Immigration Detention – Page 24 – immigrationcourtside.com

☠️HE SURVIVED 22 YEARS IN CAL STATE PRISONS — 2 YEARS IN DHS DETENTION “BROKE” HIM, DESPITE WINNING HIS CASE BEFORE AN IJ! — Welcome To America & Biden’s Gulag, Where Asylum Seekers Get Treated Worse Than Convicted Felons!🤮

https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/article/I-ve-done-time-in-12-California-prisons-Yuba-16804293.php

Carlos Sauceda writes in the SF Chron:

In 2017, after serving 22 years in prison for a gang-related murder I committed as a teenager, the California parole board granted me early release due to my rehabilitation and leadership while incarcerated. I was incredibly fortunate to get what I thought would be a second chance at life, and I committed myself to using my freedom to improve the world around me.

But I had to put those plans on hold. Because I was undocumented, I was immediately transferred to Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody at Yuba County Jail. The two years I spent there awaiting a decision on my immigration status were far worse than the over two decades I spent in 12 different prisons serving out my sentence.

Yuba County Jail is the last county jail under contract with the federal government to hold immigrant detainees in California. For the two years I fought my immigration case, I was psychologically, emotionally and physically abused by the Yuba County Sheriff’s Department. Some of the cells I lived in had no drinking water, others did not have working toilets and others had no lights, leaving me and other detainees in the dark all day long. My stress increased and my blood pressure became dangerously high. In 2018, after a year at the jail, I finally won my immigration case. But Department of Homeland Security attorneys appealed the judge’s decision, keeping me separated from my family, fueling my depression and suicidal thoughts. After another year of fighting the appeal, I had to make an impossible choice: Die inside Yuba County Jail or risk imminent death in my native land. After two years of inhumane treatment, I chose the latter. I signed the paperwork for self-deportation and went back to my home country.

My story is just one of thousands playing out in federally contracted county jails and privately operated ICE detention centers across the country. Despite President Biden’s campaign promise to end the use of private prisons for immigration detention, for undocumented people being held at Yuba County Jail, no relief is coming.

Yuba County Jail has a long history of violating national detention standards. From 2010 to 2021, ICE’s own detention office conducted at least eight inspections at the jail and found 171 violations. Among those violations, inspection officials determined that a sergeant, who was involved in two use-of-force incidents at the jail, participated in his own reviews. As a result of the findings, 24 members of Congress wrote a letter to Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas demanding that the department terminate ICE’s contract with Yuba County. At the state level, California legislators passed SB29, forbidding local governments to enter into new detention agreements with ICE. But as The Chronicle’s reporting pointed out, in 2018, the same year SB29 took effect, ICE and Yuba County officials “quietly extended their contract” to 2099.

Why would Yuba County officials establish an indefinite contract with ICE as the rest of the state moves to end the use of its jails by federal immigration authorities? Follow the money. The contract with ICE earns the Yuba County Sheriff’s Department a minimum of just under $24,000 a day, whether or not any detainees are being held in the jail, totaling about $8.66 million per year.

When the pandemic hit, conditions inside the jail worsened. Following an April 2020 class-action lawsuit, court orders led the jail to decrease its detainee population. Thanks to the work of human right advocates and formerly detained undocumented people like myself, and others, the jail went from having 127 detainees in May 2020 to zero in late 2021. For those of us who had fought, staged hunger strikes and protested, both inside and outside the jail, it felt like we were finally seeing the end of immigrant detainment.

But our celebrations were brief. In the two months that the jail had no detainees, the county’s contract with ICE was still in place, earning it an estimated $1.4 million. And in December, ICE transported its first detainee back into the jail. As of this week, three people are now detained there under ICE custody.

The repopulation of the jail by ICE only means we will fight even harder for liberation and the termination of the contract. Over the past year, and despite being thousands of miles away, I found ways to raise my voice. I connected with others who were detained alongside me and who were also deported and encouraged them to join the fight. My wife, along with other mothers, sisters, and family members joined us as well. We hosted Instagram live videos as a space for storytelling. For weeks, I met with congressional offices and shared my story and the story of others, which ultimately led to their support.

At a recent Yuba County Board of Supervisors meeting, newly named Chairman Randy Fletcher said that the claims made in a letter sent by the ACLU to the Yuba County sheriff and Board of Supervisors about the multiple violations and unlawful conditions at the jail were not true. “They make a lot of accusations. … It’s not true. It’s just not true,” he said. But I and the other undocumented people who were detained there know what we suffered through is true. And it needs to stop.

. . . .

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

Read the rest of the story at the link.

Coercion and punishment have long been part of the plan. That’s because the Supremes have fabricated the concept that “civil” imprisonment isn’t “punishment.” Pure balderdash!

Also, how does a jail get paid $1.4 million by taxpayers for nothing? Sounds like a “fleecing of America.”

But, of course, neither Garland nor Mayorkas bother to look into these questionable practices. Rather curious in light of the recommendation of a “select task force of experts” at the end of the Obama Administration that detention contracts (which frequently make establishing accountability for abuses difficult or impossible) be ended and that DHS phase out unnecessary detention.

Lack of accountability for DHS Detention is a chronic problem. So are defective bond procedures by EOIR that several Federal Courts have found unconstitutional, but which Garland continues to defend! Arbitrary bond procedures, weak internal appellate review, and lack of helpful precedents all feed the system.

Also, EOIR’s brushing aside the intentional coercion, lack of access to counsel, absence of resources, inability to prepare and document cases all contribute to the dangerous dysfunction. New, independent, expert, progressive “real judges” at EOIR would not allow Mayorkas and Garland to keep sweeping these abuses under the carpet!

Perhaps that’s why Garland has been content to allow his “courts” to malfunction using a majority of Trump/Miller holdovers and some notorious “go along to get along” bureaucrats as “judges.” Voices of expertise and reason among the IJs, and there are some, are often “silenced,” “neutered,” or “intentionally frustrated” by a BIA stacked with apologists, sometimes flat-out advocates, for DHS Enforcement and anti-immigrant policies.

Meanwhile, journalists, advocates, and those who have experienced “The Gulag” first hand need to keep it in the headlines, continue to litigate vigorously against it, and make a record of the disgraceful gap between what America claims to stand for and what it actually does! And, they would do well to “keep turning up the heat” on Garland’s “star chambers” and on his own lack of accountability for the daily disasters that unfold under his auspices.

🇺🇸Due Process Forever!

PWS

01-27-22

🤯👎🏽MORE CIRCUIT REJECTS FOR GARLAND & PRELOGAR — 1st & 3rd Cirs “Just Say No” To DOJ’s Ill-Advised Positions On “Theft Offense” & Derivative Citizenship! — It’s Part Of A Larger Leadership Failure @ Garland’s Broken DOJ!

From Dan Kowalski @ LexisNexis:

https://www.lexisnexis.com/LegalNewsRoom/immigration/b/insidenews/posts/ca1-on-categorical-approach-da-graca-v-garland

CA1 on Categorical Approach: Da Graca v. Garland

Da Graca v. Garland

“Aires Daniel Benros Da Graca petitions for review of a decision of the Board of Immigration Appeals (the “Board”) affirming his order of removal and denying his requests for cancellation of removal and voluntary departure. Because we find that a conviction under Rhode Island General Laws (“RIGL”) § 31-9-1 is not categorically a theft offense, we grant the petition for review, vacate the decision below, and remand for further proceedings.”

[Hats off to Randy Olen and Robert F. Weber!]

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

https://www.lexisnexis.com/LegalNewsRoom/immigration/b/insidenews/posts/ca3-derivative-citizenship-victory-jaffal-v-director

CA3 Derivative Citizenship Victory: Jaffal v. Director

https://www2.ca3.uscourts.gov/opinarch/203148p.pdf

“Appellant Imad Jaffal, born in Jordan, seeks a declaration that he is entitled to derivative U.S. citizenship under former 8 U.S.C. § 1432(a). That statute provides that “a child born outside the United States automatically acquires United States citizenship if, while the child is under the age of eighteen, the parent with legal custody of the child is naturalized while that child’s parents are legally separated.” Jaffal’s father was naturalized when Jaffal was seventeen years old, and Jaffal presented evidence to the District Court that he was in the sole legal custody of his father when his father was naturalized and his parents were separated. The District Court, however, declined to accept Jaffal’s evidence of his parents’ divorce. Because we conclude that was error, we will reverse the order of the District Court and remand the matter with instructions to issue a judgment declaring Jaffal to be a national of the United States.”

[Hats way off to Alexandra Tseitlin!]

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

Here’s my favorite quote from Judge Torresen’s decision in Da Garcia v. Garland:

Despite this apparent disconnect between RIGL § 31-9-1 and the Board’s definition of theft offense, the Board in Da Graca’s case determined that to prove the statute’s overbreadth, the Petitioner was required to identify actual cases in which Rhode Island had enforced the statute against de minimis deprivations of ownership interests. Da Graca contests the Board’s imposition of an actual case requirement and argues that he “need not necessarily proffer specific examples of Rhode Island prosecutions in order to establish a ‘realistic probability’ that the state would apply its statute to conduct that falls outside the generic definition of a crime.” We agree with Da Graca.

Essentially, Garland’s BIA “makes it up as it goes along” to reach a denial, then Prelogar’s DOJ attorneys defend the illegal result. Sounds like a really bad system, lacking accountability, expertise, common sense, and, sometimes, professional responsibility.

Lest you think that the legal nonsense being produced by Garland’s BIA and the USCIS is “below Prelogar’s radar screen” in her exulted position, that’s NOT true! Every adverse decision suffered by the USG must be reported to the SG’s Office with an analysis and recommendations from the agency’s attorneys, the litigators who handled the case, the appellate section of litigating division (here the Civil Division), and the SG’s staff. No appeal, petition for rehearing en banc, or petition for cert. can be filed without the express authorization of the SG’s Office.

So, Prelogar is well aware of the bad positions, unfairness, and poor work product DOJ attorneys are defending (sometimes with a lack of candor or misleading the courts) and their abuses of the time of the Article IIIs.

Even with the “real” (Article III) Federal Courts moving markedly to the right (following four years of Trump-McConnell appointments and eight years of lackadaisical performance by the Obama Administration), and rules that strongly favor the Government on judicial review, DOJ’s haphazard performance under Garland and Prelogar continues to earn a stream of avoidable “kickbacks” from the Article IIIs. The DOJ system is broken in many places — EOIR is just the most obvious, most pressing, and most easily addressed area of failure.

There is a tendency of immigration advocates, perhaps still hoping to curry favor with an Administration that largely ignores and despises them, to overemphasize the largely cosmetic and low impact “positive” changes made by the Biden Administration. See, e.g., https://www.lexisnexis.com/LegalNewsRoom/immigration/b/outsidenews/posts/biden-at-the-one-year-mark-a-greater-change-in-direction-on-immigration-than-is-recognized;

https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/immigration/2022/01/biden-keeps-trump-immigration-policiesand-stephen-miller-is-loving-it.html

At the same time they acknowledge but downplay the existential crippling effects of Garland’s failure to bring progressive reforms to EOIR, his defense of disgraceful, immoral, and inhumane “Miller Lite” positions in Federal Court, his intentional indifference to human suffering and the complete breakdown of the rule of law at our borders, and his disdain for removing the Trump enablers, deadwood, and poor lawyers from DOJ — at all levels.

