Tag: Innovation Law Lab v. McAleenan

FINALLY: SPLIT 9TH CIR PANEL ENTERS NATIONWIDE INJUNCTION AGAINST “LET ‘EM DIE IN MEXICO” A/K/A “MIGRANT ‘PROTECTION’ PROTOCOLS” — Innovation Law Lab v. Wolf

9thMPPInjunction

Innovation Law Lab v. Wolf, 9th Cir., 02-28-20, published

PANEL:  Ferdinand F. Fernandez, William A. Fletcher, and Richard A. Paez, Circuit Judges.

OPINION BY:  Judge William A. Fletcher

DISSENTING OPINION:  Judge Ferdinand F. Fernandez

KEY QUOTE FROM MAJORITY:

In addition to likelihood of success on the merits, a court must consider the likelihood that the requesting party will

 

INNOVATION LAW LAB V. WOLF 49

suffer irreparable harm, the balance of the equities, and the public interest in determining whether a preliminary injunction is justified. Winter, 555 U.S. at 20. “When the government is a party, these last two factors merge.” Drakes Bay Oyster Co. v. Jewell, 747 F.3d 1073, 1092 (9th Cir. 2014) (citing Nken v. Holder, 556 U.S. 418, 435 (2009)).

There is a significant likelihood that the individual plaintiffs will suffer irreparable harm if the MPP is not enjoined. Uncontested evidence in the record establishes that non-Mexicans returned to Mexico under the MPP risk substantial harm, even death, while they await adjudication of their applications for asylum.

The balance of equities favors plaintiffs. On one side is the interest of the Government in continuing to follow the directives of the MPP. However, the strength of that interest is diminished by the likelihood, established above, that the MPP is inconsistent with 8 U.S.C. §§ 1225(b) and 1231(b). On the other side is the interest of the plaintiffs. The individual plaintiffs risk substantial harm, even death, so long as the directives of the MPP are followed, and the organizational plaintiffs are hindered in their ability to carry out their missions.

The public interest similarly favors the plaintiffs. We agree with East Bay Sanctuary Covenant:

On the one hand, the public has a “weighty” interest “in efficient administration of the immigration laws at the border.” Landon v. Plasencia, 459 U.S. 21, 34 (1982). But the public also has an interest in ensuring that “statutes enacted by [their] representatives”

 

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are not imperiled by executive fiat. Maryland v. King, 567 U.S. 1301, 1301 (2012) (Roberts, C.J., in chambers).

932 F.3d at 779 (alteration in original).

VII. Scope of the Injunction

The district court issued a preliminary injunction setting aside the MPP—that is, enjoining the Government “from continuing to implement or expand the ‘Migrant Protection Protocols’ as announced in the January 25, 2018 DHS policy memorandum and as explicated in further agency memoranda.” Innovation Law Lab, 366 F. Supp. 3d at 1130. Accepting for purposes of argument that some injunction should issue, the Government objects to its scope.

We recognize that nationwide injunctions have become increasingly controversial, but we begin by noting that it is something of a misnomer to call the district court’s order in this case a “nationwide injunction.” The MPP operates only at our southern border and directs the actions of government officials only in the four States along that border. Two of those states (California and Arizona) are in the Ninth Circuit. One of those states (New Mexico) is in the Tenth Circuit. One of those states (Texas) is in the Fifth Circuit. In practical effect, the district court’s injunction, while setting aside the MPP in its entirety, does not operate nationwide.

For two mutually reinforcing reasons, we conclude that the district court did not abuse its discretion in setting aside the MPP.

 

INNOVATION LAW LAB V. WOLF 51

First, plaintiffs have challenged the MPP under the Administrative Procedure Act (“APA”). Section 706(2)(A) of the APA provides that a “reviewing court shall . . . hold unlawful and set aside agency action . . . not in accordance with law.” We held, above, that the MPP is “not in accordance with” 8 U.S.C. § 1225(b). Section 706(2)(A) directs that in a case where, as here, a reviewing court has found the agency action “unlawful,” the court “shall . . . set aside [the] agency action.” That is, in a case where § 706(2)(A) applies, there is a statutory directive—above and beyond the underlying statutory obligation asserted in the litigation—telling a reviewing court that its obligation is to “set aside” any unlawful agency action.

There is a presumption (often unstated) in APA cases that the offending agency action should be set aside in its entirety rather than only in limited geographical areas. “[W]hen a reviewing court determines that agency regulations are unlawful, the ordinary result is that rules are vacated—not that their application to the individual petitioners is proscribed.” Regents of the Univ. of Cal. v. U.S. Dep’t of Homeland Sec., 908 F3d 476, 511 (9th Cir. 2018) (internal quotation marks omitted). “When a court determines that an agency’s action failed to follow Congress’s clear mandate the appropriate remedy is to vacate that action.” Cal. Wilderness Coalition v. U.S. Dep’t of Energy, 631 F.3d 1072, 1095 (9th Cir. 2011); see also United Steel v. Mine Safety & Health Admin., 925 F.3d 1279, 1287 (D.C. Cir. 2019) (“The ordinary practice is to vacate unlawful agency action.”); Gen. Chem. Corp. v. United States, 817 F.2d 844, 848 (D.C. Cir. 1987) (“The APA requires us to vacate the agency’s decision if it is ‘arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, or otherwise not in accordance with law . . . .”).

 

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Second, cases implicating immigration policy have a particularly strong claim for uniform relief. Federal law contemplates a “comprehensive and unified” immigration policy. Arizona v. United States, 567 U.S. 387, 401 (2012). “In immigration matters, we have consistently recognized the authority of district courts to enjoin unlawful policies on a universal basis.” E. Bay Sanctuary Covenant, 932 F.3d at 779. We wrote in Regents of the University of California, 908 F.3d at 511, “A final principle is also relevant: the need for uniformity in immigration policy. . . . Allowing uneven application of nationwide immigration policy flies in the face of these requirements.” We wrote to the same effect in Hawaii v. Trump, 878 F.3d 662, 701 (9th Cir. 2017), rev’d on other grounds, 138 S. Ct. 2392 (2018): “Because this case implicates immigration policy, a nationwide injunction was necessary to give Plaintiffs a full expression of their rights.” The Fifth Circuit, one of only two other federal circuits with states along our southern border, has held that nationwide injunctions are appropriate in immigration cases. In sustaining a nationwide injunction in an immigration case, the Fifth Circuit wrote, “[T]he Constitution requires ‘an uniform Rule of Naturalization’; Congress has instructed that ‘the immigration laws of the United States should be enforced vigorously and uniformly’; and the Supreme Court has described immigration policy as ‘a comprehensive and unified system.’” Texas v. United States, 809 F.3d 134, 187–88 (5th Cir. 2015) (emphasis in original; citations omitted). In Washington v. Trump, 847 F.3d 1151 (9th Cir. 2017), we relied on the Fifth Circuit’s decision in Texas to sustain the nationwide scope of a temporary restraining order in an immigration case. We wrote, “[W]e decline to limit the geographic scope of the TRO. The Fifth Circuit has held that such a fragmented immigration policy would run afoul of the

 

INNOVATION LAW LAB V. WOLF 53 constitutional and statutory requirement for uniform

immigration law and policy.” Id. at 1166–67. Conclusion

We conclude that the MPP is inconsistent with 8 U.S.C. § 1225(b), and that it is inconsistent in part with 8 U.S.C. § 1231(b). Because the MPP is invalid in its entirety due to its inconsistency with § 1225(b), it should be enjoined in its entirety. Because plaintiffs have successfully challenged the MPP under § 706(2)(A) of the APA, and because the MPP directly affects immigration into this country along our southern border, the issuance of a temporary injunction setting aside the MPP was not an abuse of discretion.

We lift the emergency stay imposed by the motions panel, and we firm the decision of the district court.

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At last, a breath of justice in halting, at least temporarily, an outrageously illegal program that is also a grotesque violation of our national values and humanity. Unfortunately, it has already resulted in thousands of injustices and damaged many lives beyond repair. That’s something that a clueless shill for authoritarianism, wanton cruelty, and abrogation of the rule of law like dissenting Judge Fernandez might want to think about. 

But, hold the “victory dance.” The regime will likely seek “rehearing en banc,” appealing to other enablers of human rights atrocities like Fernandez. And, if the regime fails there, they always can “short circuit” the legal system applicable to everyone else by having Solicitor General Francisco ask his GOP buddies on the Supremes, “The JR Five,” to give the regime a free pass. As Justice Sotomayor pointed out, that type of “tilt” has already become more or less “business as usual” as the regime carries out its nativist, White Nationalist immigration agenda. Indeed, Justices Gorsuch and Thomas have already announced their eagerness to carry the regime’s water for them by doing away with nationwide injunctions, even though they are the sole way for doing justice in immigration cases like this. 

But, at least for today, we can all celebrate a battle won by the New Due Process Army in the ongoing war to restore our Constitution, the rule of law, and human dignity.

Due Process Forever!

PWS 

02-29-20

Related posts:

  1. HOW “AMERICA’S KILLER COURTS” PROMOTE “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” — HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH: TRUMP & HIS WHITE NATIONALIST SYCOPHANTS & TOADIES TOUT LAWLESS POLICIES THAT VIOLATE LEGAL OBLIGATIONS & HELP KILL, RAPE, TORTURE THOSE RETURNED TO EL SALVADOR — Supremes & Article III Judiciary Complicit In Gross Human Rights Violations! 
  2. GROSS NATIONAL DISGRACE: “A Fucking Disaster That Is Designed to Fail”: How Trump Wrecked America’s Immigration Courts — Fernanda Echavarri Reports For Mother Jones On How Our Failed Justice System Daily Abuses The Most Vulnerable While Feckless Legislators &   Smugly Complicit Article III Judges Look On & Ignore The Human Carnage They Are Enabling — “ Two days after US immigration officials sent her to Tijuana, she was raped.”
  3. COMPLICITY HAS COSTS:  Article III Judges’ Association Apparently Worries That Trump, Barr, GOP Toadies Starting To “Treat Them Like Immigration Judges” — Do They Fear Descent To Status Of Mere Refugees, Immigrants, “Dreamers,” Unaccompanied Children, Or Others Treated As “Less Than Persons” By Trump, 5th Cir., 11th Cir., 9th Cir., & The Supremes’ “J.R. Five?” 
  4. WHERE’S THE OUTRAGE? — 9th CIRCUIT JUDGES ASSIST REGIME’S AGENTS IN COMMITTING “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” MERE YARDS FROM THE BORDER! — NDPA Leader Jodi Goodwin, Esquire, Speaks Out: “I’ve been practicing law for 25 years and the last four to five months of practicing law has broken me. I don’t want to fucking do this anymore. [Her voice breaks again] It sucks. How do you explain to people that you know they thought they were coming to a place where there’s freedom and safety and where the laws are just, but that’s not the situation? I’m very mad.”

FINALLY, 3D CIR. BLASTS THROUGH JURISDICTIONAL BS & TELLS U.S. DISTRICT COURT TO GIVE SOME MEANINGFUL JUDICIAL REVIEW TO SOME OF THOSE CAUGHT UP IN “LET ‘EM DIE IN MEXICO!” – But, Is It Too Little, Too Late For Most Of The 60,000 Poor Souls Illegally Condemned By The Regime To Deadly Misery On The Mexican Side of the Border? — E.O.H.C.; M.S.H.S. v. Sec. U.S. Dep’t of Homeland Security  

https://www2.ca3.uscourts.gov/opinarch/192927p.pdf

 

E.O.H.C.; M.S.H.S. v. Sec. U.S. Dep’t of Homeland Security, 3d Cir., 02-13-20, published

PANEL: AMBRO, KRAUSE, and BIBAS, Circuit Judges

OPINION BY: Judge Bibas

KEY QUOTE:

This case raises the age-old question: “If not now, when?” Mishnah, Pirkei Avot 1:14. For aliens who are challenging their removal from the United States, the answer is usually “later.” But not always. And not here.

. . . .

Immigration claims ordinarily proceed from an immigra- tion judge through the Board of Immigration Appeals to the court of appeals by petition for review of a final removal order. Review by district courts is not the norm. But neither is this case. Most of the claims here cannot await a petition for re- view. By the time appellants are ordered removed to Guatemala (if ever), it will be too late to review their claims about their return to Mexico in the meantime. Only their statutory right-to-counsel claim will still be redressable. So the INA does not bar review of the remaining claims. And there is federal-question jurisdiction over the Flores claim. Because the United States is a party to the Flores Settlement Agreement, the contract claim is governed by federal common law and so arises under federal law. In short, the District Court has juris- diction over most of the claims. We will thus affirm the dis- missal of the statutory right-to-counsel claim and otherwise re- verse and remand for the District Court to address the merits.

 

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The court actually makes one highly questionable assumption: That folks returned to Mexico will survive long enough to challenge the inevitable denial of their asylum claims in Barr’s biased “kangaroo courts.” The court fails to recognize/articulate the real driving force behind “Let ‘Em Die In Mexico:” Kill off the asylum applicants, make it impossible for them to raise their claims in the U.S. legal system by denying reasonable access, and/or demoralize individuals so that they will give up and accept their fate, even where it likely means death or torture. That’s what our “justice system” has become under the regime.

Perhaps, Article III Courts are starting to take notice of what Let ‘Em Die in Mexico is really about. The dead can’t get judicial review, at least in this world. We can only hope!

 

Too bad the awareness hasn’t extended to the 9th Circuit and their truly abominable, not to mention cowardly, decision in Innovation Law Lab v. McAleenan.

 

Article III Courts twiddle and fiddle, hem and haw, while real people die!

Due Process Forever; Complicit Courts Never!

 

PWS

 

09-14-20

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Related posts:

  1. GROSS NATIONAL DISGRACE: “A Fucking Disaster That Is Designed to Fail”: How Trump Wrecked America’s Immigration Courts — Fernanda Echavarri Reports For Mother Jones On How Our Failed Justice System Daily Abuses The Most Vulnerable While Feckless Legislators &   Smugly Complicit Article III Judges Look On & Ignore The Human Carnage They Are Enabling — “ Two days after US immigration officials sent her to Tijuana, she was raped.”
  2. HOW “AMERICA’S KILLER COURTS” PROMOTE “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” — HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH: TRUMP & HIS WHITE NATIONALIST SYCOPHANTS & TOADIES TOUT LAWLESS POLICIES THAT VIOLATE LEGAL OBLIGATIONS & HELP KILL, RAPE, TORTURE THOSE RETURNED TO EL SALVADOR — Supremes & Article III Judiciary Complicit In Gross Human Rights Violations! 
  3. WHERE’S THE OUTRAGE? — 9th CIRCUIT JUDGES ASSIST REGIME’S AGENTS IN COMMITTING “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” MERE YARDS FROM THE BORDER! — NDPA Leader Jodi Goodwin, Esquire, Speaks Out: “I’ve been practicing law for 25 years and the last four to five months of practicing law has broken me. I don’t want to fucking do this anymore. [Her voice breaks again] It sucks. How do you explain to people that you know they thought they were coming to a place where there’s freedom and safety and where the laws are just, but that’s not the situation? I’m very mad.”
  4. “SITTING DUCKS” IN “UNSAFE THIRD COUNTRIES” — How The Supremes, The 9th Circuit, The 5th Circuit, & Other Complicit Federal Appellate Courts Aid & Abet The Trump Regime’s Human Rights Violations — Would The “Privileged Robed Ones” Take Due Process & The Rule Of Law More Seriously If It Were THEIR Kids & Grandkids Being Kidnapped & Held for Ransom For The “Crime” Of Seeking Protection Under U.S. Laws?  

AS MARK MORGAN AND OTHER REGIME HUMAN RIGHTS ABUSERS CELEBRATE THEIR “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY,” & THE SUPREMES, THE 9TH CIRCUIT,  & OTHER ARTICLE III COURTS CONTINUE THEIR IMMORAL COMPLICITY, NEW HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH REPORT DOCUMENTS HARM  TO CHILDREN FROM “LET ‘EM DIE IN MEXICO” CHARADE – “A United States government program exposes children, as well as their parents, seeking asylum to serious risk of assault, mistreatment, and trauma while waiting for their cases to be heard, Human Rights Watch said today in a joint investigation report.”

Remain in Mexico
A girl peers out from an encampment at the U.S.-Mexico border where she and several hundred people waited to present themselves to U.S. immigration to seek asylum. / Photo by David Maung

 

https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/02/12/us-remain-mexico-program-harming-children#

 

(Washington, DC) – A United States government program exposes children, as well as their parents, seeking asylum to serious risk of assault, mistreatment, and trauma while waiting for their cases to be heard, Human Rights Watch said today in a joint investigation report.

Human Rights Watch, working with Stanford University’s Human Rights in Trauma Mental Health Program and Willamette University’s Child and Family Advocacy Clinic, found that the US Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP) program, commonly known as “Remain in Mexico,” compelled families with children to wait in unsafe environments in Mexico for many months. Parents said that prolonged immigration court proceedings, fear of being incarcerated, and uncertainty about the future took a toll on their family’s health, safety, and well-being. Many described changes in their children’s behavior, saying they became more anxious or depressed after US authorities sent them to Mexico to await their hearings.

