellow-citizens is an endless triathlon of reading, talking, and panicking. It creates the worst possible frame of mind for answering vexing moral questions, especially ones that require a choice between two desperately unsatisfying options.

Thinking morally about the Trump era requires a different temporal frame. It requires a look at the present through the prism of the future. There will come a time after Trump, and we need to consider how we will enter it. What are we going to take with us into that time—what kind of politics, language, and culture? How will we recover from years of policy (if you can call it that) being made by tweet? How will we reclaim simple and essential words? Most important, how will we restart a political conversation? Political discourse was in crisis before Trump—no wonder Americans of all stripes have become accustomed to using the words “politics” and “political” to denote substance-free transactions in the electoral arena. But, under Trump, it is nearing complete destruction.

Consider the last month’s worth of conversation about Trump and North Korea. Forgetting the President’s “little rocket man” remarks and building on months of denial that Trump had brought the world as close to the brink of nuclear annihilation as it has ever been, politicians, bureaucrats, policy wonks, and journalists have been speaking as though Trump were engaged in actual negotiations with Kim Jong Un. Some deliriously joined him in contemplating the prospect of a Nobel Peace Prize. The voices of a few experts who dared say that nothing had been accomplished yet and expressed doubt that the summit would actually occur were quickly drowned out. The ritual of analysis and anticipation that normally accrues to diplomacy was accruing instead to Trump’s flailing gestures, in the same way that the normal rituals of punditry have accrued to Trump’s tweets, harangues, and inconsistencies, all of which are the opposite of politics. On Friday, the Times’ morning podcast, “The Daily,” offered up a thoughtful analysis of Trump’s summit-cancelling missive, which was written in the language of a sulking, lovelorn seventh grader. But no sooner was the podcast posted than Trump told the media that he might hold the summit after all.

We are losing the habit, and perhaps the capability, of distinguishing reality from vacuum. This is disorienting in the present and disastrous for the future—it is the one factor that will make post-Trumpian recovery, when it comes, so difficult. We must pose a bigger question than whether Administration members or congressional Republicans should stay or go, for it’s not only Trump’s appointees or fellow party members who are implicated in the daily insults and damage to our perceptions. We should be asking what each one of us can do to assert a fact-based reality at any given time. The great French thinker and activist Simone Weil had a prescription that she wrote down in her journal in 1933: “Never react to an evil in such a way as to augment it.” A few days later, she added, “Refuse to be an accomplice. Don’t lie—don’t keep your eyes shut.”

Throughout the twentieth century, writers and thinkers who faced reality-destroying regimes kept producing similar recipes. “Live not by lies,” the Russian dissident novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote. The Czech dissident playwright and future President Václav Havel pondered the predicament of living, unquestioningly, “inside the lie”—and the uncanny power of stepping outside of it. In our case, stepping outside the lie means refusing—stubbornly, consistently, incrementally—to lend credence to the opposite of politics, the opposite of diplomacy, and the opposite of sanity. That would require thinking, reading, and speaking critically: not treating an outburst as though it were politics, a tantrum as though it were diplomacy, and a delusion as though it were aspiration. The good news is that this is not an entirely impossible task.

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Any individual with a sense of morality, decency, values, and a commitment to fundamental fairness, and Constitutional Due Process can’t afford to “sit this one out.” Don’t “normalize” Trump and his vile lies, bullying, mysoginy, and racism! Join the “New Due Process Army” and stand up for the REAL America (never to be confused with the scary and bogus “MAGA Pervision”)!

PWS

05-27-18

Related posts:

  1. JAMELLE BOUIE @ SLATE: TRUMP, SESSIONS, MILLER & THE GOP RESTRICTIONISTS HAVE PUT GOOD OL’ 1920S RACISM AT THE FOREFRONT OF THEIR WHITE NATIONALIST IMMIGRATION AGENDA! –“What good does it do to bring in somebody who’s illiterate in their own country, has no skills, and is going to struggle in our country and not be successful? . . . That is not what a good nation should do, and we need to get away from it.” — J. “Gonzo Apocalypto” Sessions, Attorney General of the United States of America & Unapologetic White Nationalist With A Long History Of Racism!
  2. MARK JOSEPH STERN @ SLATE: GONZO’S GONE! — Bigoted, Xenophobic AG Leaves Behind Disgraceful Record Of Intentional Cruelty, Vengeance, Hate, Lawlessness, & Incompetence That Will Haunt America For Many Years!
  3. VICTORY DANCE! — ICE’S HOMAN SAYS CLIMATE OF FEAR HAS STEMMED BORDER CROSSINGS & PROVES UNRESTRAINED, ARBITRARY IMMIGRATION ENFORCEMENT WORKS! — “There’s no population that’s off the table,” he said. “If you’re in the country illegally, we’re looking for you and we’re looking to apprehend you.” — America Won’t Be Truly Safe Until The Last Cook, Gardner, Construction Worker, Nanny, Janitor, Tree Cutter, Mechanic, Handyman, Carpenter, Home Health Aide, Computer Programmer, Healthcare Worker, Lettuce Picker, Cow Milker, Landscaper, Lawnmower, Bricklayer, Roofer, Window Washer, Waiter, Sandwich Artist, Teacher, Minister, Coach, Student, Parent, Clerk, Fisherman, Farmer, Maid, Chicken Plucker, Meat Processor, Etc., Without Docs Is Removed And US Citizens Take Over All These Jobs!
  4. MARIA SACCHETTI IN WASHPOST: INSIDE THE “NAG” (NEW AMERICAN GULAG) — CRUEL, INHUMAN, DEGRADING TREATMENT APPEARS TO BE WIDESPREAD IN SO-CALLED “CIVIL” IMMIGRATION DETENTION! — Where’s The Outrage? — Where’s The Congressional Oversight? — Why Aren’t Guys Like “Gonzo” & Homan Who Knowingly Promote Violations Of Legal & Human Rights As (Unlawful) “Immigration Deterrence” Under Investigation For Their Roles In Violating Human, Constitutional Rights!

LA TIMES: JUDICIAL BURNOUT: Unjust Failed Laws That Congress Ignores; Morally Corrosive Policies Of The Obama & Trump Administrations; & An Overwhelming Workload Combine to Demoralize Even Article III Judges! — “I have presided over a process that destroys families!”

http://enewspaper.latimes.com/infinity/article_share.aspx?guid=9f85955b-8f63-4c72-a322-e89f2d83b70b

Lauren Villagran reports for the

‘I have presided over a process that destroys families’

Judge can’t reconcile values and the law

Crackdown on illegal immigration takes its toll on a federal judge with an unparalleled sentencing record.

By Lauren Villagran

LAS CRUCES, N.M. — Day in, day out, immigrants shuffle into Judge Robert Brack’s courtroom, shackled at the wrist and ankle, to be sentenced for the crime of crossing the border.

The judge hands down sentences with a heavy heart. Since he joined the federal bench in 2003, Brack has sentenced some 15,000 defendants, the vast majority of them immigrants with little or no criminal record.

“See, I have presided over a process that destroys families for a long time, and I am weary of it,” said Brack one day in his chambers in Las Cruces. “And I think we as a country are better than this.”

Brack’s court in rural southern New Mexico is swollen with immigration cases, the migrants brought to his courtroom by the dozen. They exchange guilty pleas for “time served” sentences, usually not more than two months on the first or second offense. They leave his court as felons.

For years, federal authorities in this area along the New Mexico border have taken a distinctively hard-line approach to enforcing immigration law, pursuing criminal charges rather than handling cases administratively.

Essentially, authorities here have already been carrying out the “zero tolerance” policy Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions unveiled in April, when he announced that all immigrants who cross the border will be charged with a crime.

Together, the Border Patrol and U.S. attorney’s office in New Mexico bring charges against nearly every eligible adult migrant apprehended at the state’s border, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection. That amounted to 4,190 prosecutions last fiscal year.

Vigorous enforcement in New Mexico is a result of ample bed space in the state’s border county jails and a fast-track system that prosecutes nonviolent migrants quickly. The state also doesn’t face the volume of illegal crossings that south Texas does, for example.

“It is an efficient process,” says U.S. Atty. John Anderson of the District of New Mexico. “That is one of the key features that allows us to implement 100% prosecutions.”

For Judge Brack, it’s a punishing routine. And it has been building for a long time. Back in 2010, the judge had been on the federal bench for seven years, his docket overloaded with immigration cases, when “at some point I just snapped,” he said.

He sat down to compose a letter to President Obama to call for a more compassionate approach to immigration, one that would keep families together and acknowledge that the demands of the labor market drive immigration:

I write today because my experience of the immigration issue, in some 8,500 cases, is consistently at odds with what the media reports and, therefore, what many believe.

I have learned why people come, how and when they come, and what their expectations are. The people that I see are, for the most part, hardworking, gentle, uneducated and completely lacking in criminal history. Just simple people looking for work.

He didn’t get a reply.

No other federal criminal court judge comes near Brack’s sentencing record.

In the five years through 2017, Brack ranked first among 680 judges nationwide for his caseload, according to Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, which tracks court data. He sentenced 6,858 offenders — 5,823 of them for felony immigration violations.

It’s a dubious honor for a man who is a devout Catholic and makes plain his moral dilemma in public hearings. He takes seriously his oath to uphold the laws of the United States. But he is a cog in a system he believes is unjust.