I have a radically different perspective on the future of meaningful progressive immigration reforms, based on my nearly 50 years of involvement with the system on both sides and at all levels — more than most folks.

There will be no meaningful, sustainable immigration reforms without a radically reformed, remade, Immigration Court system with a judiciary of due-process-oriented progressive experts who have the courage to “speak truth to power,” stand up for the legal, constitutional, and human right of the most vulnerable, and put integrity, humanity, and the best interests of our nation above career advancement, survival, or “ingratiation with the powers that be.” That’s NOT Garland’s DOJ — which remains largely the out of control, often ethically challenged morass that he inherited from his predecessors.

Let’s not forget that through intentional misuse of precedents, weaponization of EOIR, and White Nationalist litigation strategies, Jeff Sessions was able to largely disable the entire asylum system, including USCIS Asylum Offices, and shift USCIS Adjudications from service to “enforcement only,” in preparation for the “final eradication” of asylum and crippling of our entire legal immigration system by his crony and former subordinate, Stephen Miller. And, the folks who helped him do that and “went along to go along” with abuses are still largely on board and in key positions in Garland’s DOJ — actually operating with his apparent “stamp of approval.” Outrageous!

From a due process, human rights, progressive, good government, equal justice, racial equality standpoint, as well as from any aspect of moral leadership on fundamental values, Garland’s performance at DOJ has been unacceptable. Has Garland visited any of the camps in Mexico or gone to the “New American Gulag” to witness first-hand the human carnage for which he is responsible? Heck no! That’s a job for progressive experts whose input and advice he then shuns, ignores, and “tunes out!”

For progressive advocates to downplay the Biden Administration’s gross failures or “over-cheer” incremental progress that means little without fundamental reforms at EOIR and the DOJ only deepens the fecklessness of their own positions and furthers the disrespect and under-appreciation of their efforts, potential power, and value that has become an endemic feature of the Democratic Party.

The Biden Administration might talk a good game, particularly around election time; but, in reality, they are governing largely in fear of and like nativist Republicans — but getting no “political return” whatsoever for betraying their supposed values and their base (see, Catherine Rampell). Advocates reward and tolerate such disgraceful and intellectually dishonest conduct at their own peril!

Meanwhile, Suzanne Clark, President of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, certainly no “progressive shill,” speaks truth about the need for and our ability to accept more immigrants:

Allowing more immigrants into the US would help mitigate both soaring inflation and the current labor shortage, the CEO of the US Chamber of Commerce said.

“We need more workers,” Suzanne Clark told reporters Tuesday, per CNN. “We should welcome people who want to come here, go to school, and stay.”

“That is a place the government could be particularly helpful and we do believe it would be anti-inflationary,” she said, per CNN.

https://apple.news/AT8YmOLhiTOCuUFZijTLJCQ

Those immigrants are right in front of us: rotting in camps at the border, being returned to danger or death with no process — both as a result of Garland’s failure to re-establish our legal asylum system at the border — or languishing in Garland’s mushrooming 1.6 million Immigration Court backlog! It doesn’t take a “rocket scientist” to see that instead of wasting time, money, and resources on mindless “enforcement” intended to deter and discourage those who might help us by helping themselves, we should have set up fair and timely processing systems, staffed by experts, that would identify the many individuals at the border and already in the U.S. who can qualify to remain under fair and properly generous interpretations of asylum law, withholding, CAT, U & T visas, “stateside processing waivers,” cancellation of removal” (for those already here), TPS, and other possibilities.

This is just as much”law enforcement” and “maintaining the integrity of our system” as are the efforts to increase deportations, terrorize communities, or close borders to “deter” migrants (primarily those of color) that has been practiced to some degree by every Administration. It also makes sense, economically, practically, and ethically.

It starts with an Attorney General and DOJ with the courage and vision to end the “deterrence only” misconstruction of our laws and stand up for the legal and human rights of migrants, regardless of race, color, creed, or manner of entry. That’s not what Garland has been doing to date! Too bad, because there will be no resolution of immigration issues — nor will there be racial justice in America — without an AG who will stand up for the real rule of law rather than the parody of the law and justice purveyed by Miller and his White Nationalists and still being parroted and too often defended by Garland and his minions.

🇺🇸Due Process Forever.

PWS

01-21-22

TAL KOPAN @ SF CHRON: NO DUE PROCESS HERE☹️: GARLAND’S DESPICABLE “STAR CHAMBERS” CHEERED “ENGINEERED IN ABSENTIA” DEPORTATION ORDERS — Garland Fails To Provide Justice @ The Border Or In Biased “Courts,” But Inflicts Outrageous “Miller Lite” Anti-Due-Process “Gimmicks” On Vulnerable Migrants!🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮👎🏽👎🏽👎🏽👎🏽👎🏽

Immigration court officials cheered results of fast-tracked deportation orders, emails reveal

WASHINGTON — Last June, the San Francisco Immigration Court quietly tested a new idea: Fast-track the cases of immigrants whose mail wasn’t reaching them. In the trial run, 80% of the immigrants scheduled were ordered deported for not showing up.

Top officials were effusive with praise over the results, emails obtained by The Chronicle show, and rushed to set up more hearings: “Very positive!” emailed one of the top supervising immigration judges overseeing the nation’s hundreds of courts.

The newly uncovered emails reveal that the fast-track docket for immigrants with returned mail, which was first reported by The San Francisco Chronicle last fall, was cheered at the highest levels of the courts and pursued with full awareness that scores of immigrants would likely be ordered deported as a result.

Advocates and attorneys for immigrants raised concerns about the practice as a sort of deportation conveyor belt last year, as many of the lawyer-less immigrants may have no idea they missed a court hearing, much less that they were ordered deported during it, because they didn’t know how to update their address with the court or thought that Immigration and Customs Enforcement would do so on their behalf. The immigration courts are run by the Justice Department, with judges hired and ultimately overseen by the attorney general.

The emails were obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request by a nonprofit watchdog group, American Oversight, prompted by The Chronicle’s reporting. The group shared the records with The Chronicle.

The Department of Justice declined to comment specifically on the emails, noting that removal orders for failing to appear in court are legally valid and that issuing notices with new hearing dates gives unreachable immigrants an opportunity to appear in court and avoid a deportation order.

Chronicle analysis of available data last year found that the practice significantly increased the number of immigrants who were ordered deported for not being present in court, called an “in absentia” removal order. As many as 173 people were given deportation orders because of such proceedings in August and September — a nearly ninefold increase from the 20 similar orders given the previous seven months combined.

More here:

https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/Immigration-court-officials-cheered-results-of-16791798.php

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

Star Chamber Justice — This guy doesn’t realize that he could have avoided “justice” in Garland’s Star Chambers by not appearing for his hearing!

For Garland’s “judiciary,” the object appears to be avoiding fair hearings rather than conducting them! Perhaps, that’s understandable (not justifiable) considering how poorly many of his courts’ decisions fare upon judicial review in the Article IIIs.

For his cowardly attacks on migrants and backlog-building mismanagement and misdirection of EOIR, Garland gets “Courtside’s” coveted “Five Puke-Five Thumbs Down Award!” 🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮👎🏽👎🏽👎🏽👎🏽👎🏽

While Garland is failing in his job, his concerted efforts to break apart and “alienate” key segments the Dem coalition that elected Biden is succeeding and should pay great dividends (for the GOP and Trump) in the Fall Midterms! No wonder Garland’s running the system into the ground using “Trump/Miller holdovers.”

Garland and his equally poorly performing lieutenants (Monaco, Gupta, Clarke, Prelogar) are giving us a “Master Class” in “Why Dems Can’t Govern and Blow Elections 101.”

A party that lacks the courage to act on the values it espoused to get elected doesn’t stand for anything at all!🤮👎🏽

Maybe lots of Dems pulled the lever because they wanted more of Gauleiter Stephen Miller’s White Nationalist policies. But, I haven’t heard of any!

🇺🇸Due Process Forever!

PWS

01-20-21

CATHERINE RAMPELL @ WASHPOST: “Biden has delivered the worst of all worlds: inhumane, immoral, potentially illegal policy — and bad-faith political blowback about “open borders” all the same.”☠️🏴‍☠️🤮🤯👎🏽⚰️🆘

Catherine writes:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/01/17/year-into-his-presidency-biden-has-kept-some-trumps-worst-immigration-policies-place-why/

. . . .

But these are, mostly, obscure policy changes or unrealized proposals. When Miller et al. condemn Biden’s “immigration record,” they zero in on his decisions at the Southern border.

Which is, frankly, odd. You’d never know it from the right-wing hysteria about Biden’s supposedly “open borders,” or Biden’s own campaign promise to “end Trump’s detrimental asylum policies.” But Biden has continued Trump’s most restrictionist, inhumane and possibly illegal border policies.

In some cases Biden has even expanded them.

As evidence of Biden’s supposedly lax border policies, Republicans sometimes cite his attempt, on Day One of his presidency, to end the program informally known as “Remain in Mexico.” This Trump-created program forced asylum seekers to wait in dangerous camps in Mexico while their U.S. cases were processed; there, vulnerable immigrants have been frequent targets for rape, kidnappings, torture and murder.

If Biden had terminated the program, that would have been a good thing, from a human rights perspective (not a Republican priority, apparently). But Biden did not succeed. After a legal challenge, a federal judge ordered the program to be resurrected — and the Biden administration not only obeyed but also expanded the program’s scope to cover even more categories of immigrants.

[Catherine Rampell: Joe Biden is president. Why is he maintaining Trump’s immigration agenda?]

Worse, Biden has maintained Trump’s Title 42 order. This likely illegal order involves automatically expelling hundreds of thousands of people encountered at the border without ever allowing them to apply for asylum, in contravention of rights guaranteed under both U.S. and international law. Both Trump and Biden have cited a little-used public health provision as pretext for this policy, even though legions of public health experts have argued that it doesn’t protect public health.

Perversely, continuing this Trump policy has also given ammunition to the hard-right nativists, because it has the unintended consequence of inflating the count of U.S. border crossings. Many of those expelled immediately turn around and attempt another crossing; in fiscal 2021, 27 percent of individuals were apprehended multiple times by Border Patrol, nearly quadruple the share in 2019.

The disconnect between GOP claims about “open borders” and Biden’s actually-quite-Trumpy border policies, is enormous. Two of Biden’s own political appointees who resigned last fall lambasted his actions as “inhumane” on their way out the door; six other high-level immigration officials have recently announced they were leaving the administration, without much public explanation.

It’s unclear why Biden has maintained his predecessor’s policies. One possibility is politics — that these choices were intended to stave off right-wing attacks about lax enforcement. If that was the motivation, though, it failed. Instead, Biden has delivered the worst of all worlds: inhumane, immoral, potentially illegal policy — and bad-faith political blowback about “open borders” all the same.