“The conditions, threats to safety, and sense of uncertainty asylum seekers face while waiting in Mexico creates chronic and severe psychological stress for children and families,” said Dr. Ryan Matlow, clinical assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Stanford University School of Medicine. “We know that these forms of pervasive, unresolved complex trauma can lead to significant long-term negative consequences for child development and family functioning.”

Human Rights Watch and other investigators interviewed parents and children from 60 families seeking asylum between November 2019 and January 2020. Most families were from El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala, with a few from Cuba, Ecuador, and Peru. The investigators also spoke with lawyers, doctors, shelter providers, faith leaders, and Mexican officials.

Under the Migrant Protection Protocols, US immigration officials have required most Spanish-speaking asylum seekers who arrive in the US through Mexico to go to Mexico while their cases are heard. Parents said that while waiting in Mexico, they or their children were beaten, harassed, sexually assaulted, or abducted. Some said Mexican police had harassed or extorted money from them. Most said they were constantly fearful and easily identified as targets for violence.

US Department of Homeland Security guidance suggests that certain particularly vulnerable groups should not be placed in the program, but the guidance is vague and immigration agents interpret it variably. US Customs and Border Protection officials regularly return to Mexico families with infants and toddlers; indigenous families and Brazilians whose first language is not Spanish; and children and adults with serious health conditions.

Asylum hearings under the Migrant Protection Protocols raise various due process concerns, Human Rights Watch said. To get to court hearings in the United States, families must report to a designated border crossing point, which sometimes requires them to arrive as early as 3 a.m. in unsafe locations. Those sent to Mexicali or Piedras Negras must make journeys of 160 to 550 kilometers (100 to 340 miles) to reach their designated border crossing point.

All family members, including young children, must appear, and sit quietly for each court hearing. Families interviewed said that they were frequently required to wait for hours for a brief hearing, and agents have told parents they risked being sent back to Mexico without seeing a judge if their children made noise or could not sit still.

Families said that after each hearing, they were locked up in very cold, often overcrowded immigration holding cells, with men and teenage boys held separately, sometimes overnight or longer, before US officials returned them to Mexico. Some said they were considering abandoning their asylum cases because their children were afraid of being detained again.

A 27-year-old woman from Honduras described being detained in an El Paso holding cell with her daughter. “I asked for a blanket for the girl. They said no,” she said, saying that the guard did not give a reason.

Guards separate older boys under age 18 from their mothers and younger siblings, placing them with unrelated adults. A woman from Cuba said her 13-year-old son’s separation “had a traumatic effect on him.” Another described the effect of family separation on the boys he saw in his cell after his hearing: “It’s very inhumane. The guards don’t treat these boys like children, they treat them like adults. It’s illogical.”

“Locking families up in frigid, overcrowded cells and separating boys from their mothers is traumatizing,” said Michael Garcia Bochenek, senior children’s rights counsel at Human Rights Watch. “The US government should never inflict cruelty on children, especially not as the price of getting their day in court.”

All governments are obligated to respect the customary international law principle of nonrefoulement – the prohibition on returning a person to a country where they are at risk of persecution, torture, or other cruel or inhuman treatment. Governments are also obligated to extend specific protections to children, whether traveling alone or with families, including by giving primary consideration to their best interests.

The US government should immediately terminate the MPP program and cease all returns of non-Mexican asylum seekers to Mexico. Instead, it should revert to the global norm of allowing asylum seekers to remain in the country where their claims are heard. The government should safeguard asylum seekers’ right to a fair and timely hearing by establishing an adequately resourced, independent immigration court system with court-appointed legal representation for asylum seekers who are members of particularly vulnerable groups.

“‘Remain in Mexico’ is putting at risk families who are already facing desperate situations,” said Dr. Nancy Wang, professor of emergency medicine at Stanford University Medical Center. “It’s inexcusable for the US government to subject children and families to crowded, unsanitary, insecure conditions with inadequate protection from infectious diseases – whether in US immigration detention or in overstretched shelters in Mexico.”

For additional information on the findings, please see below.

Migrant Protection Protocols Program

The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) began implementing the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), also known as “Remain in Mexico,” on January 29, 2019. Under the program, US immigration officers send most people seeking asylum who have entered the United States by land from Mexico to Mexican border towns while their cases are pending before US immigration courts. As of December, US officials sent more than 59,000 people to Mexico under the program, including at least 16,000 children.

Under the program, families with children are sent to Mexico regardless of the children’s ages. DHS has stated that people “in special circumstances,” including those with “[k]nown physical/mental health issues,” will not be placed in the program, but US immigration officials apply the DHS guidance inconsistently, with reports that people who are critically ill, pregnant, or living with disabilities have been sent to Mexico to await their asylum hearings. According to DHS guidelines, unaccompanied children should not be placed in the program. The program applied only to asylum seekers from Spanish-speaking countries other than Mexico, but DHS announced that beginning January 29, 2020, it had begun requiring Portuguese-speaking Brazilians who are seeking asylum to remain in Mexico.

In the year since the program began, US officials have sent children in families seeking asylum to Ciudad Juárez, Matamoros, Mexicali, Nuevo Laredo, Piedras Negras, and Tijuana, and, as of January 2, to Nogales.

Sent to Danger

Asylum seekers interviewed said they or their children had been violently attacked, robbed at knifepoint, or extorted in Ciudad Juárez, Matamoros, Mexicali, Nuevo Laredo, and Tijuana while transiting through these cities before they sought asylum, or after US officials sent them to those cities. Three families said they had been abducted for ransom, in Nuevo Laredo; one family for eight days. Four families said their children had been sexually assaulted after US officials sent them to Mexico.

Two women said they were raped after being sent to Mexico, including one who was abducted and raped the day US officials sent her to Mexico. Two families said they were abducted and held for ransom almost immediately after arriving. Another woman described being robbed by armed men as she crossed into Mexico from the United States.

These accounts are in addition to 29 reports of harm to asylum seekers in Ciudad Juárezdocumented by Human Rights Watch in a July 2019 report.

An October 2019 study by the US Immigration Policy Center of the University of California San Diego found that one-quarter of more than 600 asylum seekers returned to Mexicali and Tijuana were threatened with physical violence while they waited in Mexico for their immigration court hearings.

Human Rights First has tracked more than 800 violent attacks on people seeking asylum, including cases of murder, rape, and abduction for ransom, in the year since the program began. That figure includes at least 200 cases of alleged kidnapping or attempted kidnapping of children.

In the current investigation, some families described extortion and other harassment by Mexican police. Edwin F. (all names are pseudonyms), a 28-year-old from Honduras staying in a shelter in Ciudad Juárez with his wife and 5-year-old son, said in January 2020: “Yesterday the police stopped a group of us. They asked all of us where we were from. They searched through our phone history as if we were coming to do harm to the country. They held us close to half an hour while they searched us, even our son. They asked for money. I didn’t have any.” His wife, Marisela, 21, said that when the police officers searched her: “I had some sanitary pads in a shopping bag. They dumped them out on the ground. Everything I had, they dumped out on the ground.” The encounter traumatized their 5-year-old. “He became really anxious,” his father said. “He started to cry uncontrollably.”

Under DHS policy, people seeking asylum should receive an interview with an asylum officer, known as a “credible fear” interview, if they tell immigration agents they fear harm in Mexico. DHS guidance states that “a third-country national should not be involuntarily returned to Mexico . . . if the alien would more likely than not be persecuted. . . or tortured.”

Many families said these interviews were by telephone and not face-to-face. Assessing these interviews, a former asylum officer wrote: “[The MPP] process places on the applicants the highest burden of proof in civil proceedings in the lowest quality hearing available.”

“If you say you’re afraid of going back to Mexico, they put you in a cell in the hielera [the “freezer,” referring to an immigration holding cell],” said Nelly O., a 27-year-old Honduran woman. “You wait for a call. They call this a ‘credible fear’ interview. When the call comes, it could be nighttime. You spend the entire night in the hielera.”

The families who spoke to the investigation team said they received an interview, but organizations working in Ciudad Juárez and Tijuana told Human Rights Watch that many asylum seekers had not. “People are now being denied interviews, with no reason given and no documentation of denial,” said Tania Guerrero, an attorney with the Estamos Unidos Asylum Project of CLINIC. She said she had heard of more than 10 such cases in El Paso in a single week in January.

Every family we interviewed said immigration officials did not actively ask them if they feared being sent to Mexico, and DHS guidance does not require them to. “They didn’t really ask us what our case was or why we left our countries,” said Maria Q., a 41-year-old from Honduras, of her hearing in San Diego in October. “They said they couldn’t do anything. They just handed us some papers. They didn’t pay attention to what we needed or what we said.”

Marisela F., a 21-year-old from Honduras, said that at her hearing in El Paso in December with her husband and their 5-year-old son: “The officials didn’t ask about Mexico.” While one of the papers they received before they were sent to Ciudad Juárez stated, “Attached is a credible fear worksheet,” they had no memory of ever receiving such a worksheet and had no copy of one among the papers from their legal proceedings.

Similarly, the US Immigration Policy Center found that more than one-third of people seeking asylum were not asked by US immigration officials if they feared being sent to Mexico. Of those who were asked, nearly 9 out of 10 told immigration agents they feared harm if returned to Mexico; nearly 60 percent of them were not given a secondary interview to explain their fears.

Families returned to Mexico despite their expressed fears of harm said they were afraid to request interviews during subsequent court hearings. They said their initial experience suggested that they would not be believed and that requesting an interview would only mean more time detained. Julián M., a 28-year-old Honduran man, said that the second time he and his family went for their court hearing, they decided not to ask for a call to explain their fear of returning to Mexico. “If we did, we would have to wait another night in the cell,” he said.

Ordeal Getting to Immigration Court

Asylum seekers sent to Mexicali must find transportation to Tijuana, 180 kilometers (110 miles) west, to report at the border for immigration court hearings in San Diego. Families sent to Piedras Negras must travel an equivalent distance to Laredo for hearings.

“From Mexicali, we had to make our way here [to Tijuana],” Maria Q. said. “The immigration agents didn’t give us any directions. They didn’t tell us where there were shelters.”

Children and families sent to Nogales will have to make their way to Ciudad Juárez, a 550-kilometer (340-mile), seven-and-a-half-hour journey by the most direct route through Mexico, for hearings.

If children and families cannot or do not make the long, potentially dangerous journey, an immigration judge can reject their asylum claim and in their absence order them deported.

Families said that immigration agents told them they had to arrive at the border crossings between 3 a.m. and 4 a.m. for hearings beginning at 8 a.m.

Families in Tijuana said that because of the difficulty and danger of traveling from their shelters in the middle of the night, especially with children, they stayed in hotel rooms if they could afford to. Many, including young women with toddlers, said they did not have the money and spent the night on the street outside the border crossing. Some families described concerns about being stalked or profiled while looking for hotels or waiting in the street and feared that they could be extorted or kidnapped.

Once allowed to enter US territory, families undergo health screenings, including lice checks, then are transported to the immigration court. If all family members do not pass the health screening, including the lice checks, the family is rescheduled for another hearing, often a month or more later.

“We wait in a hallway, seated in chairs,” said Nuria J. “The kids are right there with us. There’s nowhere else for them. They can’t play. The guards don’t permit them to move around. They reprimand you if the kids get out of the chairs. You sit all day. It’s a long time.” Another woman said: “If you have a baby and you need to change your baby’s diapers, they’ll give you a diaper. But there’s no place to go. You have to change your baby on the floor, right there in the hallway.”

Blanca M., 31, attended her first immigration court hearing in August with her husband and their three daughters, all under age 5. “We had nothing to eat from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.,” she said. “The officials wanted us to keep the kids quiet. Really I was at the point of giving up.” Her husband added: “One guard kept saying, ‘Those of you with children, control them. If your children are fucking around, I can take away your court hearing.’ It’s almost impossible to get a 1-year-old to stay seated in a chair.” They said the same thing happened inside the courtroom.

Some families said they were thinking of abandoning their asylum claims because the process was so traumatic for their children.

A Bewildering Process and Little Access to Counsel

Families interviewed in Ciudad Juarez and Tijuana described a chaotic, confusing process once they saw an immigration judge.

Most expected that they would be able to explain their situation to a judge immediately, but the first hearing, a “master calendar” hearing, is a brief session to handle preliminary matters and set a date for a longer individual hearing. Asylum seekers who need more time to prepare or to seek legal representation are often rescheduled for an additional master calendar hearing. Some families said they had three brief master calendar hearings. Most we spoke to said they were sent to Mexico after each hearing with very little understanding of what had happened and what they needed to do to pursue their claims.

Most papers they received were in English. They must submit their asylum applications in English, with all supporting documentation translated into English.

Associated Press reporters who visited immigration courts in 11 cities, including El Paso and San Diego, described what they saw as “nonstop chaos” – overcrowded courtrooms, evidence misplaced in stacks of paper files, and hearings without interpreters, among other shortcomings.

People seeking asylum in the United States are not guaranteed legal representation. Instead, US law states that they have the “privilege of being represented (at no expense to the government).” Pro bono or low-cost legal representation is difficult to find even for those inside the country. For the tens of thousands of families sent to Mexico, obtaining counsel is nearly impossible – with nowhere near enough pro bono lawyers to meet the need. Only 14 of the 1,155 cases decided in the program’s first five months, 1.2 percent, had legal representation.

Immigration officials provided a woman who attended a hearing in Laredo a list of legal service providers – showing lawyers in Dallas, 700 kilometers (430 miles) away.

Some asylum seekers alleged that abuses by US immigration agents directly affected their ability to present their claims. Nicola A. said a uniformed US border agent tore up the documents corroborating her account of persecution in her home country. She now fears that she will not have sufficient proof to support her asylum claim.

Detention in Frigid US Immigration Holding Cells

Most of the families interviewed said that they spent at least one night and sometimes more after their court hearing in the immigration holding cells known as the hieleras.

These holding cells are notoriously cold, with temperatures reaching as low as 15 degrees Celsius (59 degrees Fahrenheit). People detained in these cell have frequently been subjected to substandard conditions and abusive treatment, as Human Rights Watch and other groups have consistently reported.

“When we entered, the guards turned the air conditioning up,” said Maria Q. “They took away our sweaters and said they would wash them, but they never returned them.”

Wendy G., 32, from Honduras, was held in the hielera with her 12-year-old daughter and 10 and 8-year-old sons in August and again in September after each of her court hearings. “It was really cold both times,” she said. “Some of the guards shouted at us…They would give us food that was still frozen. They told us we risked being locked up more days if we misbehaved.”

Families said immigration holding cells could be very overcrowded, consistent with reports in June by lawyers and the DHS Office of Inspector General. Edwin F. said that after his family’s court hearing in December, “We were held in the [border station] cells…My wife was held with our son, I was in another cell. There were 17 of us in a small space. It was hard to lie down.” Because their court date was on December 23, they stayed in the holding cells for four days, returning to Ciudad Juárez on December 27.

Julián M. said that after he and his family had a court hearing in October, they were held in an El Paso immigration holding cell:

The cell I was in had a capacity of 38. There was a sign. It was in English, but I understood the word “capacity,” and right next to it was the number 38. We all counted ourselves. There were 112 of us in that cell. At first there were 99. Then the guards brought 13 more. The 13 didn’t fit. We were all sleeping on the floor. An official told us to get up so everyone could fit in the cell. He had a stun gun. He threatened us with it, saying, “If you don’t get up, I’ll shoot you with the stun gun.” Of course everyone immediately got up. Nobody slept that night.

Most of the families interviewed said they were detained for one or two days after their hearings, but some families described periods lasting three or four days or longer. Nuria J. said that when she was in the hielera with her son and daughter: “[t]here was one guy, maybe 35 years old, who said he had spent seven days locked up after his court hearing.”

Families in immigration holding cells have no opportunity to bathe. Many described the cells as “dirty” and “filthy.”

Some described significant health concerns in the holding cells. Nicola A., who has public health training, said that while she and her family were in immigration holding cells, “I noticed that there were numerous people carrying lice, as well as people showing signs and symptoms of varicella [chicken pox]. Nonetheless, we were all kept together in the same rooms – these conditions were extremely unsanitary.

Previous reports and inspections of immigration holding cells by government inspectors, Human Rights Watch, and others have also found unsanitary and otherwise substandard conditions, including flu, lice, scabies, shingles, and chicken poxtransmission, overcrowding, and inadequate food. A San Antonio-based group of volunteer doctors, nurses, and social workers, Sueños Sin Fronteras, found that new medical conditions arose while in immigration holding cells, including “a lot of boils and skin rashes, attributable to the lack of hygiene, and severe constipation, attributable to the dehydration and poor food intake” and near-universal “complaints of flu symptoms or respiratory problems or both.”