Johana Bencomo, director of organizing with the Las Cruces immigrant advocacy group Comunidades en Acción y Fe — Communities in Action and Faith — calls criminal prosecution of migrants “dehumanizing.”

“We’re just this rural community with some of the highest prosecution rates,” she said. “That is Brack’s legacy, no matter how you spin it.”

Advocates of stronger immigration enforcement counter that prosecutions are a crucial element of border security and have contributed to today’s historically low rates of illegal immigration.

“Criminal charges turn out to be one of the most effective tools for dissuading people from trying [to cross] again,” said Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies at the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates for tougher border enforcement.

The effects of this enforcement play out at the five-story, copper-colored federal building in Las Cruces, about 47 miles from the U.S.-Mexico border. Brack’s chambers are on the top floor.

In windowless cellblocks on the bottom floor, migrants from Mexico, Central America and Brazil wait to make their initial appearance in a federal magistrate courtroom.

The same scene repeats again and again: The immigrants crowd five broad benches, the juror’s box and the swivel chairs meant for attorneys. They wear the jumpsuits of the four county jails where they are being held: a sea of orange, navy, dark green, fluorescent yellow.

They hear their rights and the charges against them. They eventually plead guilty, to benefit from New Mexico’s fast-track process. Within a month or so, they will find themselves in Brack’s court for sentencing and within days they’ll be deported.

The border used to be wide open, but now it is closed, Brack tells each migrant at sentencing. There are more Border Patrol agents than you can count. Immigration used to be handled as a civil offense, but now it is criminal: a misdemeanor on the first attempt, a felony on the second.

“Everyone gets caught and what’s worse, everyone goes to jail,” he told one migrant, a Mexican woman named Elizabeth Jimenez Rios. “That is not how it has always been, but that is how it is now.”

Their fate is sealed, but Brack still asks the public defenders to tell each migrant’s story.

Elías Beltran, an oil field worker from Mexico, with no criminal history, tried to return to his wife and two kids, U.S. citizens in eastern New Mexico. He lived there for 15 years before he was deported.

Andres Badolla Juarez, a farmworker from Mexico, wanted to pick strawberries in California to support his wife, toddler and new baby — all U.S. citizens — in Arizona. He lived in the U.S. for 16 years and got deported after an aggravated DUI. It was his fourth failed attempt to cross the border.

Rosario Bencomo Marquez, a 52-year-old maid from Mexico, with no criminal history, hoped to return to her daughter and grandchildren in Santa Fe. She lived in the U.S. for 19 years before she was deported.

Brack also sees migrants charged with drug offenses or long criminal records and is unsparing in their punishment. But they are a minority, he said.

“I get asked the question, ‘How do you continue to do this all day every day?’ I recognize the possibility that you could get hard-edged, you could get calloused, doing what I do,” he said. “I don’t. Every day it’s fresh. I can’t look a father and a husband in the eye and not feel empathy.”

Brack, 65, is the son of a railroad-worker father and homemaker mother and earned a law degree at the University of New Mexico. He served as a state judge before being named to the federal bench by President George W. Bush.

In his chambers, above a shelf stacked with books on jurisprudence, Bible study and basketball, hang framed pictures of his forefathers: men who immigrated to the U.S. from England and Prussia. Brack grew up in rural New Mexico, where immigrants — whatever their status — were viewed as “valuable co-workers,” not a threat, he said.

After that first letter to Obama in 2010, he wrote another. And another. As the nation periodically heaved toward the possibility of immigration reform, only to leave the issues — and lives of millions — unresolved, Brack continued to write letters to the White House.

He told more heart-wrenching stories about families divided. He kept it up for four years. He pleaded for a civil debate: “See what I see, hear what I hear. Be wary of the loudest, angriest voices.”

He signed each letter with prayer: “May God continue to bless all those who serve our great nation.”

He never got a response. He stopped writing.

And now, after so many grueling years and thousands more immigration cases, Brack has decided enough is enough. He takes “senior status” in July, effectively stepping aside to serve part time. President Trump will name his replacement.

Villagran writes for Searchlight New Mexico.

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Imagine what the stress levels are like for U.S. Immigration Judges! They often have pending dockets in excess of 2500 cases; are expected to “grind out” so-called “oral decisions” in “life or death” cases without time to reflect or the assistance of judicial law clerks; lack the job tenure, independence, and status of an Article III judge; operate in an out of control court system largely without rules; have been stripped of effective control of their dockets; and are constantly subjected to disingenuous attacks, “production quotas”  and a “bogus blame game” by their so-called “boss” Attorney General Jeff “Gonzo Apocalypto” Sessions — who has a well-earned reputation for lacking any moral sensitivity or responsibility for his statements and actions, having a biased and one-sided view of the law, and being totally unqualified and incompetent to administer a major court system that is supposed to be providing Due Process for migrants.