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

Yup! It’s what “Courtside” has been saying all along! Read her complete article at the link!

Catherine sees much more clearly than any member of the Biden Administration the ridiculous failings of their so-called “immigration policies” (actually a series of disjointed, often self-contradictory, knee-jerk responses that sometimes undermine each other and reflect a total lack of thoughtful, morally courageous, informed leadership).

And, Catherine doesn’t even highlight the single biggest failure — one that cuts across every failure she mentions and also goes to the heart of our legal system!

That’s, of course, the abject failure of Biden AG Merrick Garland to bring due process reforms and better judges to his totally dysfunctional, grotesquely unfair, wholly-owned U.S. Immigration Courts. These “courts” — that function more like 21st Century Star Chambers than anyone’s concept of a “real court” — were “weaponized” by Garland’s Trumpy predecessors, Sessions and Barr.

They filled the courts at all levels with less than well qualified judges, many with no immigration experience or prosecutorial experience only, who were intended to help carry out the White Nationalist, anti-asylum, anti-immigrant policies developed by Gauleiter Stephen Miller. Garland has not replaced these unqualified judges with better talent, selected in a open, transparent, merit-based process with “outside input.” He has failed to make the substantive and procedural reforms necessary to bring order and some semblance of efficiency to his hopelessly backlogged “courts.”

He has declined to remove poor leaders appointed by his predecessors; nor has he tapped the large supply of progressive, expert human rights/immigration talent who could begin the process of restoring due process. He has continued to promote enforcement “gimmicks” — like “Dedicated Dockets” and the illegal use of Title 42 — that accelerate “Aimless Docket Reshuffling” and have led to even higher backlogs.

His refusal to bring common sense, achievable reforms, and better judges to the Immigration Courts has demoralized lawyers and made pro bono representation even more difficult.

He has ignored the pressing need for better judicial training implemented by qualified outside experts. He hasn’t bothered to engage with those like the VIISTA Villanova program turning out exceptionally well-trained potential “accredited representatives” who could help reduce the staggering representation gap in his courts. Worse yet, he has allowed EOIR bureaucrats to create entirely new backlogs in the agency process for recognizing pro bono organizations and accrediting their representatives.

Garland’s horrible failure to energize and attract the progressive leadership and judicial talent who know how to begin solving these problems (rather than aggravating them) might eventually go down as one of the biggest “blown opportunities” for due process reforms in modern American legal history! This is the “low hanging fruit” that Garland and the Biden Administration has allowed to “rot on the tree.” What a (needless and deadly) tragedy!

🇺🇸Due Process Forever!

PWS

01-18-22

🤯👎🏽☠️🤮🆘STATS SHOW YET ANOTHER PREDICTABLE, HORRIBLE GARLAND FAILURE @ EOIR: “New Research Finds that Dedicated Docket Leads to High Rates of Deportation, Low Representation Rates, and Wastes Immigration Judges’ Time” — Duh!

From Austin Kocher:

https://austinkocher.substack.com/p/biden-administrations-dedicated-docket

. . . .

These findings raise serious questions about whether the Biden administration’s Dedicated Docket is achieving its stated goals or, more seriously, why this program was created in the first place given that it doesn’t appear to actually be benefitting anyone involved. These are my takeaways and not necessarily the views of TRAC as an organization.

. . . .

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

Read Austin’s findings at the link.

The idea was idiotic, the execution amateurish, the human impact catastrophic, and the failure both inevitable and totally predictable! Totally predictable, that is, to anyone who actually understands how broken our Immigration Courts are. That, obviously, doesn’t include Garland or anyone on his senior management team.

Gotta hope that the upcoming “Lofgren hearings” will highlight and document the ridiculous nonsense that’s going on under Garland and crank up the pressure on him to take the human lives at stake here seriously and to do better.

🇺🇸Due Process Forever!

PWS

01-14-22

🤮🤯☠️👎🏽 COMPLETE DISCONNECT @ “JUSTICE” — WHO WON THE 2020 ELECTION, ANYWAY? — Even As He Disses Progressive Human Rights Advocates & Bashes Migrants In Court, Garland Continues To Employ Highly Unqualified “Stephen Miller Acolyte” As Top Judge In His Biased & Broken “Courts!” — Tracy Short “Cheered” Trump’s Most Heavy-Handed Enforcement Actions — Now He’s Garland’s “Top Judge” In a Wholly-Owned System That Abuses Migrants & Consistently Turns Out Sloppy, Unprofessional Work!

https://www.law360.com/immigration/articles/1454701/docs-show-ice-atty-cheered-judge-s-arrest-first-of-many-

Docs Show ICE Atty Cheered Judge’s Arrest: ‘First Of Many?’

By Brian Dowling

Law360 (January 12, 2022, 2:09 PM EST) — A top U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement attorney appeared elated when a sitting Massachusetts judge was indicted in 2018 for helping an immigrant in the country illegally evade custody, asking in an email if it would be “the first of many” such arrests, according to records made public in court Tuesday.

The email by then-ICE Principal Legal Adviser Tracy Short was part of a series of documents filed by a civil liberties group and government watchdog suing the agency to obtain even more records relating to the obstruction of justice charges against Newton District Court Judge Shelley Joseph.

Short posed the rhetorical question as a Fox News article circulated in emails among agency staff on the day Judge Joseph was indicted. In a later email to agency executives, Short said, “This is a great day.”

“Indeed,” responded Matthew Albence, ICE director of enforcement removal operations, according to the court filings. ICE chief of staff Thomas Blank allegedly chimed in, “Blessed.”

Short is now chief immigration judge for the U.S. Department of Justice‘s Executive Office for Immigration Review, while Albence and Blank have since moved into the private sector.

Judge Joseph is accused of helping the immigrant evade federal custody by allowing him to leave out the back door of her courtroom while agents from ICE were waiting out front to arrest him.

The case has been criticized by retired judges, academics and Massachusetts defense lawyers as an overreach by the federal government. Judge Joseph has argued that she acted within the scope of her judicial authority and therefore cannot be criminally charged. The issue is on appeal at the First Circuit.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts and American Oversight, a government watchdog, attached the emails ICE produced to a motion for a pretrial win in the lawsuit they filed against the agency for records relating to the charges against Judge Joseph and her court officer Wesley MacGregor.

The civil liberties groups told U.S. District Judge Angel Kelley that the 83 pages of communications handed over by ICE in response to its records request “calls into serious question the adequacy of its search” for documents.

Among the groups’ concerns are that no records were produced for the 11 months that followed the incident, no text messages were searched, the search terms used were too narrow, and the agency never searched its Homeland Security Investigations Division even though the unit wrote a memo about the incident.

The groups asked the court to grant them summary judgment, order ICE to conduct a reasonable search — including emails and text messages — and release pages ICE is withholding under claimed exemptions from the public records law.

In December, ICE asked for a win in the case, saying it handed over what it needed to and withheld other sought-after documents that would harm pending criminal proceedings if released.

Judge Joseph and MacGregor have appealed a federal judge’s decision to not toss the charges on judicial immunity grounds. The First Circuit, in early December, heard the appeal and wrestled with how to define the judge’s immunity claim.

The ACLU’s records request was spurred by a November 2019 New York Times article that reported then-acting ICE Director Thomas Homan had been communicating with the Massachusetts U.S. Attorney’s Office in seeking legal recourse against Judge Joseph.

The ACLU requested records from March 15, 2018, through April 25, 2019, including emailed messages and letters between the U.S. attorney’s office and ICE about Judge Joseph, as well as records concerning an ICE investigation into the judge.

ICE told the ACLU in 2019 that it couldn’t do the search because the ACLU was a third party in the criminal case against Judge Joseph and needed her approval to access the records.

The ACLU protested and asked the agency to reconsider, saying that its request didn’t need Judge Joseph’s approval. In February 2020, the ICE Office of the Principal Legal Advisor ruled that a records search could be made, but ICE has failed to respond to the ACLU’s request since then, the complaint says.

Daniel McFadden, an ACLU staff attorney on the case, said in a statement to Law360 that ICE’s decision to charge Judge Joseph was “unprecedented.”

“The public has a right to know how this prosecution arose, and whether it was part of a pressure campaign to force Massachusetts court officials to assist in federal immigration enforcement,” McFadden said.

ICE and the Department of Justice declined to comment on the filing when reached Wednesday.

The ACLU of Massachusetts is represented in-house by Krista Oehlke, Daniel L. McFadden and Matthew R. Segal.

American Oversight is represented in-house by Katherine M. Anthony.

ICE is represented by Michael Sady of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Massachusetts.

The case is ACLU of Massachusetts et al. v. ICE, case number 1:21-cv-10761, in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts.

–Editing by Orlando Lorenzo.

Update: This article has been updated to include comments from the ACLU.

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

Look, whether Short can be fired or not, he has no business being the Chief Immigration Judge at EOIR. Short never held a judicial position before his inappropriate appointment under Trump.

His career as a hard line, widely disrespected ICE Prosecutor took him through probably the worst Federal Court in America — the Atlanta immigration Court, a self-styled “Asylum Free Zone” where “due process and fundamental fairness go to die and be buried.”

No Senior Executive like Short has “life tenure” in a particular senior position. For example, former Chief Immigration Judge, current BIA Appellate Judge Michael J, Creppy, woke up one morning in 2006 to find himself “out at OCIJ” and on his way to OCAHO, widely considered the “Siberia of EOIR.” His “offense:” “losing the confidence” of the then powers that were at DOJ and EOIR during the Bush II Administration!

I had a similar experience when I was “pushed out” as BIA Chair and then Appellate Judge because Ashcroft and his team of hard liners (including the notorious neo-fascist nativist Kris Kobach) didn’t like my decisions standing up for the legal rights of migrants!

Once in power, the GOP makes good on its threats against asylum seekers and other migrants, without necessarily passing any legislation. By contrast, with weak-kneed, tone-deaf “leaders” like Mayorkas and Garland, Dems fail to keep their campaign promises and won’t even move the worst of the GOP holdovers out of key positions where they undermine justice and ruin human lives.

🇺🇸Due Process Forever!

PWS

01-134-22

🤮🤯🏴‍☠️👎🏽GARLAND’S DOJ GOES “FULL MILLER LITE” ON TRAUMATIZED REFUGEE FAMILIES! — Some Dem “Strategists” Like New Policy: Dis Progressives, Abandon Campaign Promises, Trash Vulnerable Migrant Families Of Color In Hopes Of Appeasing White Nationalist GOP Nativists!

Maria Sacchetti & Sean Sullivan report for WashPost:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/biden-separated-families-court-migrants/2022/01/12/5c592f74-725a-11ec-8b0a-bcfab800c430_story.html

Two months after President Biden said migrant families separated at the border under the Trump administration deserve compensation, his administration’s lawyers are arguing in federal court that they are not in fact entitled to financial damages and their cases should be dismissed.

The Justice Department outlined its position in the government’s first court filings since settlement negotiations that could have awarded the families hundreds of thousands of dollars broke down in mid-December.