Adverse Consequences for Mental Well-Being

The combined trauma of families’ flights from persecution, and the dangers they faced on their journeys to the United States, and now face in Mexico, have had serious negative effects on their mental well-being.

“The children and families we saw showed incredible strength and resilience,” Dr. Ryan Matlow said. “At the same time, the conditions they face while waiting for their asylum hearings continuously erode the resources and protective influences that would help them maintain their physical and psychological health. Trauma and adversity have a cumulative impact on health, meaning that chronic stress over time, along with repeated exposure to threats increase the prevalence and severity of possibly long-lasting negative physical and mental health outcomes.”

The families interviewed described their despair, hopelessness, anxiety, and deteriorating family relationships. “Families are doing their best to survive and adapt to the circumstances they are placed in, but the sense that they are under chronic threat and danger leads to long-term experiences of anxiety, mistrust, hypervigilance, behavioral reactivity, withdrawal, and fatigue,” Matlow said. He said that children were especially susceptible to trauma, which is associated with learning difficulties, behavior problems, health impairment, and shortened life expectancy.

“It’s hardest on our son,” said Edwin F., choking up as he described the changes in his 5-year-old son during the three months they had been in Mexico. “He isn’t prepared mentally for these things. We’ve seen a change in him… Before he was more easygoing. Now he’s easily bothered, more irritable, gets angry easily. He’s anxious and impulsive now, he doesn’t control himself. He was more well-behaved in Honduras. Now he misbehaves. We’ve seen a complete change in the boy. We didn’t want this life for our son.”

Tania Guerrero, the CLINIC project attorney, said: “The women I speak to tell me, ‘Nobody understands what we’re going through here [in Ciudad Juárez].’ They have been here eight months. They’re exhausted, alone, miserable. They want to get on with their lives. The level of disillusionment and despair they feel is profound.”

Nicola A. said:

We are constantly under stress by our inability to request asylum and find shelter in a safe place. We are afraid and anxious in Mexico, given that our kidnappers are still pursuing us. We are afraid of being separated and detained again in the horrendous conditions in immigration detention… We experience these fears every day. We have ongoing health concerns and we are running out of money to pay for medication and treatment… This entire experience has had a negative impact on our family.

Our son appears traumatized and is more quiet, depressed, and withdrawn than I have ever seen him before. My husband and I are constantly anxious and irritable due to the constant stress. We are desperate, and we are losing hope that we will be able to find safety and refuge from the persecution and victimization that we have experienced. We are starting to believe that there is no safe place where we can go and be accepted.

 

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

The stain of America’s widespread, intentional, illegal abuse of vulnerable refugees, the arrogance of human rights abusers like Trump, Miller, Morgan, Barr, Pompeo, Sessions and their accomplices, and the cowardly failure of the Supremes and too many other Article III Judges to defend the Constitution and protect humanity in the face of tyranny will be indelible.

 

The truth is out there. While it might not set us free or save the lives of those being targeted by our Government, it will not go away and they will not escape moral accountability for their betrayal of human decency.

Due Process Forever!

 

PWS

 

02-12-20

 

Related posts:

  1. GROSS NATIONAL DISGRACE: “A Fucking Disaster That Is Designed to Fail”: How Trump Wrecked America’s Immigration Courts — Fernanda Echavarri Reports For Mother Jones On How Our Failed Justice System Daily Abuses The Most Vulnerable While Feckless Legislators &   Smugly Complicit Article III Judges Look On & Ignore The Human Carnage They Are Enabling — “ Two days after US immigration officials sent her to Tijuana, she was raped.”
  2. HOW “AMERICA’S KILLER COURTS” PROMOTE “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” — HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH: TRUMP & HIS WHITE NATIONALIST SYCOPHANTS & TOADIES TOUT LAWLESS POLICIES THAT VIOLATE LEGAL OBLIGATIONS & HELP KILL, RAPE, TORTURE THOSE RETURNED TO EL SALVADOR — Supremes & Article III Judiciary Complicit In Gross Human Rights Violations! 
  3. COURTSIDE HAS BEEN AT THE FOREFRONT OF EXPOSING THE “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” COMMITTED BY THE REGIME AND THE MORAL CULPABILITY OF THOSE WHO WILLFULLY CARRY OUT & ENABLE THESE ATROCITIES — The “Mainstream Media” Is Now Channeling Courtside! — “In the meantime, no government has the right to treat people with such abject inhumanity. History will remember Trump for this, but it will also remember the people who enable such atrocious acts.”
  4. COMPLICITY HAS COSTS:  Article III Judges’ Association Apparently Worries That Trump, Barr, GOP Toadies Starting To “Treat Them Like Immigration Judges” — Do They Fear Descent To Status Of Mere Refugees, Immigrants, “Dreamers,” Unaccompanied Children, Or Others Treated As “Less Than Persons” By Trump, 5th Cir., 11th Cir., 9th Cir., & The Supremes’ “J.R. Five?” 

GROSS NATIONAL DISGRACE: “A Fucking Disaster That Is Designed to Fail”: How Trump Wrecked America’s Immigration Courts — Fernanda Echavarri Reports For Mother Jones On How Our Failed Justice System Daily Abuses The Most Vulnerable While Feckless Legislators &   Smugly Complicit Article III Judges Look On & Ignore The Human Carnage They Are Enabling — “ Two days after US immigration officials sent her to Tijuana, she was raped.”

Fernanda Echavarri
Fernanda Echavarri
Reporter
Mother Jones

https://apple.news/AyKjNs5gOQJqIJ2_IeeQvcg

Fernanda Echavarri reports for Mother Jones:

“A Fucking Disaster That Is Designed to Fail”: How Trump Wrecked America’s Immigration Courts

SAN DIEGO IMMIGRATION COURT, COURTROOM #2;
PRESIDING: JUDGE LEE O’CONNOR

Lee O’Connor has been in his courtroom for all of two minutes before a look of annoyance washes over his face.

Eleven children and six adults—all of them from Central America, all of them in court for the first time—sit on the wooden benches before him. They’ve been awake since well before dawn so they could line up at the US-Mexico border to board government buses headed to immigration court in downtown San Diego, Kevlar-vested federal agents in tow. Like the dozens of families jam-packed into the lobby and the six other courtrooms, they’ve been waiting out their asylum cases in Mexico, often for months, as part of the Trump administration’s controversial border policy, the Migrant Protection Protocols.

O’Connor has a docket full of MPP cases today, like every day. Before he gets to them, though, he quickly postpones a non-MPP case to January 2021, explaining to a man and his attorney that he simply doesn’t have time for them today, motioning to the families in the gallery. While he’s doing this, the little girl in front of me keeps asking her mom if she can put on the headphones that play a Spanish translation of the proceedings. A guard motions the little girl to be quiet. 

For months, immigration attorneys and judges have been complaining that there’s no fair way to hear the cases of the tens of thousands of Central Americans who have been forced to remain on the Mexican side of the border while their claims inch through the courts. MPP has further overwhelmed dockets across the country and pushed aside cases that already were up against a crippling backlog that’s a million cases deep, stranding immigration judges in a bureaucratic morass and families with little hope for closure anytime in the near future.

I went last month to San Diego—home to one of the busiest MPP courts, thanks to its proximity to Tijuana and the more than 20,000 asylum seekers who now live in shelters and tent cities there—expecting to see logistical chaos. But I was still surprised at how fed up immigration judges like O’Connor were by the MPP-driven speedup—and by the extent to which their hands were tied to do anything about it.

Once O’Connor is done rescheduling his non-MPP case, he leans forward to adjust his microphone, rubs his forehead, and starts the group removal hearing. The interpreter translates into Spanish, and he asks if the adults understand. “Sí,” they say nervously from the back of the courtroom. O’Connor goes down his list, reading their names aloud with a slight Spaniard accent, asking people to identify themselves when their names are called. He reprimands those who do not speak up loud enough for him to hear.

O’Connor, who was appointed to the bench in 2010, is known for being tough: Between 2014 and 2019, he has denied 96 percent of asylum cases. He explains to the migrants that they have the right to an attorney, although one will not be provided—there are no public defenders in immigration court. O’Connor acknowledges finding legal representation from afar is difficult, but he tells them it’s not impossible. He encourages them to call the five pro bono legal providers listed on a sheet of paper they received that day. The moms sitting in front of me have their eyes locked on the Spanish interpreter, trying to absorb every bit of information. Their kids try their best to sit quietly.

As he thumbs through the case files, O’Connor grows increasingly frustrated: None of them has an address listed. “The government isn’t even bothering to do this,” he grumbles. The documents for MPP cases list people’s addresses as simply “Domicilio Conocido,” which translates to “Known Address.” This happens even when people say they can provide an address to a shelter in Mexico or when they have the address of a relative in the United States who can receive their paperwork. “I’ve seen them do this in 2,000 cases since May,” O’Connor says, and the Department of Homeland Security “hasn’t even bothered to investigate.” He looks up at the DHS attorney with a stern look on his face, but she continues shuffling paperwork around at her desk.

O’Connor picks up a blue form and explains to the group that they have to change their address to a physical location. The form is only in English; many of the adults seem confused and keep flipping over their copies as he tells them how to fill it out. O’Connor tells them they have to file within a week—perhaps better to do it that day, he says—but it’s unclear to me how they could follow his exacting instructions without the help of an attorney. He points out other mistakes in the paperwork filed by DHS and wraps up the hearing after about 45 minutes. The families don’t know that’s typical for a first hearing and seem perplexed when it ends. 

O’Connor schedules the group to come back for their next hearing in five weeks at 8:30 a.m. That will mean showing up at the San Ysidro port of entry at 4:30 a.m.; the alternative, he says, is being barred from entering the United States and seeking forms of relief for 10 years. “Do you understand?” he asks. The group responds with a hesitant “Sí.”

The Trump administration designed MPP to prevent people like them from receiving asylum, and beyond that, from even seeking it in the first place. First implemented in San Diego in late January 2019 to help stem the flow of people showing up at the southern border, the policy has since sent somewhere between 57,000 and 62,000 people to dangerous Mexican cities where migrants have been preyed upon for decades. Their cases have been added to an immigration court that already has a backlog of 1,057,811 cases—up from 600,000 at the time when Obama left office—according to data obtained by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University.

The skyrocketing immigration court backlog

View on the original site.

According to immigration judge Ashley Tabaddor, who spoke to me in her capacity as union president of the National Association of Immigration Judges, MPP has constituted a fundamental change to the way courts are run. DHS, she says, is “creating a situation where they’re physically, logistically, and systematically creating all the obstacles and holding all the cards.” The MPP program has left the court powerless, “speeding up the process of dehumanizing the individuals who are before the court and deterring anyone from the right to seek protection” All this while the Department of Justice is trying to decertify Tabbador’s union—the only protection judges have, and the only avenue for speaking publicly about these issues—by claiming its members are managers and no longer eligible for union membership. Tabaddor says the extreme number of cases combined with the pressure to process them quickly is making it difficult for judges to balance the DOJ’s demands with their oath of office.

Immigration attorneys in El Paso, San Antonio, and San Diego have told me they are disturbed by the courtroom disarray: the unanswered phones, unopened mail, and unprocessed filings. Some of their clients are showing up at border in the middle of the night only to find that their cases have been rescheduled. That’s not only unfair, one attorney told me, “it’s dangerous.” Central Americans who speak only indigenous languages are asked to navigate court proceedings with Spanish interpreters. One attorney in El Paso had an 800-page filing for an asylum case that she filed with plenty of time for the judge to review, but it didn’t make it to the judge in time. 

As another lawyer put it, “The whole thing is a fucking disaster that is designed to fail.”

Guillermo Arias/Getty People line up at the San Ysidro border crossing in Tijuana in May 2019.

COURTROOM #4; PRESIDING: JUDGE PHILIP LAW

Down the hall, a Honduran woman I’ll call Mari stands up next to her attorney and five-year-old son, raises her right hand, and is sworn in. 

Mari’s hearing isn’t much of a hearing at all. Stephanie Blumberg, an attorney with Jewish Family Service of San Diego, who is working the case pro bono, asks for more time because she only recently took the case; Judge Philip Law says he will consolidate the cases of mother and child into one; and he schedules her next hearing for the following week at 7:30 a.m., with a call time of 3:30 a.m. at the border.

Just as it’s about to wrap up, Bloomberg says her client is afraid to return to Mexico. “I want to know what is going to happen with me. I don’t want to go back to Mexico—it’s terrible,” Mari says in Spanish, an interpreter translating for the judge. “I have no jurisdiction over that,” Law says. “That’s between you and the Department of Homeland Security.” Law then turns to the DHS attorney, who says he’ll flag the case and “pass it along.”

While nine families begin their MPP group hearing, Mari tells me back in the waiting room that she and her son crossed the border in Texas and then asked for asylum. They were detained for two days and then transported by plane to San Diego, where she was given a piece of paper with a date and time for court and then released in Tijuana. She didn’t know anyone, barely knew where she was, and, trying to find safety in numbers, stuck with the group released that day. Two days after US immigration officials sent her to Tijuana, she was raped.

Mari’s voice gets shaky, and she tries to wipe the tears from her eyes, but even the cotton gloves she’s wearing aren’t enough to keep her face dry. I tell her we can end the conversation and apologize for making her relive those moments. She looks at her son from across the room and says she’d like to continue talking.

“I thought about suicide,” she whispers. “I carried my son and thought about jumping off a bridge.” Instead, she ended up walking for a long time, not knowing what to do or what would happen to them because they didn’t have a safe place to go.

“I haven’t talked to my family back home—it’s so embarrassing because of the dream I had coming here, and now look,” she says. “We’re discriminated against in Mexico; people make fun of us and the way we talk.” Her boy was already shy but has become quieter and more distrusting in recent months.

In the last year, I’ve spoken to dozens of migrants in border cities like Ciudad Juárez and Tijuana who share similarly horrific stories. Human Rights First has tracked more than 800 public reports of torture, kidnapping, rape, and murder against asylum seekers sent to Mexico in the last year. A lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union, Southern Poverty Law Center, and Center for Gender and Refugee Studies is challenging MPP on the grounds that it violates the Immigration and Nationality Act, and the “United States’ duty under international human rights law” not to return people to dangerous conditions.

“The system has not been set up to handle this in any way,” says Kate Clark, senior director of immigration services with Jewish Family Service of San Diego, one of the groups listed on the pro bono sheet Judge O’Connor handed out earlier in the day. They’re the only ones with a WhatsApp number listed, and their phones are constantly ringing because “it’s clear that people don’t know what’s going on or what to expect—and they’re in fear for their lives,” Clark says. Still, her 8-person team working MPP cases can only help a small percentage of the people coming through the courtroom every day.

Later that afternoon, shortly after 5, two large white buses pull up to the court’s loading dock. Guards in green uniforms escort about 60 people out from the loading dock. Moms, dads, and dozens of little kids walk in a straight light to get on a bus. They are driven down to the border and sent back to Tijuana later that night.

A few days later, Mari’s attorney tells me that despite raising a fear of retuning to Mexico in court, US port officials sent Mari back to Tijuana that night.

COURTROOM #2; PRESIDING: JUDGE LEE O’CONNOR

I find myself back in O’Connor’s courtroom for his afternoon MPP hearings. This time, the only people with legal representation is a Cuban family who crossed in Arizona in July 2019 and turned themselves in to Border Patrol agents. This is their first time in court, and their attorney calls in from out of state.

Right away, O’Connor wants to address a different kind of clerical error from the one that bothered him earlier in the day—and one that he thinks matters even more. It involves the first document that DHS issues to “removable” immigrants, known as a Notice to Appear (NTA) form. Although the form allows agents to check a box to categorize people based on how they encountered immigration officials, O’Connor points out that in this case it was left blank—and that “this is fairly typical of the overwhelming majority of these cases.”

He isn’t the first or only judge to notice this; I heard others bring up inconsistent and incomplete NTAs. Border officials are supposed to note on the form if the people taken into custody are “arriving aliens,” meaning they presented at the port of entry asking for asylum, or “aliens present in the United States who have not been admitted or paroled,” meaning they first entered illegally in between ports of entry. Thousands of MPP cases have forms without a marked category. As far as O’Connor is concerned, that’s a crucial distinction. He believes that this Trump administration policy shouldn’t apply to people who entered the country without authorization—meaning countless immigrants who applied for MPP should be disqualified from the get-go.

In the case of the Cuban family, like dozens more that day, the DHS attorney filed an amended NTA classifying them as “arriving aliens.” O’Connor points out is not how they entered the United States. The DHS attorney is unphased by the judge’s stern tone and came prepared with piles of new forms for the other cases of incomplete NTAs. The family’s lawyer says maybe the government made a mistake. O’Connor, unsatisfied, interrupts her: “There was no confusion. I’ve seen 2,000 of theseâ¦the government is not bothering to spend the time.” After a lengthy back-and-forth, a testy O’Connor schedules the family to come back in three weeks.