PWS

05-27-18

 

Related posts:

  1. GONZO’S WORLD: WHAT HAPPENS WHEN A DIVERSE “NATION OF IMMIGRANTS” ANOINTS A COMMITTED XENOPHOBE AS ITS CHIEF LAW OFFICER? – Gonzo Is Deconstructing Our System Of Justice, One Day At A Time!
  2. NATION OF CHILD ABUSERS: WHILE MANY RIGHT WING APOLOGISTS (ALONG WITH ALAN DERSHOWITZ) PAN NAZI COMPARISON, ACTUAL HOLOCAUST CHILD SURVIVOR YOKA VERDONER UNDERSTANDS THE PARALLELS! — Child Abuse Is Child Abuse —Evil Is Evil — Damage Is Irreparable!
  3. GONZO’S WORLD: THIS IS WHY HE STAYS: UNDERNEATH ALL THE “TRUMP NOISE” SESSIONS IS METHODICALLY ERADICATING DUE PROCESS, PERVERTING THE LAW, & TURNING ONE OF THE LARGEST FEDERAL COURT SYSTEMS INTO A “KILLING FLOOR” TARGETING OUR MOST VULNERABLE & DESERVING REFUGEES! — “[Sessions] is dumbing down the judges and treating them like assembly-line workers whose only job is to stamp out final orders of removal.”
  4. PROFESSOR FITZ BRUNDAGE @ WASHPOST: Can We Regain Our Humanitarian Values In The Age Of Trump? — “We must shine a spotlight on cruel and illegal policies that undermine our national ideals and find the wisdom and the courage to do better.”

FULL FRONTAL: SAMANTHA BEE ICES ICE! (WARNING: Video Clip Contains Explicit Language)

https://youtu.be/AiBtPy0EOno

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Most of the ICE folks that I met during my career (including with the “Legacy INS”) were hard-working, dedicated civil servants performing a very difficult and often thankless job. In particular, the attorneys in the Office of ICE Chief Counsel in Arlington were not only talented lawyers but had strong senses of justice that often went beyond the most narrow constructions of the law.

They also had strong senses of being part of the  larger “justice system team” working cooperatively with both the Immigration Judges and the private bar to keep the dockets moving while dispensing justice with humanity that reflected legal knowledge, the willingness to exercise their discretion, and the courage to do what was necessary to make a broken system function in something approaching a fundamentally fair manner.

For those of us involved the creation of the forerunner of the “Modern Chief Counsel System” at INS in the 1980’s, it’s exactly what we had in mind. According to my sources, that important attitude and the values upon which it was based (which, admittedly, might never have existed in some ICE offices) has now largely disappeared in light of the Trump Administration’s mismanagement and “gonzo” enforcement policies.

I don’t see how I could have done my job as a judge without the thoughtful assistance and professionalism of the ICE Office of Chief Counsel in Arlington. Working with them, our private bar, and our dedicated court support team as a group was a daily pleasure and probably extended my career by a number of years.

The main problem with ICE these days appears to stem from extraordinarily poor leadership from the top down, starting, but by no means ending, with Trump himself. As a result, ICE is now well on its way to becoming the most hated and least trusted law enforcement agency in America. While it might not require abolition of ICE, it will require fundamental changes to ICE structure, culture, and policies in the future under more talented, practical, and humane leaders.

Unfortunately, and not necessarily thorough the fault of individual employees at the “working” level, today’s ICE is a national disgrace and an embarrassment — for American justice, the Constitution, and our national values.

PWS

05-25-18

 

Related posts:

  1. THE HILL: NOLAN SAYS THERE IS A BETTER WAY TO ADDRESS PROBLEMS AT ICE
  2. MARIA SACCHETTI IN WASHPOST: INSIDE THE “NAG” (NEW AMERICAN GULAG) — CRUEL, INHUMAN, DEGRADING TREATMENT APPEARS TO BE WIDESPREAD IN SO-CALLED “CIVIL” IMMIGRATION DETENTION! — Where’s The Outrage? — Where’s The Congressional Oversight? — Why Aren’t Guys Like “Gonzo” & Homan Who Knowingly Promote Violations Of Legal & Human Rights As (Unlawful) “Immigration Deterrence” Under Investigation For Their Roles In Violating Human, Constitutional Rights!
  3. AMEN: A PRAYER IN THE TIME OF KAKISTOCRACY!
  4. REPORT FROM FBA, AUSTIN: Read My Speech “JUSTICE BETRAYED: THE INTENTIONAL MISTREATMENT OF CENTRAL AMERICAN ASYLUM APPLICANTS BY THE EXECUTIVE OFFICE FOR IMMIGRATION REVIEW”