Government lawyers emphasized in the court documents that they do not condone the Trump administration’s policy of separating the children of undocumented migrants from their parents. But they said the U.S. government has a good deal of leeway when it comes to managing immigration and is immune from such legal challenges.

“At issue in this case is whether adults who entered the country without authorization can challenge the federal government’s enforcement of federal immigration laws” under federal tort claims laws, the Justice Department said in a Jan. 7 brief in a lawsuit in Pennsylvania. “They cannot.”

The legal strategy reflects the Biden administration’s awkward position as it shifts from championing the migrant families politically to fighting them in court. Migrant families have filed approximately 20 lawsuits and hundreds of administrative claims seeking compensation for the emotional and sometimes physical abuse they allege they suffered during the separations.

. . . .

But while immigrant advocates and liberals are likely to be furious at the administration’s position in court, some Democrats say privately that it has a political upside. The image of the administration fighting against the large payments, they say, could blunt GOP arguments that the administration is too soft on immigration.

. . . .

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

Read the full article at the link.

“Awkward” seems like a “sanitized term” for “duplicitous and immoral!”

So, I assume that the Dems who are unwilling to stand up for progressive values and the human rights of migrants will look to their GOP nativist, White Nationalist buddies for contributions and votes come election time. Contrary to DOJ’s misrepresentation to the courts, individuals regardless of status had a statutory and treaty right to seek protection in the U.S. regardless of manner of entry. The unconstitutional Sessions/Miller scofflaw conduct was intended to punish and deter individuals from asserting and vindicating their legal rights.

Additionally, so-called “illegal entries” are to a large extent fueled by illegal policies by both the Biden and Trump Administrations of not having an operating, fair, timely asylum system at legal ports of entry. This has been compounded by failure of both Administrations to establish robust, fair refugee processing systems for Latin America in the regions where the refugee situations are generated.

I have a different perspective: A party afraid to stand up for the values of its core constituency stands for nothing at all! And we already have a major “party of no values.” So, the “competition” for the “no values voters” might already be over.

Disgusting as the anti-democracy, White Nationalist GOP is, I must say that they know who their supporters are and aren’t afraid to act accordingly. Just who are the Dems representing in this disgraceful and cowardly race to the bottom being led by Garland and Mayorkas (with an assist from Vice President “Die in Place” Harris)?

The Biden Administration’s “policy” of abandoning asylum seekers and allowing the Immigration Courts to operate dysfunctionally with mostly “holdover judges” and ever-mushrooming backlogs hasn’t proved to be a “political winner” to date. So, why do the tone-deaf Dems pushing it believe it will help them in November?

Hopefully, at least some Federal Courts will see through Garland’s disingenuous smokescreen and stick the DOJ & DHS with judgements much larger than the ones they were afraid to agree to in settlement.

The Garland DOJ continues to squander time, resources, and goodwill by filling the Article IIIs with ill-advised “Stephen Miller Lite” litigation positions. And, these are the folks progressives are depending on to vindicate voting rights and hold the leaders of the insurrection accountable? Good luck with that! Garland appears to be too busy defending Stephen Miller’s policies to effectively push progressive, due-process-oriented positions in the Article IIIs or reform his wholly owned, totally dysfunctional Immigration “Courts.”

🇺🇸Due Process Forever!

PWS

01-13-22

💸🤑SCAM CITY USA! — Feds Paid Bad Cal Jail $1.4 Million For Nothing! — Now They Are Placing Immigration Detainees In These Dangerous, ☠️ Substandard ⚠️ Conditions! — Administrations Change, But The American Gulag 🤮 Remains!

https://www.sfchronicle.com/california/article/Northern-California-jail-reopens-to-immigrant-16765144.php

Deepa Fernandes for the SF Chron:

. . . .

Court orders in the class-action lawsuit caused Yuba’s detainee population to steadily decline, from 127 in May 2020 to zero on Oct. 27, 2021, when the last incarcerated noncitizen was released. Activists briefly celebrated and hoped to use the momentum to prevent the jail from accepting future detainees.

But ICE and Yuba County had quietly extended their contract indefinitely in 2018. The contract stipulates that Yuba County receive a minimum of $24,000 a day whether any detainees are in its jail or not. In the two months the jail was without detainees, the federal government paid Yuba County almost $1.4 million.

As word trickled out that the Northern California jail might begin accepting new detainees, formerly incarcerated men and community supporters protested outside the federal immigration court in San Francisco last month.

A report by the team overseeing the jail’s compliance with the court-ordered consent decree found that a “severe breakdown of the Jail’s mental health system” contributed to the suicide last month of a man who had been in the jail for only a few days. It also found that officials had failed to fix previously cited suicide risks, and that there was inadequate medical and mental health staffing and treatment.

“We’ve known for decades that Yuba County Jail has a horrific record of mental and medical care that has unfortunately resulted in tragic deaths and lots of pain for lots of families,” said Laura Duarte Bateman, communications director for the California Collaborative for Immigrant Justice, which organized last month’s protest against Yuba accepting new detainees.

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

Read the full article at the link.

Fraud, waste, and abuse. No need for the GAO “hotline” on this one. It’s all hanging out in public view as Mayorkas & Garland bury their respective heads in the sand.

🇺🇸Due Process Forever!

PWS

01-11-21

☹️HE BEAT THE GOVERNMENT TWICE IN COURT — But, After Three Years In Jail Without Being Charged With Any Crime, Omar Ameen Still Can’t Get A Bond From Garland’s Courts — How Can A System Where The Prosecutor Makes The Rules & Picks The Judges, Mostly From The Ranks Of Former Prosecutors, Provide The “Fair & Impartial Judging” Required By Due Process?

Hon. Ilyce Shugall
U.S. Immigraton Judge (Retired)
Immigrant Legal Defense Program, Justice & Diversity Center of the Bar Assn. of San Francisco.

IMMIGRANT LEGAL DEFENSE

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE January 10, 2022

Contacts:

Immigrant Legal Defense

Ilyce Shugall, ilyce@ild.org, (415) 758-3765

Siobhan Waldron, siobhan@ild.org, (510) 479-0972

Edwin F. Mandel Legal Aid Clinic, The University of Chicago Law School Nicole Hallett, nhallett@uchicago.edu, (203) 910-1980

Omar Ameen Files Federal Lawsuit Seeking His Release

After the U.S. Government Fails Once Again to Prove Any Connection to Terrorism

San Francisco, CA. Immigrant Legal Defense and the University of Chicago Immigrants’ Rights Clinic have filed a petition for a writ of habeas corpus on behalf of Omar Ameen seeking his immediate release from immigration custody. Mr. Ameen has been held by the U.S. government for over three years based on false allegations that he was involved in terrorism in Iraq before he arrived in the United States as a refugee. Multiple courts have now rejected those allegations. The petition alleges that his continued detention in these circumstances violates the Due Process Clause and the Immigration and Nationality Act.

After an investigation initiated by the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the Iraqi government issued a warrant for his arrest in connection with the 2014 murder of a police officer in Rawa, Iraq. Mr. Ameen was subsequently arrested by U.S. authorities in August 2018 and placed in extradition proceedings, with the government arguing that not only was Omar responsible for the 2014 murder, but that he also occupied a leadership position in ISIS. After two and a half years of fighting his extradition, the federal magistrate judge found that the warrant was not supported by probable cause because Mr. Ameen had been in Turkey, not Iraq, at the time of the murder. He further found that there was no evidence that Mr. Ameen was an ISIS leader and ordered his immediate release.

Instead of releasing him or charging him with a crime, DHS took Mr. Ameen into immigration custody, and placed him in removal proceedings before the Department of Justice (DOJ). DHS abandoned the murder claim, but otherwise made the same terrorism allegations against Mr. Ameen in immigration court that had been made – and rejected – in the extradition proceedings. After months of proceedings, the immigration judge found that the government had not proved that Mr. Ameen had any involvement with terrorism, yet still denied him bond while he seeks relief from deportation. Mr. Ameen continues to fight for his freedom, to remain in the United States, and to clear his name.

“It is a fundamental principle that the government cannot detain someone based on unsubstantiated rumors and unproven accusations,” said Ilyce Shugall, an attorney with Immigration Legal Defense (ILD) and a member of Mr. Ameen’s legal team. “The government keeps losing, yet continues to believe it can detain Omar indefinitely without cause. The Constitution does not allow such a cavalier denial of individual liberty.”

“Omar’s bond request was denied by the same agency – the Department of Justice – that has maliciously targeted for him years. Omar deserves a fair hearing in federal court,” said Siobhan Waldron, another ILD attorney on Mr. Ameen’s legal team.

“The government seems to think that it can do whatever it wants as long as it invokes the word ‘terrorism,’” said Nicole Hallett, director of the Immigrants’ Rights Clinic at the University of Chicago Law School, “Rather than admit it was wrong about Omar, the government will go to extraordinary measures to keep him locked up. We are asking the federal court to put a stop to this abuse of power.”

###

Immigrant Legal Defense’s mission is to promote justice through the provision of legal representation to underserved immigrant communities.

The Immigrants’ Rights Clinic is a clinical program of the University of Chicago Law School and provides representation to immigrants in Chicago and throughout the country.

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

Unfortunately, “cavalier denial of individual liberty” largely describes the daily operations of Garland’s dysfunctional and hopelessly backlogged “wholly owned Immigration Courts” — where due process, scholarship, quality, and efficiency are afterthoughts, at best. “Malicious targeting” — that’s a Stephen Miller specialty shamelessly carried forth by Garland in too many instances! Miller must be gratified, and not a little amazed, to find that the guy Dem progressives and human rights advocates thought would be leading the charge to undo Miller’s White Nationalist, scofflaw attack on migrants and people of color would instead be proudly “carrying his water” for him.

To punctuate my point, today Garland’s Solicitor General will follow in the disgraceful footsteps of predecessors in both GOP and Dem Administrations. Essentially (that is, stripped of its disingenuous legal gobbledygook), the SG will argue that individuals, imprisoned without conviction, struggling to vindicate their rights before Garland’s broken, backlogged, and notoriously pro-Government, anti-immigrant Immigration Courts, renowned for their sloppiness and bad judging, are not really “persons” under the Constitution and therefore can be arbitrarily imprisoned indefinitely, in conditions that are often worse than those for convicted felons, without any individualized rationale and without recourse to “real” courts (e.g., Article III courts not directly controlled by the DOJ).

“The right-wing majority on the Supreme Court seems to be planning to eliminate the only way a lot of people in immigration detention can challenge their imprisonment,” appellate public defender Sam Feldman commented in a quote-tweet. “People would still be held illegally, but no court could do anything about it.”

https://www.lexisnexis.com/legalnewsroom/immigration/b/insidenews/posts/jan-11-2022-sc-oral-arg-previews-detention-bond-jurisdiction

One might assume that our nation’s highest Court would unanimously make short-shrift of the SG’s scofflaw arguments and send her packing. After all, that’s what several lower courts have done! But, most experts predict the exactly opposite result from a Supremes’ majority firmly committed to “Dred Scottification” — that is de-humanization and de-personification” — of people of color and migrants under the Constitution.