O’Connor’s stance and rulings on this issue have broader implications. He terminated a case in October because a woman had entered the country illegally before turning herself in and wrote in his decision that DHS had “inappropriately subjected respondent to MPP.” He is among the loudest voices on this issue, saying that MPP is legal only when applied to asylum-seekers presenting at legal ports of entry—though it’s unclear to many lawyers what it might mean for their clients to have their cases terminated in this way. Would these asylum seekers end up in immigration detention facilities? Would they be released under supervision in the United States? Would they be deported back to their home countries?

Since MPP cases hit the courts last March, asylum attorneys have been critical of DHS for not answering these questions. I was present for the very first MPP hearing in San Diego and saw how confused and frustrated all sides were that DHS didn’t seem to have a plan for handling these cases. Now, almost a year later, little has changed.

Tabaddor, the union president, tells me that “there are definitely legal issues that the MPP program has presented” and that judges are having to decide whether the documents “are legally sufficient.” “The issue with DHS—frankly, from what I’ve heard—is that it seems like they’re making it up as they go,” she says.

Last week, Tabaddor testified in front of the House Judiciary Committee and for the independence of immigration courts from the political pressures of federal law enforcement. There are approximately 400 immigration judges across more than 60 courts nationwide, and almost half of those judges have been appointed during the Trump era. (According to a recent story in the Los Angeles Times, dozens of judges are quitting or retiring early because their jobs have become “unbearable” under Trump.)

California Democrat Zoe Lofgren, an immigrants’ rights supporter in Congress, argued during the hearing that the immigration courts are in crisis and the issue requires urgent congressional attention. “In order to be fully effective, the immigration court system should function just like any other judicial institution,” she said. “Immigration judges should have the time and resources to conduct full and fair hearings, but for too long, the courts have not functioned as they should—pushing the system to the brink.”

Guillermo Arias/Getty Asylum seekers in Tijuana in October

COURTROOM #1; PRESIDING: JUDGE SCOTT SIMPSON

“I don’t want any more court,” a woman from Guatemala pleads just before lunchtime. “No more hearings, please.”

Unlike many of the people who were there for their first hearing when I observed court in San Diego, this woman has been to court multiple times since mid-2019. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t find a lawyer, she tells Judge Scott Simpson. She’s had enough.

“We’ve reached a fork on the road, ma’am,” Simpson says in a warm, calm tone. “You either ask for more time for an attorney to help you or you represent yourself.”

“No, it’d be a loss since I don’t know anything about the law,” the woman responds, her voice getting both louder and shakier. Simpson explains to her again the benefits of taking time to find an attorney.

“It’s been almost a year. I don’t want to continue the case. I want to leave it as is,” she tells him. After more explanation from the judge, the woman says she’d like to represent herself today so that decisions can be made. Simpson asks what she would like to do next, and the woman says, “I want you to end it.”

This woman’s pleas are increasingly common. Tabaddor says MPP has taken “an already very challenging situation and [made] it exponentially worse.” The new reality in immigration courts “is logistically and systematically designed to just deter people from seeking or availing themselves of the right to request protection,” Tabaddor says.

After hearing the Guatemalan woman ask for the case to be closed multiple times, Simpson takes a deep breath, claps his hands, and says there are four options: withdrawal, administrative close, dismissal, or termination. He explains each one, and after 10 minutes the woman asks for her case to be administratively closed. The DHS attorney, however, denies that request. Simpson’s hands are tied.

The judge tells the woman that because DHS filed paperwork on her case that day, and because it’s only in English, that he’s going to give her time to review it, because “as the judge I don’t think it would be fair for you to go forward without the opportunity to object to that.” He schedules her to come back in a month.

“MPP is not a program I created,” he says. “That decision was made by someone else.” 

Additional reporting by Noah Lanard.

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

“Malicious incompetence,” “Aimless Docket Reshuffling,” “Man’s Inhumanity to Man” — it’s all there on public display in this deadly “Theater of the Absurd.”

Here, from a recent Human Rights Watch report on over 200 of those illegally returned to El Salvador without Due Process and in violation of the rule of law:

138 Killed;

70 Sexually abused, tortured, or otherwise harmed.

Here is the HRW report as posted on Courtside:

https://immigrationcourtside.com/2020/02/06/how-americas-killer-courts-promote-crimes-against-humanity-human-rights-watch-trump-his-white-nationalist-sycophants-toadies-tout-lawless-policies-that-violate-legal-obligations-he/

Where, oh where, has our humanity and human decency gone?

And, how do spineless jurists on Article III Courts who continue to “rubber stamp” and overlook the disgraceful abrogation of Due Process and fundamental fairness going on in a grotesquely biased and mismanaged “court system” controlled by a White Nationalist, nativist regime look at themselves in the mirror each morning. Maybe they don’t.

Abuse of the most vulnerable among us might seem to them to be “below the radar screen.” After all, their victims often die, disappear, or are orbited back to unknown fates in dangerous foreign lands. Out of sign, out of mind! But, what if it were their spouses, sons, and daughters sent to Tijuana to be raped while awaiting a so-called “trial.”

Rather than serving its intended purpose, promoting courage to stand up against government tyranny and to defend the rights of individuals, even the downtrodden and powerless, against Government abuse of the law, life tenure has apparently become something quite different. That is, a refuge from accountability and the rules of human decency.

John Roberts, his “Gang of Five,” and the rest of the Article III enablers will escape any legal consequences for their actions and, perhaps more significant, inactions in the face of unspeakable abuses of our Constitution, the rule of law, intellectual honesty, and the obligations we owe to other human beings.

How about those cowardly 9th Circuit Judges who ignored the law, betrayed human decency, and enabled rapes, killings, and other “crimes against humanity” by “green lighting” the unconstitutional and clearly illegal “MPP” — better known as “Let ‘Em Die in Mexico” with their absurdist legal gobbledygook in Innovation Law Lab v. McAleenan. They are enjoying life in the ivory tower while their human victims are suffering and dying.

But, folks like Fernanda and many others are recording their abuses which will live in history and infamy, will forever tarnish their records, and be a blot on their family names for generations to come. 

There is no excuse for what is happening at our borders and in our Immigration Courts today. Constantly Confront Complicit Courts 4 Change! Flood the Article IIIs with examples and constant reminders of their handiwork and dereliction of duty! Let the bodies pile up on their collective doorsteps until the stench is so great that even they can no longer ignore and paper over their own complicity and moral responsibility with legal banalities. Force them to see their own faces and the faces of their loved ones in the scared, tormented faces and ruined lives of those destroyed by our scofflaw regime and its enablers. 

Also, if you haven’t already done so, tell your Congressional representatives that you have had enough of this grotesque circus!

Here’s what I wrote to my legislators, and some from other states, recently:

I hope you will also speak out frequently against the grotesque abuses of human rights, Due Process, and human decency, not to mention the teachings of Jesus Christ and almost all other religious traditions, that the Trump Administration is carrying out against refugees of color, many of them desperate and vulnerable women and children, at our Southern Border.

Additionally, under Trump, the U.S. Immigration Courts, absurdly and unconstitutionally located within a politically biased U.S. Department of Justice, have become a mockery of justice, Due Process, and fundamental fairness. I urge you to join with other legislators in abolishing the current failed (1.1 million case backlog) and unfair system and replacing it with an independent Article I U.S. Immigration Court. It’s time to end the abuse! This must be one of our highest national priorities.

I invite you and your staff to read more about the grotesque abuses of law, human rights, and fundamental human decency being committed daily on migrants and other vulnerable humans by the Trump Administration in my blog: immigrationcourtside.com, “The Voice of the New Due Process Army.” This is not the America I knew and proudly served for more than three decades as a Federal employee.

Due Process Forever; Trump’s Perverted View of America Never!

Thanks again.

With my appreciation and very best wishes,

Paul Wickham Schmidt

U.S. Immigration Judge (Retired)

Adjunct Professor, Georgetown Law

Due Process Forever; Complicit Courts & Feckless Legislators, Never!

PWS

02-07-20

 

Related posts:

  1. HOW “AMERICA’S KILLER COURTS” PROMOTE “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” — HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH: TRUMP & HIS WHITE NATIONALIST SYCOPHANTS & TOADIES TOUT LAWLESS POLICIES THAT VIOLATE LEGAL OBLIGATIONS & HELP KILL, RAPE, TORTURE THOSE RETURNED TO EL SALVADOR — Supremes & Article III Judiciary Complicit In Gross Human Rights Violations! 
  2. COMPLICITY HAS COSTS:  Article III Judges’ Association Apparently Worries That Trump, Barr, GOP Toadies Starting To “Treat Them Like Immigration Judges” — Do They Fear Descent To Status Of Mere Refugees, Immigrants, “Dreamers,” Unaccompanied Children, Or Others Treated As “Less Than Persons” By Trump, 5th Cir., 11th Cir., 9th Cir., & The Supremes’ “J.R. Five?” 
  3. WHEN ARTICLE III COURTS FAIL: U.S. “Orbits” Refugee Families To Dangerous Chaos In Guatemala Under Clearly Fraudulent “Safe Third Country” Arrangements As Feckless U.S. Courts Fail To Enforce Constitutional Due Process & U.S. Asylum Laws In Face Of Trump Regime’s Contemptuous Scofflaw Conduct!
  4. COURTSIDE HAS BEEN AT THE FOREFRONT OF EXPOSING THE “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” COMMITTED BY THE REGIME AND THE MORAL CULPABILITY OF THOSE WHO WILLFULLY CARRY OUT & ENABLE THESE ATROCITIES — The “Mainstream Media” Is Now Channeling Courtside! — “In the meantime, no government has the right to treat people with such abject inhumanity. History will remember Trump for this, but it will also remember the people who enable such atrocious acts.”

TESS HELLGREN @ INNOVATION LAW LAB: When It Comes To The Captive BIA & Weaponized Immigration Courts, The Article IIIs Need To Put Away The Rubber Stamp & Restore Integrity To The Law! — “Faced with the Trump Administration’s weaponization of the immigration courts against asylum-seeking individuals, the role of the federal courts is more important than ever.”

Tess Hellgren
Tess Hellgren, Staff Attorney and Justice Catalyst Legal Fellow

http://innovationlawlab.org/blog/the-role-of-judges-to-say-what-the-law-is-judicial-oversight-of-immigration-adjudication/

 

THE ROLE OF JUDGES TO “SAY WHAT THE LAW IS”: JUDICIAL OVERSIGHT OF IMMIGRATION ADJUDICATION

By Tess Hellgren, Staff Attorney and Justice Catalyst Legal Fellow

January 31, 2020

Since the beginning of the Trump Administration, the immigration court system has been used as a tool to further the executive branch’s anti-immigrant agenda. The Attorney General and other executive officials have enabled widespread due process violations and skyrocketing case backlogs while imposing case quotas and docketing rules that prevent judges from serving as impartial adjudicators.[1]

Last week, the Seventh Circuit highlighted a new abuse of power: the refusal of executive officials in the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) to follow a direct order from a federal court.

The BIA is the administrative body responsible for reviewing decisions that are appealed from sixty-eight immigration courts across the country. Like these immigration courts, the BIA is part of the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) – the immigration court system, located in the executive branch, that is ultimately overseen by the Attorney General of the United States. Despite the serious flaws inherent in the design of this system, BIA decisions may at least be appealed up to the appropriate federal circuit court, providing a crucial layer of independent judicial review in individual cases.[2]

In the case of Baez-Sanchez v. Barr, the Seventh Circuit had previously held that the immigration laws unambiguously grant immigration judges the power to waive a noncitizen’s inadmissibility to the United States, overruling the BIA’s prior decision to the contrary.[3] On remand, the BIA “flatly refused to implement” the court’s direct order.[4] Writing that the BIA’s decision “beggars belief,” the Seventh Circuit stated that

We have never before encountered defiance of a remand order, and we hope never to see it again. Members of the Board must count themselves lucky that [the Respondent] has not asked us to hold them in contempt, with all the consequences that possibility entails.[5]

This language is an extraordinary rebuke: it is very rare for a circuit court to issue an implicit threat to hold members of an administrative agency in contempt for directly disregarding a court order. The Seventh Circuit was clear that the BIA was mistaken if it thought that “faced with a conflict between our views and those of the Attorney General it should follow the latter.”[6] Affirming foundational separation of powers principles, the Seventh Circuit admonished that

[I]t should not be necessary to remind the Board, all of whose members are lawyers, that the “judicial Power” under Article III of the Constitution is one to make conclusive decisions, not subject to disapproval or revision by another branch of government . . . Once we reached a conclusion, both the Constitution and the statute required the Board to implement it.[7]

The Seventh Circuit’s decision also noted that the Attorney General had submitted a brief asking the court to give the BIA another opportunity to issue “an authoritative decision” on this issue, arguing that such a decision could be entitled to judicial deference.[8] The court aptly responded that this “request is bizarre,” as the court had already held that the applicable regulation was unambiguous – and an agency “cannot rewrite an unambiguous [law] through the guise of interpretation.”[9] As the Supreme Court made clear in Kisor v. Wilkie, “if the law gives an answer—if there is only one reasonable construction of a regulation—then a court has no business deferring to any other reading, no matter how much the agency insists it would make more sense.”[10]

Notably, even if the Seventh Circuit had found the laws in question to be ambiguous, the Attorney General and members of the BIA do not have free reign to impose any interpretation they choose. It is true that federal courts must defer to the reasoned decisions of administrative agencies when Congress has left the agency’s discretion to interpret an ambiguous provision of law, under the doctrine of Chevron deference.[11] But this deference is not boundless. As the Supreme Court made clear in Chevron, courts should defer to agencies’ interpretation of ambiguous statutes when the agency interpretation is “a reasonable accommodation of conflicting policies that were committed to the agency’s care by the statute.”[12] The agency’s interpretation must thus still fall “within the bounds of reasonable interpretation.”[13]

This standard, and the Seventh Circuit’s reprimand, is especially important as the Attorney General attempts to aggressively expand his control of immigration court adjudication. Under the Trump Administration, the Attorneys General have issued a number of “certified” decisions that attempt to restrict eligibility for asylum based on factors such as domestic violence, gang violence, or past persecution due to family membership.[14] In these decisions, which upend years of established immigration precedent, the Attorney General has pointedly asserted his authority to construe the terms of the Immigration and Nationality Act and implied that federal courts must fall in line with his interpretations.[15]

Yet the Attorney General’s reasoning holds only if his interpretations are actually entitled to judicial deference: if the laws in question are ambiguous and the federal courts find his interpretations reasonable.[16] And as the Supreme Court has admonished, “let there be no mistake: That is a requirement an agency can fail.”[17] Indeed, in addressing the application of the Attorney General’s certified decision in Matter of A-B-, at least one federal court has already held that a “general rule against domestic violence and gang-related claims during a credible fear determination is arbitrary and capricious and violates the immigration laws.”[18]

Faced with the Trump Administration’s weaponization of the immigration courts against asylum-seeking individuals, the role of the federal courts is more important than ever. As the Attorney General and other executive officials attempt to expand their authority to define the terms of immigration adjudication, federal courts should heed the Seventh Circuit’s decision – and remember the foundational legal principle that “[i]t is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is.”[19]

[1] See generally Innovation Law Lab and Southern Poverty Law Center, The Attorney General’s Judges: How the U.S. Immigration Courts Became a Deportation Tool, 14–15 (June 2019), https://innovationlawlab.org/reports/the-attorney-generals-judges/; Complaint, Las Americas v. Trump, No. 3:19-cv-02051-SB (D. Or. Dec. 18, 2019), https://innovationlawlab.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/ECF-1-Las-Americas-v.-Trump-No.-19-cv-02051-SB-D.-Or..pdf.

[2] See Immigration and Nationality Act § 242; 8 U.S.C. § 1252.

[3] Baez-Sanchez v. Sessions, 872 F.3d 854, 856 (7th Cir. 2017); Baez-Sanchez v. Barr, No. 19-1642, slip op. at 2–3 (7th Cir. Jan. 23, 2020).

[4] Baez-Sanchez, slip op. at 3.

[5] Id. at 3–4.

[6] Id. at 4.

[7] Id. 

[8] Id. at 4–5.

[9] Id. at 5.

[10] Kisor v. Wilkie, 139 S.Ct. 2400, 2415 (2019).

[11] Chevron  v. Nat. Res. Def. Council, Inc., 467 U.S. 837, 842–43 (1984).

[12] Id. at 844–45; see also 5 U.S.C. § 706(2) (a reviewing court shall set aside agency action, findings, and conclusions found to be “arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, or otherwise not in accordance with law”).

[13] See Kisor, 139 S.Ct. at 2416, quoting Arlington v. FCC, 569 U.S. 290, 296 (2013).

[14] See Matter of A-B-, 27 I&N Dec. 316 (2018); Matter of L-E-A-, 27 I&N Dec. 581 (2019). Note inconsistencies

[15] See Matter of A-B-, 27 I&N at 326–27; Matter of L-E-A-, 27 I&N at 591–92.

[16] See Nat’l Cable & Telecommunications Ass’n v. Brand X Internet Servs., 545 U.S. 967, 982 (2005) (allowing for agency interpretation to override judicial interpretation in certain circumstances, when the agency interpretation is “otherwise entitled to Chevron deference”).

[17] See Kisor, 139 S.Ct. at 2416.

[18] Grace v. Whitaker, 344 F. Supp. 3d 96, 127 (D.D.C. 2018).

[19] See Marbury v. Madison, 5 U.S. 137, 177 (1803).

 

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

Well said, Tess!

 

Thanks for being such a NDPA stalwart!

 

Due Process Forever!

 

PWS

02-01-20

 

Related posts:

  1. COMPLICITY HAS COSTS:  Article III Judges’ Association Apparently Worries That Trump, Barr, GOP Toadies Starting To “Treat Them Like Immigration Judges” — Do They Fear Descent To Status Of Mere Refugees, Immigrants, “Dreamers,” Unaccompanied Children, Or Others Treated As “Less Than Persons” By Trump, 5th Cir., 11th Cir., 9th Cir., & The Supremes’ “J.R. Five?” 
  2. GROSS NATIONAL DISGRACE: “A Fucking Disaster That Is Designed to Fail”: How Trump Wrecked America’s Immigration Courts — Fernanda Echavarri Reports For Mother Jones On How Our Failed Justice System Daily Abuses The Most Vulnerable While Feckless Legislators &   Smugly Complicit Article III Judges Look On & Ignore The Human Carnage They Are Enabling — “ Two days after US immigration officials sent her to Tijuana, she was raped.”
  3. WHEN ARTICLE III COURTS FAIL: U.S. “Orbits” Refugee Families To Dangerous Chaos In Guatemala Under Clearly Fraudulent “Safe Third Country” Arrangements As Feckless U.S. Courts Fail To Enforce Constitutional Due Process & U.S. Asylum Laws In Face Of Trump Regime’s Contemptuous Scofflaw Conduct!
  4. HOW “AMERICA’S KILLER COURTS” PROMOTE “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” — HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH: TRUMP & HIS WHITE NATIONALIST SYCOPHANTS & TOADIES TOUT LAWLESS POLICIES THAT VIOLATE LEGAL OBLIGATIONS & HELP KILL, RAPE, TORTURE THOSE RETURNED TO EL SALVADOR — Supremes & Article III Judiciary Complicit In Gross Human Rights Violations! 

BIA: ANY OL’ NOTICE IS GOOD ENOUGH FOR ENDANGERED ASYLUM SEEKERS ORBITED TO MEXICO & BEYOND – MATTER OF J.J. RODRIGUEZ — How Judges At All Levels Are Abandoning The Rule Of Law & Enabling Abuse Of the Most Vulnerable!

 

http://go.usa.gov/xdDRq

Matter of J.J. RODRIGUEZ, 27 I&N Dec. 762 (BIA 2020)

 

PANEL: MALPHRUS, Acting Chairman; CREPPY and CASSIDY, Board Members.

OPINION BY: Acting Chairman Malphrus

 

BIA HEADNOTE:

Where the Department of Homeland Security returns an alien to Mexico to await an immigration hearing pursuant to the Migrant Protection Protocols and provides the alien with sufficient notice of that hearing, an Immigration Judge should enter an in absentia order of removal if the alien fails to appear for the hearing.

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

Let’s put this in context!

 

This is an unrepresented asylum seeker “orbited” back to dangerous and chaotic conditions in Mexico. We don’t even know if he’s still alive.

 

He’s a native of Honduras. Obviously, he fled Honduras and sought admission to the United States for a reason. His only chance of not being returned to Honduras would be to show up for his hearing. Therefore, he would have no obvious reason for failing to appear at his hearing if he were able to do so.

 

In the past, in cases such as this, the DHS would have either: 1) released the respondent on bond to a known address in the United States that they would have recorded and furnished to EOIR; or 2) detained the respondent.

 

In the former case, the DHS would have been obliged to provide EOIR with a facially valid address to serve notices at the time of filing the Notice to Appear with the court. In the latter case, the DHS would be responsible for producing the respondent for all scheduled hearings.

 

Instead, in this case, the DHS chose under the mis-named “Migrant Protection Protocols” (“MPP”) (which are actually designed to reject rather than protect migrants) to abdicate its normal duties and send the respondent to an unknown location in Mexico without any reasonable safeguards to insure access to the hearing process or to counsel.

The DHS has no practical idea where they sent the respondent in Mexico and no reasonable method for contacting him or retrieving him.

Incredibly, and apparently with a straight face, the BIA lists the address of the respondent as “Domicilio Conocido, Tijuana, Baja California, Mexico.” That’s roughly the equivalent of “Manhattan, New York City, New York, USA.” Good luck with that!

How would a U.S. lawyer get in touch with the respondent? How would the Immigration Court notify the respondent of the ever-changing times and dates of hearings? How would the DHS serve the respondent with notices of evidence?  Obviously, they wouldn’t.

And, if the respondent failed to appear for a non-existent hearing, he undoubtedly would be “in absentia’d” under the BIA’s warped view of what is fair and reasonable. This whole MPP has obviously been constructed by DHS, with EOIR complicity, as an exercise in naked bad faith and intentional and unreasonable inconvenience to the respondents caught up in it.

In formalizing the MPP, the DHS could have worked cooperatively with the Mexican Government and the private bar to guarantee the respondent’s statutory rights to: 1) return to the United States for his removal hearing; and 2) reasonable access to pro bono counsel in the United States. The DHS chose not to do either, thereby leaving these statutory obligations potentially unachievable for this respondent. Through the BIA’s mental gymnastics, the DHS’s intentional indolence becomes the respondent’s problem!

It’s common knowledge that individuals returned to Mexico under the MPP are often forced to live on the streets and are in constant danger of kidnaping, extortion, robbery, rape, assault, starvation, and exploitation while in Mexico awaiting hearings.

There also are credible reports that some individuals returned under the MPP are sent to the interior of Mexico, to the Southern Border of Mexico, or returned to their home countries, thus making it impossible for them to appear for their scheduled hearings. See,e.g., https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2019-10-15/buses-to-nowhere-mexico-transports-migrants-with-u-s-court-dates-to-its-far-south, “Mexico sends asylum seekers south — with no easy way to return for U.S. court dates.”

The DHS makes no effort to ascertain what happens to those sent back to Mexico under the MPP and takes no steps to insure that they are able to return to the U.S. border for their hearings.

The DHS has provided no reason to believe that individuals “relocated” after returning to Mexico either understand what is happening to their hearing rights or have any realistic mechanism for retuning.

Under these circumstances, there is a rebuttable presumption that individuals returned under the MPP who do not appear for immigration hearings have been denied both their statutory right to the hearing process and their statutory right to representation by counsel of their own choosing at no expense to the Government. These statutory rights are integral to insuring due process in the removal hearing process.

The DHS may rebut this presumption by showing either: 1) they made reasonable efforts to locate this respondent in Mexico; or 2) there are reasonable procedures in place with the Mexican Government and with pro bono providers to provide reasonable access to hearings and pro bono counsel that were available to the respondent in this case.

Since the DHS has made no such showing in this case, the Immigration Judge’s decision to terminate the proceedings without an in absentia order is reasonable and proper under the law. Indeed, it is the only lawful outcome.

This is especially true because there doesn’t appear to be any effective way an individual who was inhibited from return to the United States from Mexico for his hearing can seek to reopen an in absentia hearing from Mexico or some other country to which he might have been “orbited” by the Mexican Government.

Indeed, the process followed by the DHS in this case appears to be an intentional derogation of the normal statutory right to a stay of removal from the United States to which an individual challenging an in absentia removal order ordinarily would be legally entitled.

This is, of course, without prejudice to the DHS reinstituting removal proceedings in the future if the respondent is encountered at the border or in the United States.

Sadly, the BIA isn’t the only tribunal to “blow off” their statutory and constitutional responsibilities.

The feckless judges of the Ninth Court of Appeals “took a dive” on their oaths of office by “greenlighting” the illegal (not to mention totally dishonest and immoral) MPP by vacating the District Court’s properly issued preliminary injunction in Innovation Law Lab v. McAleenan.

As a result of the Ninth Circuit’s dereliction of duty, thousands of vulnerable asylum seekers have been irreparably injured.

Eventually, the MPP will go down as not only fraudulent and invidiously racially motivated, but as one of the most horrible, and preventable, failures of justice in modern American jurisprudence. It will rank right up there with Dred Scott., the Fugitive Slave Laws, “separate but equal,” Chinese Exclusion Laws, and Japanese internment of supposedly bygone ages. Dehumanization, exploitation, and abuse of Government authority is a common theme. It will indelibly stain the reputations of every bureaucrat and judge who touched it without “just saying no.”

While it might already be too late for many of the innocent victims of MPP, no amount of legal gobbledygook or “alternative facts” will save those responsible for initiating, carrying out, and enabling the MPP and similar violations of legal, constitutional, and human rights, and  well as human morality, from the judgments of history!

Due Process Forever; Complicit Courts Never!

PWS

01-31-20

 

 

 

Related posts:

  1. HOW “AMERICA’S KILLER COURTS” PROMOTE “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” — HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH: TRUMP & HIS WHITE NATIONALIST SYCOPHANTS & TOADIES TOUT LAWLESS POLICIES THAT VIOLATE LEGAL OBLIGATIONS & HELP KILL, RAPE, TORTURE THOSE RETURNED TO EL SALVADOR — Supremes & Article III Judiciary Complicit In Gross Human Rights Violations! 
  2. GROSS NATIONAL DISGRACE: “A Fucking Disaster That Is Designed to Fail”: How Trump Wrecked America’s Immigration Courts — Fernanda Echavarri Reports For Mother Jones On How Our Failed Justice System Daily Abuses The Most Vulnerable While Feckless Legislators &   Smugly Complicit Article III Judges Look On & Ignore The Human Carnage They Are Enabling — “ Two days after US immigration officials sent her to Tijuana, she was raped.”
  3. WHERE’S THE OUTRAGE? — 9th CIRCUIT JUDGES ASSIST REGIME’S AGENTS IN COMMITTING “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” MERE YARDS FROM THE BORDER! — NDPA Leader Jodi Goodwin, Esquire, Speaks Out: “I’ve been practicing law for 25 years and the last four to five months of practicing law has broken me. I don’t want to fucking do this anymore. [Her voice breaks again] It sucks. How do you explain to people that you know they thought they were coming to a place where there’s freedom and safety and where the laws are just, but that’s not the situation? I’m very mad.”
  4. “SITTING DUCKS” IN “UNSAFE THIRD COUNTRIES” — How The Supremes, The 9th Circuit, The 5th Circuit, & Other Complicit Federal Appellate Courts Aid & Abet The Trump Regime’s Human Rights Violations — Would The “Privileged Robed Ones” Take Due Process & The Rule Of Law More Seriously If It Were THEIR Kids & Grandkids Being Kidnapped & Held for Ransom For The “Crime” Of Seeking Protection Under U.S. Laws?  

KILLERS ON THE BENCH: The 9th Circuit Mindlessly “Greenlighted” The Trump Regime’s Illegal & Unconstitutional “Let ‘Em Die In Mexico Program” – Now, Their Victims Are Doing Just That – The Deadly Costs Of Complicit Courts!

Wendy Fry
Wendy Fry
Watchdog & Accountability Team
San Diego Union-Tribune

http://enewspaper.latimes.com/infinity/article_share.aspx?guid=861153e4-7431-4885-988f-89818194bf2f

 

Wendy Fry reports for the San Diego Union Tribune:

 

 

By Wendy Fry

TIJUANA — A 35-year-old man from El Salvador returned to Mexico under a controversial Trump administration program was brutally killed in Tijuana while waiting for an outcome to his U.S. asylum case, according to his family’s attorney.

During a seven-month period, the man and his family repeatedly told U.S. officials — including a San Diego immigration court judge, officials with Immigration and Customs Enforcement and border agents with U.S. Customs and Border Protection — that they were not safe in Tijuana, the lawyer said.

Customs and Border Protection returned the man and his family to Tijuana anyway, records show. In November, he was killed in Zona Norte, one of Tijuana’s more dangerous regions near the border.

“I don’t know how there’s an argument that Mexico is a safe country,” said Richard Sterger, the family’s immigration attorney. “My clients begged not to be sent back there.”

The family fled El Salvador and presented themselves at the San Ysidro Port of Entry in May asking to be allowed into the United States to assert their legal right to seek asylum, Sterger said.

The family was placed into the Migrant Protection Protocols program, also known as MPP or “Remain in Mexico.” The man’s wife and their two children are not being identified because they fear for their lives after reporting and speaking about his slaying.

Sterger said he could not discuss details of their asylum claim, such as why they fled El Salvador, because it is part of their ongoing immigration case.

Between May and September, the family members waited in Tijuana for their first court appearance, he said.

During their Sept. 11 immigration court hearing, they pleaded with a San Diego immigration judge to not be sent back to Mexico because they feared for their safety. At the time, the family did not have legal representation, Sterger said.

“I told the judge that I was afraid for my children because we were in a horrible, horrible place, and we didn’t feel safe here,” the widow told the Spanish-language news station Telemundo 20.

The judge referred the case to ICE, a process called “red sheeting,” and the family was interviewed about its fears of returning to Tijuana without a legal representative, the attorney said.

A spokeswoman for ICE said a “red sheet” is placed at the top of a person’s immigration court case file to alert Customs and Border Protection officials that an interview needs to be done about whether or not a family can continue safely waiting in Mexico.

She said she could not comment specifically on the man’s case because of privacy and identification policies.

Under international law, countries are forbidden to return asylum seekers to any nation where they are likely to face danger of persecution because of their “race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion.” The legal principle is known as “non-refoulement.”

Migrant rights advocates have been warning the public that the U.S. government is violating the “non-refoulement” principle with the MPP program, which is facing numerous challenges and lawsuits in federal court.

Sterger said his clients’ case is a perfect example.

After telling U.S. officials they were afraid to be in Tijuana, the members of the family were sent back anyway without explanation.

A Baja California death certificate says the husband and father died Nov. 20 of stab wounds to his neck. It also says he had cuts and stab wounds all over his torso that a Baja California investigator confirmed could indicate torture.

Started under the Trump administration, MPP requires that migrants trying to legally enter the United States remain in Mexico during the immigration court process.

That process usually takes several months, sometimes up to a year, and involves multiple court hearings, which requires migrants to present themselves at El Chaparral border crossing near the San Ysidro Port of Entry to travel to immigration court in San Diego.

Officials with the Baja California prosecutors’ office said that during the process of repeatedly presenting themselves at the border, U.S. asylum seekers can easily be spotted and targeted by criminal groups as potential victims.

In Tijuana, the threat of violence for migrants is so severe that Baja California state police have been going around to various migrant shelters giving presentations on how to avoid becoming a victim since the MPP program began.

Under the program, rolled out in January in Tijuana and then expanded across the U.S.-Mexico border, tens of thousands of U.S. asylum seekers have been returned to Mexico.

Immigration advocacy groups, attorneys and human rights organizations have been urgently warning the U.S. government that border cities are not safe places for asylum seekers to be forced to wait while their cases are processed.

The nonprofit group Human Rights First identified 636 publicly reported cases of “rape, torture, kidnapping and other violent assaults against asylum seekers and migrants forced to return to Mexico by the Trump administration.”

Of that, at least 138 cases involved children being kidnapped or nearly kidnapped in Mexico, according to a report by the group.

“The MPP fear screening process is a sham with interviews that have become increasingly cursory and adversarial resulting in the return of vulnerable and victimized asylum seekers to new dangers,” the report highlighted.

Sterger agreed.

“We are literally putting people’s lives at risk,” he said.

The attorney said that after the father and husband of the family was brutally slain, the mother ran to the border with her children, both younger than 10. She told border officers what happened and begged to be let into the United States.

Fry writes for the San Diego Union-Tribune.

 

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

The Innovation Law Lab v. McAleenan travesty just keeps on killing, abusing, torturing, and dehumanizing every day. Encouraged by the 9th Circuit’s cowardly dereliction of duty and the Supremes evident lack of concern for the safety, lives, and human dignity of asylum seekers, the regime has taken it to a new level with fraudulent and illegal “Safe Third Country” agreements with the super dangerous Northern Triangle states, none of which has any semblance of a credible asylum adjudication system.

I guess the further way we can kill ’em, the more complacent the Article IIIs are going to be. “No blood on their spiffy black robes!” And, after all, it’s not them or their families being abused. and killed by the regime, so “What, me worry?”

Also, something to keep in mind the next time “Big Mac With Lies” appears on the “speaking circuit” to tout his many “accomplishments” at DHS.

I’m, glad Wendy reports on these continuing “crimes against humanity.” But, it must be tough being  on the “Watchdog & Accountability Team” in a system where complicit and complacent Federal Judges are unwilling to hold the regime accountable for their outrageously illegal and unconstitutional (not to mention unconscionable) behavior.