It’s painfully obvious that Congress must create an independent Article I Immigration Court not beholden to the Executive Branch. But, don’t hold your breath, given the current political gridlock in Washington. It’s equally clear that the Article IIIs, from the Supremes down, have “swallowed the whistle” by not striking down this blatantly unconstitutional system, thereby forcing Congress to take corrective action to bring the system into line with our Constitution.

In the meantime, Garland could bring in better-qualified expert judges, reform procedures, and appoint competent professional administrators who would institutionalize fairness, efficiency, and independence that would help transition the Immigration Courts to a new structure outside the DOJ. He could stop echoing Stephen Miller in litigation.

He could have replaced the architects of “Aimless Docket Reshuffling” and exponentially growing back logs with practical scholars and progressive experts who could reduce backlogs and establish order without violating human or legal rights of individuals. He could have set a “new tone” by publicly insisting that all coming before his Immigration Courts be treated fairly, with respect, dignity, and professionalism.

But, instead, Garland has stubbornly eschewed the recommendations of immigration and human rights experts while allowing and even defending the trashing of the rule of law at the border and elsewhere where migrants are concerned. He’s also done it with many questionably qualified “holdover” judges and administrators appointed by Sessions and Barr because of their perceived willingness, or in some cases downright enthusiasm, to stomp on the legal and human rights of asylum seekers and other migrants.

It’s curious conduct from a guy who once was only “one Mitch McConnell away” from a seat on the Supremes! I guess the “due process” Garland got from McConnell and his GOP colleagues is all that he thinks migrants and other “non-persons” of color get in his wholly-owned “courts.”

Good luck to our Round Table colleague, Judge Ilyce Shugall, and her great team, on this litigation! Obviously, the wrong folks are on the Federal Bench — at all levels of our broken and floundering system.

Interestingly, Judge Shugall was once an Immigration Judge until forced to prematurely resign, as a matter of conscience, by the lawless anti-immigrant policies of the Trump Administration carried out through its DOJ. As in many cases, the Government’s loss is the Round Table’s gain!🛡⚔️

🇺🇸Due Process Forever!

PWS

01-11-22

☹️MORE IMMIGRATION EXPERTS FLEE THE COOP AS BIDEN ADMINISTRATION TURNS ITS BACK ON HUMAN AND CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS OF ASYLUM SEEKERS — Esther Olavarria & Tyler Moran Latest To Jump Biden’s Sinking Human Rights Ship!

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/588663-key-member-of-white-house-immigration-team-retiring-report

Olafimihan Oshin reports for The Hill:

Esther Olavarria, the deputy director for immigration of the Biden administration’s Domestic Policy Council (DPC), is retiring from her position.

A White House spokesperson confirmed Olavarria’s pending departure from her position to Politico and CNN.

“I could not be more grateful for Esther Olavarria’s myriad contributions to the Biden-Harris Administration, particularly her work to reverse the cruel and reckless policies of the previous Administration and to implement President Biden’s vision for a fair, orderly, and humane immigration system,” DPC head Susan Rice said in a statement to Politico.

A source told Politico that Olavarria hasn’t decided when her last day at the White House will be and will continue to work with the administration for the time being.

This comes as Tyler Moran, a senior adviser on migration, is set to leave this month after spending roughly six months with the Biden administration.

The Hill has reached out to White House for comment.

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

The suggestion by Susan Rice that Olavarria was able to help implement a “fair, orderly, humane immigration system” is preposterous.

The Biden Administration dishonestly continues to use Stephen Miller’s bogus, racially motivated Title 42 ruse to deny fair treatment of asylum seekers at the Southern Border. Garland’s regressive “Miller Lite” Immigration Courts are in free fall, paralyzed by an astounding, ever-expanding 1.5 million case backlog. There is no functioning due process asylum system at our borders. Nor has Biden established robust, realistic “overseas” refugee programs in Latin America that could help obviate the pressure at the border.

Most of Mayorkas’s and Garland’s ill-conceived proposed asylum regulations have been panned by the Round Table and other experts. Biden’s promise to reform and strengthen gender-based asylum has disappeared into the bureaucratic morass at DHS and DOJ. In plain terms, Biden’s human rights’ program is a mess — lacking leadership, moral courage, practical experience, and legal expertise.

These are the real reasons why the “progressive practical experts” who should be leading human rights and immigration reforms for Biden are instead abandoning ship. The “deterrence crowd” and those who live in mortal fear of the nativist right are “driving the train” for Biden.

These notable departures follow in the wake of the resignation of widely respected human rights/immigration expert Harold Koh who blasted the Biden Administration’s spineless, inept, and immoral performance on racial justice, human rights, and the Constitutional rights of vulnerable legal asylum seekers. https://immigrationcourtside.com/2021/10/04/%f0%9f%91%8d%f0%9f%8f%bcprogressive-legal-icon-harold-koh-rips-bidens-bogus-stephen-miller-lite-xenophobic-policies-resigns-dos-post-amid-a-cresendo-of-administration-lies/

Additionally, as covered earlier today, widely admired Immigration Judge Dana Leigh Marks retired at the end of the year. https://immigrationcourtside.com/2022/01/09/%f0%9f%98%8e%f0%9f%97%bd%e2%9a%96%ef%b8%8f%f0%9f%91%a9%e2%80%8d%e2%9a%96%ef%b8%8f-flash-judicial-maven-hon-dana-leigh-marks-retires-joins-round-table-%f0%9f%9b%a1%e2%9a%94%ef%b8%8f/

Garland blew the chance to use Marks’s last six to nine months prior to retirement to harness her incomparable knowledge and leadership to institute long overdue progressive personnel, procedural, and policy reforms to his disastrously dysfunctional Immigration Courts. Talk about loss of institutional knowledge of everything that has gone wrong at EOIR over the past two decades!

Also, ICE Principal Legal Advisor John Trasvina departed after an unusually short stint on the job, although he was replaced with another experienced immigration lawyer, Kerry Doyle.

Obviously, some of the “best and brightest” who once were willing to lend their expertise to an incoming Administration that (apparently disingenuously) claimed that it would reverse the “dehumanization of the other” by Trump and his cronies now believe their talents can be better used elsewhere.

As to the claims that the Olavarria and Moran departures were “normal,” don’t believe a word of it. Senior level policy advisors who believe their views are respected, making government better, and saving lives don’t “retire” after a few months on the job. It’s not like they weren’t bright enough to know their jobs would be highly stressful and personally inconvenient when they accepted their positions.

All this comes at a time when America is experiencing a worker shortage that many experts believe is being fueled by a declining birth rate and declining immigration. Seems like many of the workers we could use are legal asylum seekers who are being illegally turned around at our border while Mayorkas and Garland refuse to stand up for the rule of law. Could that have something to do with why those who have spent careers understanding the shortcomings of our immigration and human rights systems are “voting with their feet” on the Biden Administration’s muddled and wildly inconsistent approach to immigration?

🇺🇸Due Process Forever!

PWS

01-09-21

🤮👎🏽WASHPOST SLAMS BIDEN ADMINISTRATION FOR ABANDONING NEGOTIATIONS WITH FAMILIES WHO SUFFERED CHILD ABUSE BY SESSIONS & MILLER! — “Having condemned a policy that traumatized children and their parents, Mr. Biden now leads an administration fighting in court to deny recompense to those same families.”

“Floaters” — So, what’s the “dollar value” of brown-skinned human lives to Biden, Harris, & Garland? We’re about to find out!
EDS NOTE: GRAPHIC CONTENT – The bodies of Salvadoran migrant Oscar Alberto Mart??nez Ram??rez and his nearly 2-year-old daughter Valeria lie on the bank of the Rio Grande in Matamoros, Mexico, Monday, June 24, 2019, after they drowned trying to cross the river to Brownsville, Texas. Martinez’ wife, Tania told Mexican authorities she watched her husband and child disappear in the strong current. (AP Photo/Julia Le Duc)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/01/05/president-biden-broke-his-promise-separated-migrant-families/

Opinion by the Editorial Board

January 5 at 2:18 PM ET

When the Trump administration wrenched migrant babies, toddlers and tweens from their parents as a means of frightening away prospective asylum seekers, it was guilty of emotionally torturing innocent children. Americans of every political leaning expressed revulsion toward the policy implemented in 2018, especially when it became clear that the government had kept no clear records linking parents with their children — in other words, no ready means to reunite the families.

President Biden, as a candidate and also once in office, made clear his own disgust at the so-called zero-tolerance policy, calling it “criminal.” He said, correctly, that it “violates every notion of who we are as a nation.”

Now the president, having explicitly endorsed government compensation that would address the suffering of separated migrant family members, has apparently had a change of heart — or political calculation. In mid-December, the Justice Department abruptly broke off negotiations aimed at a financial settlement with hundreds of affected families. Having condemned a policy that traumatized children and their parents, Mr. Biden now leads an administration fighting in court to deny recompense to those same families.

The government has no means of alleviating the trauma inflicted by the previous president’s egregious treatment of those families. That is particularly true as regards the children, whose torment has been described and documented by medical professionals, advocates and journalists. The babies and toddlers who didn’t recognize their own mothers when they were finally reunited; the depression; the fear of further separations, even brief ones — the human aftershocks of Donald Trump’s heartlessness will linger for years, and for lifetimes in some cases.

The administration compounds the hurt by breaking off negotiations on compensating victims. The government must be held accountable; compensation is the most potent and credible vehicle for achieving that.

Granted, there may be a political price to pay. Republicans had a field day blasting the White House after media reports this fall suggested the government might pay $450,000 to separated family members — a settlement that could amount to $1 billion if applied to the several thousand affected migrants. Mr. Biden, apparently unaware of the status of negotiations at that time, said the reports, first published in the Wall Street Journal, were “garbage.” He later backed away from that remark, saying he did not know how much money would be suitable but that some amount was certainly due.

Now, it seems, all bets are off. In the absence of a negotiated settlement, the government would enter into what would likely be years of costly litigation, in which Mr. Biden’s Justice Department would be in the awkward position of defending a policy that Mr. Biden himself — and most Americans — have condemned as evil. There is no predicting how individual judges or juries might react to documented accounts of harm done to children. No one should be surprised if some were to award enormous damages — conceivably in amounts that exceed the $450,000 contemplated in the now-stalled negotiations.

By walking away from the bargaining table, Mr. Biden has broken an explicit, repeated promise. Whatever the political calculus behind that decision, it is morally indefensible.

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

Garland fails to stand up for the rights of families of color — again. At the same time, he ties up resources on a frivolous DOJ defense of the indefensible!

“Replacement theory,” White Nationalism, and racism always have been and remain at the core of the GOP’s anti-democracy insurrection. It’s no coincidence that Trump’s plans to de-stabilize American democracy began with cowardly attacks on vulnerable migrants (enabled by a failed Supremes) and culminated in open insurrection.

The dots aren’t that hard to connect. But, Garland doesn’t seem to be able to do it!

If Garland can’t handle the “low hanging fruit” — like settling these cases and creating a progressive judiciary at EOIR who will stand up for the rights of all persons while using expertise and “practical scholarship” to replace dysfunction with efficiency, his pledge to hold the January insurrectionists and their leaders accountable rings hollow!

I’m not the only one to note and question Garland’s uninspiring performance as Attorney General at a time of existential crisis. https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/editorials/article/Editorial-Merrick-Garland-isn-t-going-to-save-16752522.php?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=headlines&utm_campaign=sfc_opinioncentral&sid=5bfc15614843ea55da6b8709

For those who read the LA Times, there was a “spot on” letter to the editors today accurately characterizing Garland as the “Attorney General for different era.”

As I’ve noted before, this is NOT Ed Levi’s, Griffin Bell’s, or Ben Civiletti’s DOJ. It isn’t even Janet Reno’s DOJ. (I ought to know, as I worked under each of the foregoing.)

It’s an organization that has become increasingly politicized over the last two decades (as it was during Watergate), and that allowed itself to be weaponized by Trump’s White Nationalist regime. EOIR, Executive Orders, and immigration litigation were perhaps the most obvious, but by no means the only, examples.

🇺🇸 Due Process Forever!

PWS

01-07-22

🏴‍☠️NO ACCOUNTABILITY: ONE YEAR AFTER PUBLICLY INSTIGATING A FAILED COUP, TRUMP CONTINUES TO OPENLY PLOT TO OVERTHROW DEMOCRACY, AS NEO-FASCIST GOP & ITS TOADY POLITICOS LINE UP BEHIND THE “BIG LIE!” — THE GOP, & THOSE WHO SUPPORT & ENABLE IT, HAS ACTUALLY BECOME THE BIGGEST THREAT TO THE FUTURE OF OUR REPUBLIC!🤮👎🏽🏴‍☠️

S.V. Date
Senior White House Correspondent
HuffPost
PHOTO: HuffPost

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-coup-attempt_n_61c2733fe4b04b42ab6602a2

SV Date on HuffPost:

WASHINGTON — What if you attempted a coup but people were unwilling to wrap their heads around what you had done?

A year after Jan. 6, 2021, that is the peculiar situation in which Donald Trump finds himself. Instead of being carted off in handcuffs for inciting an insurrection against the United States, or even just being banished from federal office for life by the Senate, the former president instead remains the leader of one of the two major political parties and is openly considering another run for the White House in 2024.

. . . .

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

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jan/05/capitol-attack-january-6-democracy-america-trump?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Cas Mudde on The Guardian:

The government is finally taking the threat of far-right militia groups seriously. But the larger threat are the Republican legislators who continue to recklessly undermine democracy

One year ago, he was frantically barricading the doors to the House gallery to keep out the violent mob. Today, he calls the insurrection a “bold-faced lie” and likens the event to “a normal tourist visit”. The story of Andrew Clyde, who represents part of my – heavily gerrymandered – liberal college town in the House of Representatives, is the story of the Republican party in 2021. It shows a party that had the opportunity to break with the anti-democratic course under Donald Trump, but was too weak in ideology and leadership to do so, thereby presenting a fundamental threat to US democracy in 2022 and beyond.

The risk of a coup in the next US election is greater now than it ever was under Trump | Laurence H Tribe

Clyde is illustrative of another ongoing development, the slow but steady takeover of the Republican party by new, and often relatively young, Trump supporters. In 2015, when his massive gun store on the outskirts of town was still flying the old flag of Georgia, which includes the Confederate flag, he was a lone, open supporter of then-presidential candidate Trump, with several large pro-Trump and anti-“fake news” signs adorning his gun store. Five years later, Clyde was elected to the House of Representatives as part of a wave of Trump-supporting novices, mostly replacing Republicans who had supported President Trump more strategically than ideologically.

With his 180-degree turn about the 6 January insurrection, Clyde is back in line with the majority of the Republican base, as a recent UMass poll shows. After initial shock, and broad condemnation, Republicans have embraced the people who stormed the Capitol last year, primarily referring to the event as a “protest” (80%) and to the insurrectionists as “protesters” (62%), while blaming the Democratic party (30%), the Capitol police (23%), and the inevitable antifa (20%) for what happened. Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of Republicans (75%) believe the country should “move on” from 6 January, rather than learn from it. And although most don’t care either way, one-third of Republicans say they are more likely to vote for a candidate who refuses to denounce the insurrection.

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The increased anti-democratic threat of the Republican party can also be seen in the tidal wave of voting restrictions proposed and passed in 2021. The Brennan Center for Justice counted a stunning 440 bills “with provisions that restrict voting access” introduced across all but one of the 50 US states, the highest number since the Center started tracking them 10 years ago. A total of 34 such laws were passed in 19 different states last year, and 88 bills in nine states are being carried over to the 2022 legislative term. Worryingly, Trump-backed Republicans who claim the 2020 election was stolen are running for secretary of state in various places where Trump unsuccessfully challenged the results.

. . . .

At the same time, the Republican party has become increasingly united and naked in its extremism, which denies both the anti-democratic character of the 6 January attack and the legitimacy of Biden’s presidency, and is passing an unprecedented number of voter restriction bills in preparation for the 2022 midterms and 2024 presidential elections. As long as the White House mainly focuses on fighting “domestic violent extremism”, and largely ignores or minimizes the much more lethal threat to US democracy posed by non-violent extremists, the US will continue to move closer and closer to an authoritarian future.

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

You can read both articles in full at the above links.

If you are counting on AG Merrick Garland to “lead the charge” on establishing accountability, your optimism might be tempered by his own failure to “clean house” at DOJ and in particular by his failure to reform his wholly-owned Immigration Court system that was front and center in assisting and carrying out the Trump/Miller White Nationalist assault on the rule of law, primarily targeting individuals of color and the “world’s most vulnerable” seeking justice in our system.

🇺🇸Due Process Forever!

PWS

01-06-22

🗽🗽⚖️😇NY TIMES PAYS TRIBUTE TO LEGENDARY FOLK HERO & HUMAN RIGHTS ADVOCATE LISA BRODYAGA (1940-2021)

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/04/us/lisa-brodyaga-dead.html

Lisa Brodyaga, Crusading Lawyer for Immigrants’ Rights, Dies at 81

She became a folk hero representing asylum seekers fleeing violence in Central America, setting up shop in the Rio Grande Valley and building a refuge camp.

By Alex Vadukul

Jan. 4, 2022

As leftist revolution and U.S.-backed counter-insurgencies spread through El Salvador and Guatemala in the early 1980s, Central America became awash in bloodshed, sending refugees fleeing to the United States border in hopes of a new life.

When they got there, a combative immigration lawyernamed Lisa Brodyaga, who had only recently passed the Texas bar exam, was waiting.

She was running Proyecto Libertad, a pro bono legal initiative in Texas representing asylum seekers, and by the decade’s end she had helped defend thousands in court. She went on to earn a reputation as a litigious thorn in the side of federal border enforcement agencies for the next 40 years.

“Lisa was a leader in a whole movement of lawyers who decided to approach the representation of immigrants with a civil rights consciousness,” said Susan Gzesh, an immigrant rights expert who teaches at the University of Chicago. “She helped firmly establish that undocumented asylum seekers have rights under our Bill of Rights. She taught immigration lawyers to not be afraid to go into federal courts.”

Ms. Brodyaga (pronounced brod-YA-ga) died on Oct. 28 at her home at a refuge camp she founded near San Benito, Texas. She was 81. The cause was lung cancer, her son, Paul Mockett Jr., said. Her death was not widely reported at the time.

Wearing her hair in a long single braid down her back, Ms. Brodyaga was known to show up at court wearing sandals or cowboy boots. If the federal prosecutors she faced smirked at first, it was because they were uninitiated. By lunch break they were often stepping outside to collect themselves after the verbal barrage Ms. Brodyaga had directed at them in defense of her client.

“I like to be underestimated,” she once told law students at the University of Miami. “I like to have people think, ‘She’s just a hick lawyer.’” She added: “Go ahead, I dare you. Dismiss me.”

In the mid-1980s, as war raged in El Salvador, members of the independent Human Rights Commission of El Salvador were imprisoned by the country’s government, and Ms. Brodyaga traveled there to check on their condition.

. . . .

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

Read the complete tribute/obit at the link!

“Go ahead, I dare you. Dismiss me.”

That’s something to which today’s talented, dedicated, grossly under-appreciated NDPA lawyers can relate!

As an elitist who never had to operate “in the trenches of immigration law,” AG Garland obviously takes your and your colleagues’ legitimate demands for long overdue radical EOIR reform, real practical immigration/human rights expertise, and potential judicial and administrative talent “for granted” as he “busies himself” with “more important things” and runs our immigrant justice and asylum systems even more deeply into the ground (a hard concept to grasp after four years of Sessions & Barr — but progressive advocates had better start looking at Garland in a “new Miller Lite” and acting accordingly).

It looks like the only way you are going to get Garland’s attention is to keep taking him and his error-prone, anti-immigrant, Trump-era-holdover BIA “to the cleaners” in Federal Court — in the mold of the late, great, Lisa B!

Many thanks to my good friend and NDPA warrior queen Deb Sanders, who’s cast in that same mold as Lisa, for alerting me to this article!

Here’s a previous Courtside post on Lisa:

https://immigrationcourtside.com/2021/09/28/ndpa-😢-sad-news-gives-gives-all-of-us-a-chance-to-honor-ndpa-warrior-queen-for-a-lifetime-of-unswerving-devotion-to-due-process-equal-justice-for-migrants-s/

🇺🇸Due Process Forever!

PWS

01-05-21

☠️🤮⚰️ AMERICAN TRAVESTY — IN GARLAND’S TOTALLY DYSFUNCTIONAL (NON) COURT SYSTEM, LIFE OR DEATH⚰️ IS A COMPLETE “CRAP SHOOT!” — WHY ISN’T THE PRESSURE ON BIDEN’S AG TO FIX IT BEFORE MORE LIVES ARE UNJUSTLY LOST?

https://www.kqed.org/news/11900535/a-simple-paperwork-error-can-get-asylum-seekers-deported-rosa-diaz-got-lucky-on-a-lunch-break

Tyche Hendricks reports for KQED:

A Simple Paperwork Error Can Get Asylum Seekers Deported. Rosa Díaz Got Lucky on a Lunch Break

Jan 4

Sitting in her home in Colusa County on Dec. 29, 2021, Rosa Díaz holds the papers she was given by immigration officials when she fled Honduras and asked for asylum at the U.S. border. Díaz was ordered deported ‘in absentia’ when she missed a hearing in immigration court due to a clerical error in her address. (Courtesy of Rosa Díaz)

Rosa Díaz vividly remembers the summer day in 2019 when she showed up for an appointment at the Sacramento office of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

“The surprise I got on July 12 was that I was going to be deported,” she said, speaking in Spanish.

An ICE officer told her that a judge had ordered her removed from the country after she missed an immigration court hearing in Los Angeles the previous November. Díaz was stunned.