 

PWS

12-13-19

Related posts:

  1. GROSS NATIONAL DISGRACE: “A Fucking Disaster That Is Designed to Fail”: How Trump Wrecked America’s Immigration Courts — Fernanda Echavarri Reports For Mother Jones On How Our Failed Justice System Daily Abuses The Most Vulnerable While Feckless Legislators &   Smugly Complicit Article III Judges Look On & Ignore The Human Carnage They Are Enabling — “ Two days after US immigration officials sent her to Tijuana, she was raped.”
  2. WHERE’S THE OUTRAGE? — 9th CIRCUIT JUDGES ASSIST REGIME’S AGENTS IN COMMITTING “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” MERE YARDS FROM THE BORDER! — NDPA Leader Jodi Goodwin, Esquire, Speaks Out: “I’ve been practicing law for 25 years and the last four to five months of practicing law has broken me. I don’t want to fucking do this anymore. [Her voice breaks again] It sucks. How do you explain to people that you know they thought they were coming to a place where there’s freedom and safety and where the laws are just, but that’s not the situation? I’m very mad.”
  3. HOW “AMERICA’S KILLER COURTS” PROMOTE “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” — HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH: TRUMP & HIS WHITE NATIONALIST SYCOPHANTS & TOADIES TOUT LAWLESS POLICIES THAT VIOLATE LEGAL OBLIGATIONS & HELP KILL, RAPE, TORTURE THOSE RETURNED TO EL SALVADOR — Supremes & Article III Judiciary Complicit In Gross Human Rights Violations! 
  4. 18 YEARS AFTER 09-11, THE “BAD GUYS” ARE WINNING THE BATTLE TO DESTROY AMERICAN JUSTICE & SPLIT THE COUNTRY! — Here’s The Disturbing Proof Of What Passes For “Justice” In America Today!

WHERE’S THE OUTRAGE? — 9th CIRCUIT JUDGES ASSIST REGIME’S AGENTS IN COMMITTING “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” MERE YARDS FROM THE BORDER! — NDPA Leader Jodi Goodwin, Esquire, Speaks Out: “I’ve been practicing law for 25 years and the last four to five months of practicing law has broken me. I don’t want to fucking do this anymore. [Her voice breaks again] It sucks. How do you explain to people that you know they thought they were coming to a place where there’s freedom and safety and where the laws are just, but that’s not the situation? I’m very mad.”

Angelina Chapin
Angelina Chapin
Reporter
HuffPost
Jodi Goodwin, Esquire
Jodi Goodwin, Esquire
Immigration Attorney
Harlingen, TX

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/remain-in-mexico-policy-immigrant-kids_n_5deeb143e4b00563b8560c69

Angelina Chapin reports for HuffPost:

A few times a week, attorney Jodi Goodwin walks across the bridge from Brownsville, Texas, to a refugee camp in Matamoros, Mexico, to meet with asylum-seekers. Her clients are among the more than 2,500 immigrants crammed into tents while they wait for U.S. immigration hearings ― often stuck for months in dirty and dangerous conditions.

The forced return to Mexico of migrants seeking refuge in the U.S. is one of President Donald Trump’s most inhumane immigration policies, yet it hasn’t received nearly the attention that his family separation and prolonged detention practices have.

Since January, under Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” initiative ― also known as the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP) ― the U.S. government has sent at least 54,000 immigrants to wait for their court dates in Mexican border towns. Instead of staying with relatives in the U.S., families are sleeping in tents for up to eight months, in unprotected areas where infections spread within crowded quarters and cartel kidnappings are commonplace. Family separation ended a year ago. But Trump’s mistreatment of asylum-seekers continues in a different form.

Some parents are so desperate that they’ve resorted to sending their children across the bridge alone, since unaccompanied kids who arrive at the border cannot be turned away under MPP. Since October, at least 135 children have crossed back into the U.S. by themselves after being sent to wait in Mexico with their parents, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

In Mexico, many of these migrants don’t have access to lawyers and are forced to plead their cases in makeshift tent courts set up along the U.S. border where overwhelmed judges conduct hearings via video teleconference. The courts have limited public access ― lawyers and translators say that they have been barred from attending hearings. Migrants’ advocates argue that the tent courts violate due process, and immigrant rights organizations have filed a federal lawsuit against Immigration and Customs Enforcement over the use of videoconferencing.

Goodwin, who has 42 clients, said there is a serious shortage of lawyers willing to represent immigrants staying in another country where crime is rife. She spoke with HuffPost about why the Remain in Mexico policy is even more traumatic than separating thousands of families and why it hasn’t sparked public outrage.

pastedGraphic.png

AMERICAN IMMIGRATION LAWYERS ASSOCIATION

Jodi Goodwin (center) at the refugee camp in Matamoros, Mexico.

HuffPost: Immigrant parents forced to wait in Mexico are making the heart-wrenching choice to send their kids to the U.S. alone. What are the conditions like at the camp in Matamoros?

Jodi Goodwin: It smells like urine and feces. There’s not enough sanitation. There’s 10 port-a-potties for thousands of people. Up until recently, there was no potable water available at all. People were bathing in the Rio Grande river, getting sick and, in some cases, drowning. People were seriously dehydrated.

The camp sounds completely unfitting for any human being, let alone children.

It’s a horrific situation to put families in. It’s great to live in a tent for the weekend when you’re going to the lake. It’s not great to live in a tent for months at a time where you don’t have basic necessities.

Are kids getting sick?

The kids are sick every day. I’ve seen all kinds of respiratory illnesses and digestive illnesses. I’ve seen chronic illnesses like epilepsy. I saw a baby that appeared to have sepsis who was forced to wait on the bridge for more than three hours before being taken to a hospital.

And what about the kidnappings? Have you heard of families being taken by cartel members who then try and extort an immigrant’s U.S. relatives for money?

About half of the people I’ve spoken to in Mexico have been kidnapped. The cartel knows if they can grab an immigrant, they’re likely to be able to work out a ransom. If they don’t, then they just kill them.

Any specific examples?

I dealt with one case where a mom from El Salvador and her 4-year-old son were kidnapped within an hour of being sent back to Mexico under MPP. They were taken for eight days before her brother in the U.S. paid the kidnappers $7,000.

The lady was terrified. She was sleep-deprived, food-deprived and water-deprived. She said that the people who had kidnapped her were extremely violent and hit her kid. They were drinking alcohol and raping people at a stash house where several other people were being held.

pastedGraphic_1.png

LOREN ELLIOTT / REUTERS

Migrants, most of them asylum-seekers sent back to Mexico from the U.S. under the “Remain in Mexico” program, occupy a makeshift encampment in Matamoros, Mexico, on Oc. 28, 2019.

The last time we spoke, you were on the frontlines of family separation, visiting detention centers where mothers were hysterically crying after being ripped apart from their children. How does the trauma of MPP compare, particularly for parents who are sending their kids across the border alone?

It’s way worse. I can’t with any confidence say that they will ever see their children again.

Why not?

I knew there were legal ways to get out of family separation. We were able to talk with our clients and didn’t have to go off to another country. And for those parents who got through their interviews or their court hearings, we were able to get them back with their kids.

With MPP, the assault is not only on human rights but also on due process within the court systems, which has completely hijacked the ability to be able to fix things. The parents can’t even get into the country to try to reunify with their kids.

Nearly 3,000 children were separated from their parents under Trump’s zero-tolerance policy. Do you think a similar number of families will be ripped apart because of Remain in Mexico?

It could be more. Over 55,000 people have been sent back to Mexico. I’ve talked to so many parents who have sent their kids across. It’s a heart-wrenching decision process that they go through. How do you give up your baby?

It reminds me of Jewish parents who were captives in Nazi Germany and had to convince their kids to get on a different train or go in a different line to save their own lives.

Have you witnessed these separations firsthand?

In November I saw a little boy and his 4-year-old sister sent across the bridge with an older child, who was about 14 years old. The teenager carried the baby boy, who still had a pacifier in his mouth, and the girl was holding onto the older kid’s belt loop.

I was standing on the bridge between Matamoros and the U.S. and I turned around to look down at the bank of the Rio Grande river. Every single parent who has sent their kid to cross tells me the same thing: As soon as they say goodbye and hug their kids, they run to the bank to watch them. [Her voice breaks] I knew there was somebody probably standing on that bank hoping those kids made it across.

Do you still think about those kids?

Oh yeah. The green binky that the little baby was sucking on is knitted in my mind.

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VERONICA CARDENAS / REUTERS

The Mexican National Guard patrols an encampment where asylum-seekers live as their tents are relocated from the plaza to near the banks of the Rio Grande in Matamoros on Dec. 7, 2019.

You’ve been working hundreds of hours a month to try and help people stranded in Matamoros. This work must take a toll on you personally.

I’ve been practicing law for 25 years and the last four to five months of practicing law has broken me.

I don’t want to fucking do this anymore. [Her voice breaks again] It sucks. How do you explain to people that you know they thought they were coming to a place where there’s freedom and safety and where the laws are just, but that’s not the situation? I’m very mad.

Family separation resulted in massive outcry from the public, which eventually pressured the government to end the zero-tolerance policy. Why is MPP not getting the same attention?

There is no public outrage because it’s not happening on our soil. It’s happening literally 10 feet from the turnstile to come to the U.S. But because it’s out of sight and out of mind, there is no outrage. What ended family separation was public outrage. It had nothing to do with lawsuits. It had everything to do with shame, shame, shame.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

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

I’m with you, Jodi!  Thanks for your dedication to justice for the most vulnerable!

What’s wrong with this scenario: life-tenured Federal Judges who won’t stand up for the rule of law, Due Process, and Equal Protection in the face of an arrogantly and overtly lawless White Nationalist Regime; DOJ and other U.S. Government lawyers who defend immoral and disingenuous positions in Federal Court, often, as in the Census Case and the DACA Case using pretextual rationales and knowingly false information; dehumanization, with overwhelming racial and religious overtones, of those who deserve our protection and rely on our sense of fairness; undercutting, mistreating and humiliating the brave lawyers like Jodi who are standing up for justice in the face of tyranny; GOP legislators who are lawyers defending Trump’s mockery of the Constitution, human decency, and the rule of law and knowingly and defiantly spreading Putin’s false narratives.  

Obviously, there has been a severe failure in our legal and ethical education programs and our criteria for Federal Judicial selections, particularly at the higher levels, and particularly with respect to the critical characteristic of courage. Too many “go alongs to get alongs!” I can only hope that our republic survives long enough to reform and correct these existential defects that now threaten to bring us all down.

Where’s the accountability? Where’s the outrage? Where’s our humanity?

We should also remember that many asylum seekers from Africa, who face extreme danger in Mexico, are also being targeted (“shithole countries?”) and abused as part of the Regime’s judicially-enabled, racially driven, anti-asylum, anti-rule-of-law antics at the Southern Border. https://apple.news/AyYSWSXNfSdOm63skxWaUTQ

Also, morally corrupt Trump Regime officials continued to tout “Crimes Against Humanity” as an acceptable approach to border enforcement and “reducing apprehensions!” Will machine gun turrets be next on their list? Will Article III Judges give that their “A-OK?”

We’re actually paying Article III Federal Judges who are knowingly and intentionally furthering “Crimes Against Humanity.” Totally outrageous!

Constantly Confront Complicit Courts 4 Change!
Due Process Forever; Complicit Courts Never!

PWS

12-10-19

Related posts:

  1. GROSS NATIONAL DISGRACE: “A Fucking Disaster That Is Designed to Fail”: How Trump Wrecked America’s Immigration Courts — Fernanda Echavarri Reports For Mother Jones On How Our Failed Justice System Daily Abuses The Most Vulnerable While Feckless Legislators &   Smugly Complicit Article III Judges Look On & Ignore The Human Carnage They Are Enabling — “ Two days after US immigration officials sent her to Tijuana, she was raped.”
  2. HOW “AMERICA’S KILLER COURTS” PROMOTE “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” — HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH: TRUMP & HIS WHITE NATIONALIST SYCOPHANTS & TOADIES TOUT LAWLESS POLICIES THAT VIOLATE LEGAL OBLIGATIONS & HELP KILL, RAPE, TORTURE THOSE RETURNED TO EL SALVADOR — Supremes & Article III Judiciary Complicit In Gross Human Rights Violations! 
  3. “SITTING DUCKS” IN “UNSAFE THIRD COUNTRIES” — How The Supremes, The 9th Circuit, The 5th Circuit, & Other Complicit Federal Appellate Courts Aid & Abet The Trump Regime’s Human Rights Violations — Would The “Privileged Robed Ones” Take Due Process & The Rule Of Law More Seriously If It Were THEIR Kids & Grandkids Being Kidnapped & Held for Ransom For The “Crime” Of Seeking Protection Under U.S. Laws?  
  4. COURTSIDE HAS BEEN AT THE FOREFRONT OF EXPOSING THE “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” COMMITTED BY THE REGIME AND THE MORAL CULPABILITY OF THOSE WHO WILLFULLY CARRY OUT & ENABLE THESE ATROCITIES — The “Mainstream Media” Is Now Channeling Courtside! — “In the meantime, no government has the right to treat people with such abject inhumanity. History will remember Trump for this, but it will also remember the people who enable such atrocious acts.”

WHITE NATIONALIST ADMINISTRATION, CORRUPT BUREAUCRATS, FECKLESS FEDERAL JUDGES COMBINE TO COMMIT “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” AGAINST LEGAL ASYLUM APPLICANTS UNDER “LET ‘EM DIE IN MEXICO” PROGRAM — “[R]eturning home would be suicide.”

Kevin Sieff
Kevin Sieff
Latin America Correspondent
Washington Post

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/in-squalid-mexico-tent-city-asylum-seekers-are-growing-so-desperate-theyre-sending-their-children-over-the-border-alone/2019/11/22/9e5044ec-0c92-11ea-8054-289aef6e38a3_story.html

Kevin. Sieff reports for the WashPost:

November 22, 2019 at 3:43 p.m. EST

MATAMOROS, Mexico — In the middle of the largest refugee camp on the U.S. border — close enough to Texas that migrants can see an American flag hovering across the Rio Grande — Marili’s children had fallen ill.

Josue was 5. Madeline was 3. The small family was huddled together in a nylon camping tent with two blankets last week when the temperature sank to 37 degrees. The children started coughing, Marili said. Then their fingers and toes turned bright red. The camp’s doctor had begun to see cases of frostbite.

Like most of the roughly 1,600 asylum seekers at the informal camp, Marili and her children had crossed the border into the United States this summer only to be sent back to Mexico to await their asylum cases — part of a year-old U.S. policy called the Migrant Protection Protocols.

In recent weeks, dozens of parents have watched as their children, sleeping outside in the cold, have become sick or despondent. Many decided to get them help the only way they knew how — sending them across the border alone. As Josue and Madeline grew sicker, it was Marili’s turn to make a decision.

USAID helped set up microfinance in Guatemala. Now it’s funding illegal migration.

These cases illustrate the human toll of the Trump administration’s policy and suggest the United States, Mexico and the United Nations were unprepared to handle many of the unforeseen consequences.

Marili, fleeing gang violence in Honduras, knew that unaccompanied children were admitted into the United States without enduring the MPP bureaucracy and the months-long wait. The 29-year-old mother — who, like others here, asked not to be identified by her last name, for fear it could affect her asylum case — believed that returning home would be suicide. So she bundled up her children in all of their donated winter clothes and scrawled a letter to U.S. immigration officials on a torn piece of paper.

“My children are very sick and exposed to many risks in Mexico,” she wrote. “I don’t have any other way to get them to safety.”

She pressed the letter into Josue’s hand, she said, and pointed the children to three U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents in the middle of the Gateway International Bridge, the span across the Rio Grande that connects Matamoros to Brownsville, Tex.

“Josue told me, ‘Please don’t send us,’ ” Marili said, crying at the memory. “But as a mother, I knew it was the best decision for them.”

Then she sprinted to the bottom of the bridge and watched through the fence as her children turned themselves in, weeping and wondering when she would see them again, hoping they would find their way to her husband. He had entered the United States and applied for asylum before MPP was implemented. He was allowed to stay.

When they filed their asylum claim, they were told to wait in Mexico. There, they say, they were kidnapped.

In the past three weeks, migrants and aid workers say, at least 50 children have made the same crossing. The Washington Post interviewed the parents of 20 of them. On Tuesday morning, three more children were sent over. On Wednesday, another three. From tent to tent, families now talk openly about whether and when they will send their children.

More than 47,000 migrants have been sent back to Mexico since MPP started in January. Through September, 9,974 cases had been completed; only 11 migrants, or 0.1 percent, had received asylum, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, or TRAC, a research center at Syracuse University.

“It’s becoming clear to us that this whole thing is a lie,” said Reyna, 38, who sent her 15-year-old daughter, Yoisie, across the border last week. “They tell us to wait and wait and wait, but no one here gets asylum.”

The Department of Homeland Security did not return calls seeking comment.