She had left Honduras with her three children in 2018 after police failed to protect her from an abusive partner who beat her close to death while she was pregnant with her youngest child. Over two weeks, they walked, got rides and took buses to the U.S. border, hoping to find protection. They were sent to an ICE family detention center in Texas for three weeks.

Before she was released from detention, Díaz, 40, gave ICE agents the phone number for her adult son, who lived in Maxwell, a town in rural Colusa County in the Sacramento Valley. Her son provided officials with his address, where his mom and siblings would be living. But the address ICE sent to the immigration court got botched: ICE listed the city as Los Angeles.

“I never received a notice of that hearing. If I had, I would have been there,” Díaz said. “My intention was to do things the right way.”

‘I never received a notice of that hearing. If I had, I would have been there.’Rosa Díaz, asylum seeker from Honduras

When she was released from detention with a temporary status called “parole,” she was given a year before she had to check in with ICE. Díaz said she thought she had already been granted asylum.

“When a person first gets here, they don’t know how things work, and nobody explained it to me,” she said.

The asylum process can be baffling, and, as Díaz learned, navigating it without a lawyer can be disastrous. Unlike in criminal cases, people in federal immigration court have no right to a court-appointed lawyer if they can’t find their own.

Like Díaz, thousands of newly arrived asylum seekers never get their day in court. They can be tripped up by paperwork, and a clerical error can be enough to get them deported.

Last year a third of all immigrants in asylum cases did not have representation, according to data analyzed by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, or TRAC, a research center at Syracuse University. And over the past two decades, just 10% of asylum seekers without legal representation won their cases, while those with lawyers were nearly four times as likely to win protection, according to TRAC’s data.

The luckiest lunch break

After passing an initial asylum screening, Díaz and her kids were released from family detention on June 20, 2018, and told to check in with ICE before her one-year parole document expired. So on June 13, 2019, Díaz voluntarily went to the ICE office in Sacramento. She was instructed to return on June 20 with all her documents, which she did. That day, ICE officials put her in a GPS ankle monitor. On July 12, they summoned her again, and that’s when she learned she had been ordered deported “in absentia” by a Los Angeles immigration judge on Nov. 27, 2018.

ICE officials told Díaz they planned to deport her that same day. But first, the office was closing for lunch.

“I went outside, sat down and burst into tears,” Díaz said. “I cried because I had gotten all the way here with my three children and I couldn’t imagine taking them back to Honduras.”

A pair of immigrant rights advocates with NorCal Resist who were leafleting outside the ICE building stopped to check on Díaz, said Katie Fleming, director of the removal defense program at the California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation in Sacramento. The advocates drove her to Fleming’s office and made an urgent plea for legal help.

“We were able to talk to her and then advocate with ICE to give her a few more days to be able to try to reopen that removal proceeding because she did not know about it,” Fleming said.

The swift response by the activists and lawyers was an incredible stroke of luck for Díaz. Attorneys succeeded in reopening her case. And in March, with Fleming representing her, she won asylum for herself and her children.

But what Díaz experienced is common for asylum seekers without a lawyer. Fleming said Díaz’s case shows how even people with legitimate claims to asylum can be ordered deported without getting a chance to make their case to a judge.

“She didn’t understand, as most people don’t, what the next process entailed in terms of applying for asylum,” she continued. “She didn’t realize that going to an ICE office is different from going to court.”

Judge Phan turned to a towering stack of blue folders for those not present. Then she signed deportation orders for 23 people who failed to appear.

Immigrant rights advocates have long argued for universal access to counsel for people in removal proceedings. In a January 2021 report, the American Bar Association made a series of recommendations for how the incoming administration of President Joe Biden could make the immigration system more fair and efficient by providing government funding for lawyers, among other things.

The stakes for people who are deported can include persecution, torture and death, the report noted.

“Unrepresented individuals in removal proceedings are inherently disadvantaged in an adversarial system in which the government is always represented by an experienced attorney,” the report warned.

The Biden administration has asked Congress to budget $15 million to provide representation to families and children, and $23 million for legal orientation programs, but Congress has yet to act.

Deported in absentia

When a person fails to appear for a hearing in immigration court, they can be ordered removed from the country in absentia. That’s what happened to Díaz, and it’s been happening with alarming regularity at San Francisco’s immigration court, according to Milli Atkinson, who runs the Immigrant Legal Defense Program at the Bar Association of San Francisco.

Atkinson said judges handed out scores of deportation orders in absentia from August to November under a new system ostensibly aimed at correcting bad addresses when mail was returned as undeliverable.

“What the court started doing in August is purposely taking cases that they knew people were unlikely to get their mail and rescheduling their hearing and sending a new notice out to an address that the court knows is incorrect,” Atkinson said. “Some of the judges were just reading off their names and their case numbers and ordering them removed in bunches, without looking at the individual file, making sure the information was all correct and really making no attempt to contact the individuals.”

It’s a self-defeating system, Atkinson said, because most immigrants never get the new notice, so they miss their new court date.

She acknowledged that it’s the responsibility of individuals to notify the court within five days every time they move. But many people in removal proceedings are checking in regularly with ICE under a supervision program, she said.

“A lot of times ICE and the government attorneys have information about where these people are and what their current addresses are, and they have no legal obligation to share those with the court,” she said.

At one “returned notice” hearing in San Francisco in late October, Judge Susan Phan had 31 cases on her afternoon docket, but only six of the people were present.

One woman in the courtroom was Nichol Valencia, a fluent English speaker originally from the Philippines who’s married to a U.S. Coast Guard officer. She said she learned that her December hearing date had been rescheduled for October when she checked the court’s website, concerned that COVID-19 might interfere with court business.

“We called you in today because we were concerned you were not getting hearing notices,” Phan told Valencia. “Even though you submitted your new address to the ICE officer, you have to separately submit it to the court.”

“I did submit a blue form to the court,” responded Valencia, who again provided her new address.

After scheduling a new hearing for Valencia in February, Judge Phan turned to a towering stack of blue folders for those not present. She rescheduled two cases, telling the ICE prosecutor he needed to provide more evidence. Then Phan signed deportation orders for 23 people who failed to appear.

Atkinson said she thinks the new system was an effort to cope with the court’s massive backlog, which recently surpassed 1.5 million cases.

“This was a way to help some cases get back on track that might have otherwise lost contact with the court, but the actual result is they’re deporting people in very high numbers,” she said.

In November, Atkinson sent a letter on behalf of a group of Bay Area legal advocates to the presiding judge for the San Francisco court expressing “grave concerns” about the returned notice dockets, arguing they violate the constitutional due process rights of people who are ordered deported in absentia.

In addition, the letter said, the COVID-19 pandemic has caused housing instability for many immigrants and restricted their access to legal services, two reasons the court should be more understanding.

In December, an official for the court system replied, calling the approach a “longstanding practice” for immigration courts throughout the country.

Courts “routinely create dockets for cases with returned hearing notices for efficiency and docket management,” wrote Alexis Fooshé, the communications and legislative affairs division chief of the Executive Office for Immigration Review. “Like every case before the court, immigration judges make decisions based on the specific and unique factors of each case in accordance with applicable law.”

Atkinson said if people in immigration proceedings had the right to court-appointed counsel, attorneys would help with the simple but essential task of keeping contact information current.

“And all of your mail would go to the lawyer’s office, so that would be a huge problem solved right there,” she said.

Díaz did not have a lawyer to sort out the mess caused when ICE erroneously entered her brother’s address. She’s grateful that the two advocates stopped to help when they saw her weeping outside the Sacramento ICE office.

“If they hadn’t been there, I wouldn’t be here,” she said. “I’d be back in my country and God knows what would have happened to me there.”

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

Garland’s epic failure to address the festering mess in his wholly-owned Immigration Courts is an ongoing and ever-escalating national catastrophe with cosmic human consequences and implications that go to the very future of our nation as a Constitutional democracy!

It’s also a betrayal of not only Biden’s campaign promises, of almost every so-called American value, but also of basic human decency and morality.

For every “lucky individual” like Rosa, there are thousands, probably tens or even hundreds of thousands, who “fall through the gaping, largely Government-created holes” of Garland’s ridiculously broken system.

That includes tens of thousands of potential refugees improperly turned around at the border because Garland has failed to: 1) stand up for the rule of law; and 2) establish a functioning asylum system in his Immigration Courts with competent, qualified judges and professional administrators.

I simply don’t know how he gets away with it! But, he does!

And advocates, NGOS, and supposedly “progressive” Dems in Congress seem to be too discombobulated or too feckless to get his attention and demand that he change his behavior. So, the carnage continues!

The ones who play the biggest price for Garland’s failures are the “unlucky Rosas” — men, women, children, many legally entitled to protection, the most vulnerable among us, who deserve better!

🇺🇸Due Process Forever!

PWS

01-05-21

THE GIBSON REPORT— 01-02-22 — Compiled By Elizabeth Gibson, Esquire, NY Legal Assistance Group — Garland’s Aimless Docket Reshuffling (“ADR”) Squeezes Refugees On Both Ends Of His Ludicrous Backlog, As Those Patiently Waiting Given Court Dates Nearly A Decade In The Future, While Recent Arrivals Mindlessly Rocketed To The “Front Of The Line” Struggle To Find Lawyers & Prepare Cases — Plus Other New Year News From The Dystopian World Of U.S. Immigration!

NEWS

President Biden promised to reform immigration policy. How has that been going?

NPR: President Biden had an ambitious agenda to overhaul the nation’s border policies. But as the end of the year approaches, many of those proposals have been blocked, reversed or simply abandoned.

Biden asks U.S. Supreme Court to hear ‘Remain in Mexico’ case

Reuters: The Biden administration on Wednesday asked the U.S. Supreme Court whether it needed to continue to implement a Trump-era policy that has forced tens of thousands of migrants to wait in Mexico for the resolution of their U.S. asylum cases. See also ‘Remain In Mexico’ Renewal May Bring More Solo Migrant Kids

Hundreds of Afghans denied humanitarian entry into US

AP: Since the U.S. withdrawal, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has received more than 35,000 applications for humanitarian parole, of which it has denied about 470 and conditionally approved more than 140, Victoria Palmer, an agency spokesperson, said this week. See also Months later, Afghan evacuees abroad and at US bases still wait to be resettled.

Mexico Is Detaining More US-Bound Migrants Than Ever

Vice: Authorities in Mexico detained more than a quarter of a million migrants this year, and most of them were from Honduras. See also Mexico disbands makeshift camp with thousands of migrants

“I Hope a Lawyer Will Answer”: Asylum Seekers Risk Deportation in Expedited Process

KQED: Advocates say the current system has more safeguards for migrant families and isn’t placing them in detention facilities, but the accelerated pace still makes it tough for asylum seekers like López to find legal representation.

LITIGATION/CASELAW/RULES/MEMOS

Top Immigration Litigation To Watch In 2022

Law360: Federal courts in 2022 will grapple with immigration law questions ranging from the extent of the president’s authority to set immigration enforcement priorities to federal courts’ ability to review immigration decisions made by the executive branch. Here, Law360 breaks down the cases to watch.