Asylum seekers began sleeping out in the wooded field here at the base of the international bridge in August. They receive no assistance from the United States or the United Nations. They rely instead on tents, clothing and food donated by a group of American retirees and medical attention from a nonprofit group whose one doctor sits under a blue tarp.

U.N. officials say they were told months ago that the migrants would be moved by the Mexican government to better conditions. It hasn’t happened.

“We started hearing about the situation, but we just didn’t have enough capacity to help,” said Dora Giusti, the head of child protection at UNICEF in Mexico. “And the Mexican government kept saying [the migrants] would be moved out of the state, so we were waiting to see if we could respond there.”

The U.N. refu­gee agency says border cities in Tamaulipas state, where Matamoros is located, “are among the most insecure and dangerous in the country, which has limited our actions on the ground.”

A 19-year-old Salvadoran woman wanted to reunite with her father in California. She was shot dead in Mexico.

The municipal government opened a shelter at an indoor basketball court last month. With a capacity of 300, it’s already full. It’s also miles from the bridge, making it more difficult for migrants to reach the border for their court dates, or to meet with pro-bono lawyers. Every day, the U.S. government sends dozens of migrants to Matamoros under MPP. They are taken directly to the encampment and often sleep outside until they find a tent.

The camp consists of hundreds of tents clustered together on a spit of sidewalk and a stretch of scrubland along the Rio Grande. There are only a few showers, so many people bathe and wash their clothes in the river. Once a dead cow floated by and became lodged next to the camp. Another time, the headless corpse of a man washed ashore.

A cold front settled here for three days last week. Immediately, children started getting sick.

Gabrielle, 15 — from San Pedro Sula, Honduras — started coughing. Sarai, 12 — also from Honduras, from Santa Rosa de Copan — was vomiting. Valeria, 5 — from the Honduran capital, Tegucigalpa — developed a fever and became despondent.

Global Response Management, the Florida-based nonprofit that runs the small medical clinic under the blue tarp, saw a surge in patients, most of them children. The most common cases were respiratory illnesses, said Megan Algeo, the doctor on call at the time. In one case, Algeo said, she persuaded U.S. immigration agents to admit a child for emergency care.

Elderly Mexicans are visiting their undocumented children in Mexico — with the help of the State Department

Parents in different parts of the camp decided it wasn’t fair to keep their children here. Some joined a Facebook group called Mothers in Search of Asylum to discuss their options and what would happen if their children crossed the border alone.

“I kept thinking, my daughter is going to die here,” said Blanca, Valeria’s mother.

They all had relatives in the United States. Their idea was to send their children to live with spouses, siblings, cousins while they waited in Matamoros to complete the asylum process. They worried about another cold front, or another flood (there was one in September), or cartel-sponsored kidnappings.

Gabrielle walked across the bridge alone, carrying a plastic bag with her asylum papers. Sarai went with a friend. Valeria and her sister, Anahi, 7, crossed together, holding hands.

All are now in shelters in different parts of the United States. Under U.S. policy, children who enter the country unaccompanied are taken into government custody until authorities can connect them with relatives to whom they can be released.

Glady Cañas, who runs Helping Them Triumph, one of the few humanitarian organizations at the camp, tries to persuade parents not to send their children alone.

“Why did you send your child?” she demanded of Israel, Gabrielle’s father.

Israel, 40, stared at the ground. They were standing in front of his blue tent.

“She was sick,” he said. “We were desperate. A child can’t wait here for a year like this.”

Cañas hugged him.

“I personally don’t agree with what they are doing,” she said later. “A child needs their parents. But when you look around here, you understand the desperation.”

Falling coffee prices drive Guatemalan migration to the United States

For many families here, the children — and the threats against them — were the reason they fled their countries in the first place.

Victor, 28, left El Salvador with his daughter, Arleth, now 10, after she was sexually assaulted by a man affiliated with a local gang. Victor pressed charges. He carries court documents and hospital records that substantiate the case in alarming detail. The man was sentenced to 12 years in prison for “sexual aggression of a minor,” one court transcript says.

As soon as he was sentenced, Victor said, gang members came after the family. In August, they fled.

Victor and Arleth were sent back to Matamoros on Aug. 28, before tents were available. They spent 15 days sleeping outside. Eventually, he found a job in a Chinese restaurant earning $7 per day. He saved up and bought a camping tent.

But after two months, Arleth was sick, vomiting all the time. Their tent had flooded twice in the rain. After her assault, she struggled to remain calm in large groups of people, and she hated walking across the camp to use one of the portable toilets.

Victor took her several times to the Doctors Without Borders nurse who came to the camp twice a week. But she never improved.

Their ancestors fled U.S. slavery for Mexico. Now they’re looking north again.

In late September, on Arleth’s 10th birthday, Victor bought her a cake and five candles. He asked someone in a neighboring tent to take a picture of them smiling.

When her health did not improve, Victor asked her what she thought of crossing alone.

“She told me: ‘Dad, I just want to be out of this place. I want to be in the United States,’ ” he said.

Lawyers working in the camp have recently become aware of the many parents choosing to send their children alone.

“These parents have been forced to consider an unthinkable choice — to save their children by sending them into the U.S. alone or to keep them in northern Mexico, where they will be exposed to severe illness, kidnapping, torture and rape,” said Rochelle Garza of the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas.

During the last week of October, Victor walked Arleth to the edge of the international bridge and watched her shuffle toward U.S. immigration agents.

“We had never been apart,” he said later, crying. “Her entire life, we had always been together. . . .

“People might hear what I did and think I’m a bad parent. But it’s the opposite. I did this for my daughter because we had no other choice to save her.”

For a week he didn’t hear from her. Then she called his mother back in El Salvador. She was at a government shelter somewhere in Texas. The details were hazy.

His mother recorded a message from daughter to father.

“Don’t worry, Dad. I’m okay,” she said. “I hope that soon you’ll be with me.”

He played the message over and over and cried.

“The truth is I don’t have much confidence that my case is going to work out,” he said. “I’m fighting it for her. But I don’t know.”

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

The Trump Administration response: Expand the “Let ‘Em Die In Mexico Program” to additional locations near Tucson, Arizona.

It’s a national disgrace unfolding before our eyes, getting worse every day!

PWS

11-23-19

Related posts:

  1. GROSS NATIONAL DISGRACE: “A Fucking Disaster That Is Designed to Fail”: How Trump Wrecked America’s Immigration Courts — Fernanda Echavarri Reports For Mother Jones On How Our Failed Justice System Daily Abuses The Most Vulnerable While Feckless Legislators &   Smugly Complicit Article III Judges Look On & Ignore The Human Carnage They Are Enabling — “ Two days after US immigration officials sent her to Tijuana, she was raped.”
  2. WHERE’S THE OUTRAGE? — 9th CIRCUIT JUDGES ASSIST REGIME’S AGENTS IN COMMITTING “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” MERE YARDS FROM THE BORDER! — NDPA Leader Jodi Goodwin, Esquire, Speaks Out: “I’ve been practicing law for 25 years and the last four to five months of practicing law has broken me. I don’t want to fucking do this anymore. [Her voice breaks again] It sucks. How do you explain to people that you know they thought they were coming to a place where there’s freedom and safety and where the laws are just, but that’s not the situation? I’m very mad.”
  3. “SITTING DUCKS” IN “UNSAFE THIRD COUNTRIES” — How The Supremes, The 9th Circuit, The 5th Circuit, & Other Complicit Federal Appellate Courts Aid & Abet The Trump Regime’s Human Rights Violations — Would The “Privileged Robed Ones” Take Due Process & The Rule Of Law More Seriously If It Were THEIR Kids & Grandkids Being Kidnapped & Held for Ransom For The “Crime” Of Seeking Protection Under U.S. Laws?  
  4. HOW “AMERICA’S KILLER COURTS” PROMOTE “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” — HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH: TRUMP & HIS WHITE NATIONALIST SYCOPHANTS & TOADIES TOUT LAWLESS POLICIES THAT VIOLATE LEGAL OBLIGATIONS & HELP KILL, RAPE, TORTURE THOSE RETURNED TO EL SALVADOR — Supremes & Article III Judiciary Complicit In Gross Human Rights Violations! 

WHILE LIFE-TENURED FEDERAL JUDGES CHICKEN OUT, FORMER ASYLUM OFFICER DOUG STEPHENS SPEAKS OUT IN NYT VIDEO EDITORIAL AGAINST JUDICIALLY-ENABLED NATIONAL DISGRACE OF “LET ‘EM DIE IN MEXICO” — “A former asylum officer says ‘remain in Mexico’ and other policies undermining asylum aren’t just racist, they’re illegal.”

Doug Stephens
Doug Stephens
Attorney
Former Asylum Officer

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/20/opinion/trump-asylum-remain-mexico-policy.html

By Doug Stephens

Mr. Stephens is a lawyer.

Video by Leah Varjacques and Taige Jensen

In the Video Op-Ed above, a former asylum officer reveals why he resigned: to protest President Trump’s policy requiring migrants to remain in Mexico while awaiting hearings.

Doug Stephens had been an asylum officer for two years. But two days and five interviews that resulted in sending asylum seekers back to danger shook him. He drafted a memo detailing his legal objections to the policy, and circulated it to 80 of his colleagues, his supervisors and a member of Congress. And then he quit.

Mr. Stephens is not the only asylum officer who has grappled with following orders. In interviews with a half-dozen current and former asylum officers across the country, The Times learned of individuals leaving their posts, requesting job transfers and falling into deep depression.

The right to asylum has been a cornerstone of international immigration law since the 1951 United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. The United States, along with 144 other nations, made a commitment to protect those who arrive at our borders with “a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion.”

To date, Mr. Trump’s remain in Mexico policy, officially known as one of the “Migrant Protection Protocols,” has left nearly 58,000 asylum seekers stranded in Mexico.

Doug Stephens, a lawyer, resigned his post as a Citizenship and Immigrations Services asylum officer in San Francisco in August.

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

See the video at the above link.

Doug “gets it,” and it didn’t take him long. My Georgetown Law students “got it.” They kept asking me how this could be happening when it seemed to be clearly illegal and a violation of the Fifth Amendment as well as international treaties.  

But, Chief Justice John Roberts and the majority of the Supremes don’t get it? A three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit didn’t get it? The Ninth Circuit ruminates for months on a question that a District Judge already answered in short order and that most first year law students could figure out in a few minutes. Circuit Courts keep signing off on removal orders produced by a clearly unconstitutional “kangaroo court” system where applicants are denied a fair and impartial decision-maker and the Chief Prosecutor can and does reach in and change results favorable to the applicant that he doesn’t like? 

Something is wrong with this picture. And, it starts with intellectual corruption and cowardice at the highest levels of our Federal Judiciary.

Trump has never made any secret that he hates refugees and migrants for unconstitutional racial, ethnic, and political reasons, that he intends to keep them out, and that he really doesn’t care about the Constitution, due process (except for himself), the Refugee Act, or international norms. He has utter contempt for Federal Judges and for Congress.

He tried, with spectacular lack of success, to get Congress to change the immigration and refugee laws by holding “Dreamers” hostage. Failing, he just went ahead and plowed through the Refugee Act, the Fifth Amendment, and the UN Convention, harming and killing folks in his wake. Just like he illegally reprogrammed money to build an unneeded, yet politically significant, “wall” that Congress had pointedly refused to fund. Never let the law, the national interest, or democratic institutions get in the way of the Trump White Nationalist political agenda.

The Court’s response: Let’s look the other way, like we did in the “Travel Ban Case.” We’re sort of offended by your unpresidential conduct, but, hey, as long as it doesn’t affect us and our families we’ll just hope you’ll tone it down because we really don’t want to confront you. But, if you “double down” instead, we’ll pretend like it’s never happened. Oh, and by the way, perhaps we can help you heap further abuse on your “Dreamer hostages.” What’s a little more pain and suffering on kids that we can cover up with legal gobbledygook.

One of Trump’s biggest “dissings” of the Supremes: His Administration’s total disregard and effective overruling of the Supreme’s landmark INS v. Cardoza -Fonseca case requiring the Government to implement a generous interpretation of the “refugee” definition for asylum to conform to the plain language of the statute as well as the Congressional intent behind the Refugee Act. Donald Trump and his immigraton thugs don’t even recognize what “generosity” is, and he has basically wiped out the Refugee Act and its asylum provisions without any changes in the law. How’s that for contempt of Court!

Roberts can blabber his head off about whether there are “Obama Judges” or “Trump Judges.” But, actions speak louder than words; until he and his fellow GOP appointees on the Court actually stand up to Trump’s abuses of the law, his babbling will be drowned out by Trump’s tweets.

Trump’s not right about much. But, maybe he has a point in his contemptuously arrogant attitude that the Supremes and most Circuits won’t dare require him to follow the laws or operate within the Constitution, particularly as his continues to “pack” the Federal Courts with his guaranteed judicial toadies.

That’s going to be the legacy of the “Roberts Court” if our Chiefie doesn’t wake up some morning with a new backbone and start joining his liberal colleagues in putting some breaks on Trump’s outrageous scofflaw conduct in the immigration and asylum area and saving some innocent lives in the process.

And the process should start with emphatically rejecting the Solicitor General’s unethical and often factually  inaccurate and legally defective attempts to invoke the Supremes’ aid in short-circuiting the system any time the Big Baby Boss is upset with lower courts properly reigning in his illegal actions and making him follow the rules like everyone else.

Trump’s “malicious incompetence” often doesn’t accomplish much. He’s a divider, not a uniter.  He’s only President of his base. The majority of the Americans can just “go pound sand” as far as he’s concerned.

But one thing he might eventually unite Americans on, for differing reasons, is contempt for spineless Federal Courts who won’t stand up to tyranny. And, that won’t be good for the future of our Constituitional Republic.

Due Process Forever! Complicit Courts Never!

That’s why the “New Due Process Army” could be the last, best hope for American’s survival. Constantly Confront Complicit Courts 4 Change!  The “blood of the innocents” will be upon their spiffy robes if the “privileged life-tenured ones” don’t get out of their “ivory tower hazes” and have the guts to do their jobs!

PWS

11-20-19

Related posts:

  1. GROSS NATIONAL DISGRACE: “A Fucking Disaster That Is Designed to Fail”: How Trump Wrecked America’s Immigration Courts — Fernanda Echavarri Reports For Mother Jones On How Our Failed Justice System Daily Abuses The Most Vulnerable While Feckless Legislators &   Smugly Complicit Article III Judges Look On & Ignore The Human Carnage They Are Enabling — “ Two days after US immigration officials sent her to Tijuana, she was raped.”
  2. HOW “AMERICA’S KILLER COURTS” PROMOTE “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” — HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH: TRUMP & HIS WHITE NATIONALIST SYCOPHANTS & TOADIES TOUT LAWLESS POLICIES THAT VIOLATE LEGAL OBLIGATIONS & HELP KILL, RAPE, TORTURE THOSE RETURNED TO EL SALVADOR — Supremes & Article III Judiciary Complicit In Gross Human Rights Violations! 
  3. WHERE’S THE OUTRAGE? — 9th CIRCUIT JUDGES ASSIST REGIME’S AGENTS IN COMMITTING “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” MERE YARDS FROM THE BORDER! — NDPA Leader Jodi Goodwin, Esquire, Speaks Out: “I’ve been practicing law for 25 years and the last four to five months of practicing law has broken me. I don’t want to fucking do this anymore. [Her voice breaks again] It sucks. How do you explain to people that you know they thought they were coming to a place where there’s freedom and safety and where the laws are just, but that’s not the situation? I’m very mad.”
  4. COMPLICITY HAS COSTS:  Article III Judges’ Association Apparently Worries That Trump, Barr, GOP Toadies Starting To “Treat Them Like Immigration Judges” — Do They Fear Descent To Status Of Mere Refugees, Immigrants, “Dreamers,” Unaccompanied Children, Or Others Treated As “Less Than Persons” By Trump, 5th Cir., 11th Cir., 9th Cir., & The Supremes’ “J.R. Five?” 

GABE GUTIERREZ @ NBC NEWS: Here’s What “Let ‘Em Die In Mexico” Looks Like — The Systemic Failure Of The Supremes & The 9th Circuit To Hold Trump Administration Accountable For Dishonesty & Violating Statutory & Constitutional Rights Of Asylum Seekers In Multiple Contexts Has Human Consequences! — Encouraged By Feckless Appellate Judges, Corrupt DHS Officials Tout Benefits Of Endangering Lives Of Asylum Seekers As A “Deterrent!”

Gabe Gutierrez
Gabe Gutierrez
NBC News Correspondent
Atlanta, GA

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/asylum-seekers-wait-mexico-trump-admin-touts-drop-border-apprehensions-n1086291

MATAMOROS, Mexico — The stench is overpowering. During the day, it seems to bake on the squalid concrete. At dawn, it seeps into the cool air — a suffocating mix of human waste and campfires.

Just steps from Brownsville, Texas, a makeshift tent city is growing next to the international bridge. More than 1,200 migrants — many from Mexico and Central America, others from Cuba — are waiting.