Biden Administration Petitions the High Court, Seeking to End Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” Program

ImmProf: The petition, which asks to review a decision of the Fifth Circuit court of appeals, addresses issues relating to the Migrant Protection Protocols, commonly known as the “Remain in Mexico” program.

Oral Argument and Other Court Operations at the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit

CA2: In light of the recent surge in Covid-19 infections, beginning January 4, 2022 oral arguments will be conducted remotely, by Zoom or teleconference.

Unpub. CA5 Niz-Chavez Remand: Lima-Gonzalez V. Garland

LexisNexis: Lima-Gonzalez v. Garland “Lima-Gonzalez’s NTA did not contain the information required to trigger the stop-time rule. See Niz-Chavez, 141 S. Ct. at 1478-79, 1485; see also § 1229(a)(1)(A)–(G). Neither did any of the subsequent notices of hearing. As a result, the Government has not furnished Lima-Gonzalez with the “single compliant document” required by statute. Niz-Chavez, 141 S. Ct…

Illinois’ law ending immigration detention in 2022 hits snag

WaPo: Three Illinois counties with such federal agreements faced a Jan. 1 deadline to end contracts. While one in downstate Illinois complied last year, two others are involved in a federal lawsuit challenging the law. The case was dismissed last month, but a federal judge on Thursday granted an extension while an appeal is considered. Authorities in McHenry and Kankakee counties now have until Jan. 13.

DOS Proposed Rule to Raise Several Consular Service Fees

AILA: DOS proposed rule which would raise several nonimmigrant visa application processing fees, the fee for the Border Crossing Card for Mexican citizens age 15 and over, and the waiver of the two-year residency requirement fee. Comments are due 2/28/22. (86 FR 74018, 12/29/21)

Third Delay of Effective Date of Final Rule on Pandemic-Related Security Bars to Asylum and Withholding of Removal

AILA: USCIS and EOIR interim final rule further delaying until 12/31/22 the effective date of the final rule “Security Bars and Processing” (85 FR 84160, 12/23/20). Comments on the extension of the effective date as well as the possibility of a further extension are due 2/28/22. (86 FR 73615, 12/28/21)

President Revokes Proclamation Suspending Entry of Certain People Who Pose a Risk of Transmitting Omicron Variant

AILA: Effective December 31, 2021, 12:01 am (ET), Presidential Proclamation 10315 was revoked, thus rescinding travel restrictions on Botswana, Eswatini, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, and Zimbabwe. Vaccine requirements remain in effect.

USCIS Extends Flexibility for Responding to Agency Requests

USCIS: In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services is extending the flexibilities it announced on March 30, 2020.

USCIS Provides Guidance on Expedited EADs for Healthcare Workers

AILA: USCIS stated that healthcare workers with a pending EAD renewal application, Form I-765, and whose EAD expires in 30 days or less or has already expired, can request expedited processing of their EAD applications. Proof of employment will be required.

RESOURCES

AILA: Client Flyer: U-Visa Petitioners – Bona Fide Determination and Employment Authorization

AILA: Practice Alert: DOS Expands Interview Waivers for Certain Nonimmigrant Visas

AILA: Client Flyer: Overview of the Naturalization Process and Basic Requirements

AILA: Practice Alert: Summary of Omicron Presidential Proclamation

AILA: Get the AILA Discount on the Spanish for Lawyers Online Course

AILA: Custody Redetermination Hearings And Material Change In Circumstances

Asylos Research

Ghana: Accessibility of Dialysis (AFR2020-27)

Nigeria: Mental Health Treatment (AFR2021-09)

Somalia: Situation of ‘Westernised’ Returnees (AFR2021-16)

Mexico: Persecution by and local/national presence of Cartel Jalisco and Familia Michoacana (AME2021-17)

Afghanistan: Treatment of Family Members of Human Rights Activists and Former Government Supporters after the Taliban Take-over (ASI2021-13)

Afghanistan: Availability of Psychiatric Treatment for Returnees with Mental Health Conditions and Treatment of Returnees with Mental Health Conditions by the Taliban (ASI2021-12)

Egypt: Opposing Female Genital Mutilation (FGM), Social Impact, and Availability of State Protection (MEN2021-18)

Egypt: Christians in Egypt & Obtention of Citizenship (MEN2021-17)

EOIR: Appearance Requirements at the New York – Varick Immigration Court (attached)

Project South: Escalating Jailhouse Immigration Enforcement: A Report on Detainers Issued by ICE Against Persons held by Local Law Enforcement Agencies in Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina from 2016-2018

DHS OIG: Continued Reliance on Manual Processing Slowed USCIS’ Benefits Delivery during the COVID-19 Pandemic

US Embassy DR: Minors under 14 present during an Immigrant Visa interview

EVENTS

1/5/22 TPS Roundtable – Strategies for Adjusting TPS Holders in Proceedings Who Have Traveled on AP

1/6/22 Broken Promises: MPP 2.0 and Perspectives from the Ground

1/11/22 Comprehensive Overview of Immigration Law (COIL)

1/14/21 Assisting Citizens of Afghanistan

1/25/22 Adoptions for Orphans and Family Members

1/27/22 Immigration Options and Resources For Victims of Human Trafficking

02/02/22 How to Apply for DOJ Full Accreditation

02/03/22 Webinar Series: Overview of Immigration Consequences of Crimes

02/03/22 Basic Immigration Law 2022: Business, Family, Naturalization and Related Areas

02/04/22 Asylum, Special Immigrant Juvenile Status, Crime Victim, and Other Immigration Relief 2022

3/23/22 ASISTA Virtual CLE Conference (Save the Date)

ImmProf

Monday, January 3, 2022

Immigration Reform Is Dead

The Need for Attorneys in Dedicated Docket Cases

Immigration Article of the Day: Constantine’s Legacy: Preserving Empire While Undermining International Law by Craig Mousin

Sunday, January 2, 2022

Immigrant of the Day: Luis Ortiz (Professional Boxer), Cuba

Upcoming Webinar — Broken Promises: MPP 2.0 and Perspectives from the Ground

Saturday, January 1, 2022

U.S. Citizens Placed on Watch List While Taking Part in Caravan Through Mexico

Immigration Article of the Day: Asylum Under Attack by Lindsay Harris

Celebrating Immprof Books & Book Chapters of 2021 * UPDATED *

Americans seeking to renounce their citizenship can’t for now

Friday, December 31, 2021

Celebrating Immprof Achievements in 2021

Happy New Year!

Opinion: Harry Reid’s immigration legacy put politics over country

Thursday, December 30, 2021

Immigration Article of the Day: We Broke It, We Own It: How To Meet The Climate Migration Future by Elizabeth Keyes

Biden Administration Petitions the High Court, Seeking to End Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” Program

JOTWELL Administrative Law Listings feature immigration

The Citizenship Angle of the Ghislaine Maxwell Sex Trafficking Case

Disillusionment and disappointment: Biden’s White House struggles to find its footing on immigration

Wednesday, December 29, 2021

Animated film about Afghanistan refugee in top ten movies list

Silver lining of remote learning for LEP parents

Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act

Latino USA: 9/11’s Immigration Legacy

Escalating Jailhouse Immigration Enforcement: A Report on Detainers Issued by ICE Against Persons held by Local Law Enforcement Agencies in Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina from 2016-2018

Tuesday, December 28, 2021

A Proclamation on Revoking Proclamation 10315

Biden’s First Year Brings Modest Changes to Immigration Policy

Immigration Article of the Day, The Unexamined Law of Deportation, by David Hausman

The most neglected story of 2021? Immigration

Monday, December 27, 2021

Afghans in America: WaPo Calls for a Christmas Miracle

Has President Biden kept his immigration promises?

Xenophobia Spills Into Japan’s Covid-Era Debate on Immigration

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

Thanks, Elizabeth!

The problem with “ADR” @ EOIR is chronic! It’s one that Garland seems determined to repeat, despite ample advice to the contrary.

Also, he’s ignored the availability of many “practical experts” on the outside who, if appointed to key EOIR positions, could have helped him solve this without stomping on due process (although, I admit the solution would have been easier in March 2021, when Garland was sworn in as AG, than it is after 9 months of his making it worse — not to mention that his “defiant tone-deafness” has probably “turned off” some of the top-flight talent he needed to “reach out” to). As the KQED article points out:

“But there’s a lot of room for improvement, and I don’t know if the people that are being named to supervise this actually know what’s happening in the trenches.”
- Duh! That’s what all of us have been saying. Truth is, they aren’t the right people, and they don’t know what’s happening. Not by a long shot!
- I also understand why Torres, who’s trying to maintain a relationship with Garland’s “Clueless Crew” is trying to be charitable.
- But, as someone not currently “out there in the trenches,” I don’t have to be so reticent. So, I’ll say what she can’t. This is a totally unacceptable and inexcusable performance from Garland!
Another reason why this program is a massive failure is that, like their ADR-promoting, backlog-building predecessors, Garland & Mayorkas started this misguided and mishandled program without seeking the advice, counsel, and support of the pro bono lawyers who have to staff it to make it work!
- Think of the total absurdity of what Garland is doing here! While a pro bono (or low bono) lawyer is having already prepared cases “orbited” years out on the docket (a process that usually requires re-preparation of the entire case), the phone is ringing off the hook with desperate, perspective new clients given unrealistically expedited hearing dates that should have been used for the cases “orbited” to the end of the docket.
Also, having not practiced privately for many years, Garland appears to have forgotten the Code of Ethics.
- Attorneys are obligated not to take on work (even pro bono work) that they can’t professionally and timely handle.
- Yet, Garland is pushing them to do exactly that! The choice is let folks try to prepare their own cases (literally tantamount to a “death sentence” in many cases); or
- Take on work you can’t handle (a clear ethical violation that could have the same unfavorable result for the client).
There actually are ways of working with outside experts to increase pro bono representation. One of the most promising is the the amazing VIISTA Program created and run by Professor Michele Pistone at Villanova Law to train non-attorney “Accredited Representatives” to handle pro bono asylum cases.
- I have no knowledge that Garland or anyone at EOJ/EOIR has ever reached out to Professor Pistone, despite recommendations that Garland do so.
- Worse yet, Garland has allowed his “EOIR Clown Show” to also create a “new backlog” in the approval process for Accredited Representatives! Talk about clueless, counterproductive mismanagement!
Garland’s mis-handling of EOIR and his new round of “Aimless Docket Reshuffling” raises serious issues about his own performance.
- Whatever happened to Democratic oversight of EOIR in Congress? Why is Garland getting a “free pass” on mismanagement of EOIR, his further undermining of Due Process in Immigration Court, and his disrespectful treatment of the immigration pro bono and low bono bar?

🇺🇸Due Process Forever!

PWS

01-04-22

Carlos Sauceda writes in the SF Chron:

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Maria Sacchetti & Sean Sullivan report for WashPost:

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Deepa Fernandes for the SF Chron:

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Olafimihan Oshin reports for The Hill:

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Tyche Hendricks reports for KQED:

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