This year, the Trump administration enacted what it calls Migrant Protection Protocols, or MPP. Also known as the “Remain in Mexico” policy, it requires U.S. asylum-seekers to stay in that country while their claims are processed. Before MPP, families would be allowed to wait for their court hearings in the United States.

More than 55,000 migrants have been returned to Mexico under this policy, U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials said — and it’s become a bottleneck at the border.

“This is 100 percent a humanitarian crisis,” Jodi Goodwin, a Texas immigration attorney, said. “These policies are not implemented in a vacuum and there are very real human consequences.”

Carlos, from Honduras was among the migrants who spoke with NBC News and asked not to have his last name used for fear of reprisals. The 27-year-old said he’d been at the makeshift camp for four months with his 2-year-old epileptic son — and he’s struggled to find medical care.

“The most difficult part is when my son has convulsions and I’m alone in the tent,” he said. “It’s happened twice at night and I can’t do anything.”

“We’re sending a message”

According to CBP, apprehensions at the Southwest border have plummeted from 144,116 in May to 45,250 in October. That’s a 68 percent drop.

“Migrants can no longer expect to be allowed into the interior of the United States based on fraudulent asylum claims,” Mark Morgan, the acting commissioner of CBP, said at a White House briefing last week. “We’re sending a message to their criminal organizations to stop exploiting these migrants.”

The Trump administration has argued the change is working because in essence, the Remain in Mexico policy has served as a deterrent for migrants as well as human smugglers.

But immigrants advocates argue that claim is dubious and has merely increased desperation and fear on the Mexican side of the border.

In Matamoros, the Mexican government recently opened a shelter about a 30 minute walk from the international bridge in response to the influx of migrants. But many of the families refuse to stay there because they fear a growing threat from the cartels.

One man, Josué, told NBC News his two young daughters were sexually assaulted by a man he believes was a cartel operative. The girls had been washing themselves in the Rio Grande when he touched them, Josué said. He showed NBC News a police report he’d filed.

“Matamoros is controlled by the cartels and the bad people,” he said. “When I got here, I was really scared.”

So volunteers are taking action. Every day, a group called “Team Brownsville” is among those who bring food and supplies across the border.

As the sun begins to set, migrant families line up for a meal.

“It breaks my heart to see the need here,” said Mary Vanderhoof, a volunteer from New Jersey. “There’s no reason that people should be living like this.”

Sergio Córdova, one of Team Brownsville’s organizers, said he’s been coming here since the summer of 2018. What started as just a few migrants with donated cots has exploded into a full-blown tent city.

“How can you look away?” he asked. “Are we going to be a country that says ‘We looked away?’ Or did we do something?”

Follow NBC Latino on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

pastedGraphic.png

Gabe Gutierrez

Gabe Gutierrez is an NBC News Correspondent based in Atlanta, Georgia. He reports for all platforms of NBC News, including “TODAY,” “NBC Nightly News,” MSNBC and NBCNews.com.

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

Check out the video at the above link.

“How can you look away?” he asked. “Are we going to be a country that says ‘We looked away?’ Or did we do something?”

Sergio Cordova “gets it!” How come John Roberts and his tone-deaf “conservatives” who looked the other way at gross legal, Constitutional, and human rights abuses in East Side Sanctuary Covenant and the irresponsible judges on the Ninth Circuit panel that “greenlighted” these specific “designed to kill and abuse procedures” in Innovation Law Labs don’t?

How would anybody subjected to this type of cruel and inhuman treatment possibly be able to present their asylum case? Many, in fact, don’t even receive proper notice or timely access to their hearings, a fact patently obvious but ignored by the Ninth Circuit panel. Others shouldn’t even be in the program or receive knowingly “fake hearing notices” from a lawless DHS unleashed by feckless Federal Appellate Judges who won’t do their jobs.

Several U.S. Immigration Judges and a whole bunch of Asylum Officers have put their careers on the line to “just say no” to these outrages! What’s the excuse for the cowardly performance from those given the privilege of life tenure?

The grotesque derelictions of duty by the Supremes and the Ninth Circuit not only enable individual human rights abuses like these every day, but also their failure to require adherence to the Constitution, the Refugee Act, and our international obligations has emboldened the Administration to enter into totally fraudulent “Safe Third Country” agreements that will “orbit” asylum seekers to some of the most UNSAFE countries in the world, without credible asylum systems and without any procedures in place to guarantee their safety and fair treatment.

Due Process Forever! Complicit Federal Courts Never! Remember my “5Cs” — Constantly Confront Complicit Courts 4 Change! Make those who are trying to “look away” confront the legal mess and human carnage stemming every day from their irresponsibility and failure to stand up for justice for the most vulnerable among us.

PWS

11-20-20

Related posts:

  1. GROSS NATIONAL DISGRACE: “A Fucking Disaster That Is Designed to Fail”: How Trump Wrecked America’s Immigration Courts — Fernanda Echavarri Reports For Mother Jones On How Our Failed Justice System Daily Abuses The Most Vulnerable While Feckless Legislators &   Smugly Complicit Article III Judges Look On & Ignore The Human Carnage They Are Enabling — “ Two days after US immigration officials sent her to Tijuana, she was raped.”
  2. HOW “AMERICA’S KILLER COURTS” PROMOTE “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” — HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH: TRUMP & HIS WHITE NATIONALIST SYCOPHANTS & TOADIES TOUT LAWLESS POLICIES THAT VIOLATE LEGAL OBLIGATIONS & HELP KILL, RAPE, TORTURE THOSE RETURNED TO EL SALVADOR — Supremes & Article III Judiciary Complicit In Gross Human Rights Violations! 
  3. WHERE’S THE OUTRAGE? — 9th CIRCUIT JUDGES ASSIST REGIME’S AGENTS IN COMMITTING “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” MERE YARDS FROM THE BORDER! — NDPA Leader Jodi Goodwin, Esquire, Speaks Out: “I’ve been practicing law for 25 years and the last four to five months of practicing law has broken me. I don’t want to fucking do this anymore. [Her voice breaks again] It sucks. How do you explain to people that you know they thought they were coming to a place where there’s freedom and safety and where the laws are just, but that’s not the situation? I’m very mad.”
  4. “SITTING DUCKS” IN “UNSAFE THIRD COUNTRIES” — How The Supremes, The 9th Circuit, The 5th Circuit, & Other Complicit Federal Appellate Courts Aid & Abet The Trump Regime’s Human Rights Violations — Would The “Privileged Robed Ones” Take Due Process & The Rule Of Law More Seriously If It Were THEIR Kids & Grandkids Being Kidnapped & Held for Ransom For The “Crime” Of Seeking Protection Under U.S. Laws?  

THE  9th CIRCUIT’S DESCENT INTO THE LEGAL AND MORAL ABYSS OF TRUMPISM: With Court’s Aid, Trump Administration Helps Smugglers, Kidnappers, & Extorters in Mexico Target Hapless Asylum Seekers! – Can We As A Nation Get Any More Cowardly & Immoral? – This Is What Intellectually Corrupt Federal Judges Are Doing For Their Paychecks While The Innocent Suffer: “Kidnapped migrants generally were told they could avoid being killed by either paying ransom or working for the cartel.”

Maria Verza
Maria Verza
Journalist
Associated Press

 

https://apple.news/A0kbZvXqkS_GkfZ67SldXDA

 

Maria Verza reports for the Associated Press:

 

 

Migrants stuck in lawless limbo within sight of America

The gangsters trawling Nuevo Laredo know just what they’re looking for: men and women missing their shoelaces.

Those are migrants who made it to the United States to ask for asylum, only to be taken into custody and stripped of their laces — to keep them from hurting themselves. And then they were thrust into danger, sent back to the lawless border state of Tamaulipas.

In years past, migrants moved quickly through this violent territory on their way to the United States. Now, due to Trump administration policies, they remain there for weeks and sometimes months as they await their U.S. court dates, often in the hands of the gangsters who hold the area in a vise-like grip.

Here, migrants in limbo are prey, and a boon to smugglers.

———

This story is part of an occasional series, “Outsourcing Migrants,” produced with the support of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

———

They recount harrowing stories of robbery, extortion by criminals and crooked officials, and kidnappings by competing cartels. They tell of being captured by armed bandits who demand a ransom: They can pay for illegal passage to the border, or merely for their freedom, but either way they must pay.

And then they might be nabbed again by another gang. Or, desperate not to return to the homes they fled in the first place, they might willingly pay smugglers again.

That’s what a 32-year-old Honduran accountant was contemplating. She had twice paid coyotes to help her cross into the U.S. only to be returned. Most recently, in September, she was sent back across the bridge from Brownsville to Matamoros.

Now, biding her time with her daughter in the city of Monterrey, she said one thing is for sure: “We are a little gold mine for the criminals.”

———

Tamaulipas used to be a crossroads. Its dangers are well known; the U.S. has warned its citizens to stay away, assigning it the same alert level as war-torn countries such as Afghanistan and Syria.

Whenever possible, migrants heading north immediately crossed the river to Texas or presented themselves at a U.S. port of entry to file an asylum claim, which would allow them to stay in the U.S. while their cases played out.

But the U.S. has set limits on applicants for asylum, slowing the number to a mere trickle, while the policy known colloquially as “Remain in Mexico,” has meant the return of more than 55,000 asylum-seekers to the country while their requests meander through backlogged courts.

The Mexican government is ill-prepared to handle the influx along the border, especially in Tamaulipas, where it has been arranging bus rides south to the relative safety of the northern city of Monterrey or all the way to the Guatemala border, citing security concerns — tacit acknowledgement, some analysts say, of the state of anarchy.

The gangs have adapted quickly to the new reality of masses of vulnerable people parking in the heart of their fiefdom, experts say, treating the travelers, often families with young children, like ATMs, ramping up kidnapping, extortion, and illegal crossings to extract money and fuel their empires.

“There’s probably nothing worse you could do in terms of overall security along the border,” said Jeremy Slack, a geographer at the University of Texas at El Paso who studies the border region, crime and migration in Mexico. “I mean, it really is like the nightmare scenario.”

———

Yohan, a 31-year-old Nicaraguan security guard, trudged back across the border bridge from Laredo, Texas, in July with his wife and two children in tow, clutching a plastic case full of documents including one with a court date to return and make their asylum claim to a U.S. immigration judge two months later.

Penniless, with little more than a cellphone, the family was entering Nuevo Laredo, dominated by the Northeast cartel, a splinter of the brutal and once-powerful Zetas gang.

This is the way he tells the story now, in an interview at a nonprofit in Monterrey that provides the family with shelter and food:

The plan was to call and ask help from the only people they knew in the area — the “coyotes,” or people smugglers, who earlier helped them cross the Rio Grande on an inflatable raft and had treated them well. Only that was in Ciudad Miguel Aleman, about a two-hour drive south parallel to the river.

On their way to the bus station, two strange men stopped Yohan while another group grabbed his loved ones. At least one of them had a gun. They were hustled into a van, relieved of their belongings and told they had a choice: Pay thousands of dollars for their freedom, or for another illegal crossing.

All along the border, there have abuses and crimes against migrants by Mexican organized crime, which has long profited off them. But Tamaulipas is especially troubling. It is both the location of most illegal crossings, and the state where the United States has returned the most asylum seekers — 20,700 through Nuevo Laredo and Matamoros as of early October.

The Mexico City-based Institute for Women in Migration, which tracks kidnappings of migrants and asylum-seekers, has documented 212 abductions in the state from mid-July through Oct. 15. And that’s surely an undercount.

Of the documented kidnappings in Tamaulipas, 197 occurred in Nuevo Laredo, a city of about 500,000 whose international bridges fuel the trade economy.

Yohan’s family was among them.

They had left Esteli in northwestern Nicaragua over three months earlier after armed, government-aligned civilian militias learned that Yohan had witnessed the killing of a government opponent, he said. They followed him and painted death threats on the walls of their home.

He is identified only by his middle name, because he and others quoted in this story fear for their lives and spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity.

Yohan borrowed against his mother’s house to pay smugglers $18,000 for the family’s trip. But he had not bargained on the closed door at the border, or the ordeal in Nuevo Laredo, and his bankroll was depleted.

The men who grabbed the family “told us they were from the cartel, that they were not kidnappers, that their job was to get people across and that they would take us to the smuggler to explain,” Yohan said. Then they connected a cable to his cellphone to download its contents.

Yohan’s first instinct was to give the passphrase that his previous smugglers used to identify “their” migrants. “‘That doesn’t mean anything to us,’ one of them told me,” Yohan said — this lot belonged to a different group.

Gangs in Tamaulipas have fragmented in the last decade and now cartel cells there operate on a franchise model, with contacts across Mexico and Central America, said Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, a political scientist specializing in organized crime, immigration, border security and human trafficking at George Mason University.

“They are contractors. They provide a service, control the territory, operate safe houses and charge for all that,” she said.

Yohan’s family was held in a series of what appeared to be private homes or offices, along with a family from El Salvador, two Cubans and two Mexicans. Everyone slept on the floor.

One captor, a 16-year-old, told him, “We have 15 smugglers, the cartel brings the people to us here and we take them across paying the cartel for the river crossing.”

The gang had been hiring lately: “Since the United States is deporting so many through here, we are capturing them and that has meant more work,” the teen told him. “We’re saturated.”

Initially the captors demanded $16,000. They gave Yohan and his wife a list of names and accounts; relatives were supposed to deposit $450 into each one without using companies seen as traceable by authorities.

But they were able to scrape together just $3,000, and that angered the gangsters.

“I’m going to give you to the cartel,” one shouted.

Then Yohan’s son came down with the mumps. The family got the captors to provide a bit of extra milk for him in exchange for his daughter’s little gold ring, but the boy wasn’t getting better and they abruptly released the family.

“They told us that the cartel doesn’t allow them to hold sick children,” Yohan said.

This is a matter of business, not humanity: A dead child could bring attention from the media, and then authorities, says George Mason’s Correa-Cabrera.

After 14 days captive and before leaving the safe house, Yohan was given a code phrase: “We already passed through the office, checking.” Only hours later they would need to use it. Arriving at the bus station, a group of strange men tried to grab them. Yohan spoke the six words in Spanish, and they were let go, and they went on to Monterrey.

On Sept. 22, Yohan’s family returned to Nuevo Laredo for their court date, bringing with them a report on the family’s kidnapping. Though U.S. law allows at-risk people to stay, they were sent back to the parking lot of a Mexican immigration facility, surrounded by seedy cantinas and watching eyes.

Mexican authorities organized bus transportation for those who wanted to return to their home countries. The family did not intend to go back to Nicaragua, so they asked the driver to leave them in Monterrey where they would await the next hearing.

After they were under way, the driver demanded $200. They couldn’t pay, so he dumped them about 60 miles (100 kilometers) from the city at 1 a.m., along with four others.

———

Unlike other border cities such as Tijuana or Ciudad Juarez, migrants and asylum seekers are rarely seen on the streets in Nuevo Laredo. Fear keeps them in hiding, and safety isn’t a sure thing even inside shelters. This summer pastor Aarón Méndez was abducted from the shelter he ran. He has not been heard from since.

Nor is it safe on the streets going to and from the station. A couple of months after Méndez disappeared, gunmen intercepted some people who were helping migrants make those trips; those being transported were taken away, and the helpers were told they would be killed if they persisted.

Kennji Kizuka, a researcher for New York-based Human Rights First, told of one woman who crossed into the U.S. for a hearing date, where she had to surrender her phone. While she was incommunicado for hours, calls were placed to relatives in the United States claiming she had been kidnapped and aggressively demanding a ransom.

“It’s clear that they have a very sophisticated system to target people,” Kizuka said.

In another instance, Kizuka said, cartel members were in the Nuevo Laredo office of Mexican migration, openly abducting asylum seekers who had just been sent back from the United States.

One woman hid in the bathroom with her daughter and called a local pastor for help; he tried to drive them away, but they were blocked by cartel members blocks way. The two were taken from the car and held by the gangsters, though they eventually were released unharmed.

A spokesperson for the Mexican foreign affairs secretary declined comment on allegations that Mexico cannot guarantee safety for immigrants returned from U.S.

U.S. Border Patrol officials said recently they are continuing to send asylum seekers back over the border, and that includes Nuevo Laredo. The number of people returned there has been reduced recently, but that was related to a decrease in migrants arriving at the border — and not violence in Tamaulipas.

In an interview, Brian Hastings, Border Patrol chief of law enforcement operations, told AP that officials didn’t see a “threat to that population” in Tamaulipas and “there was basically a small war between the cartel and the state police” there.

But the numbers indicate the danger is real.

As of August, Human Rights First had tabulated 100 violent crimes against returnees. By October, after it rolled out to Tamaulipas, that had more than tripled to 340. Most involved kidnapping and extortion. Kizuka said the danger is even greater than the numbers reflect because they are based solely on accounts his organization or reporters have been able to document.

Of dozens of people interviewed by AP who said they had been victimized in Nuevo Laredo, Reynosa, Matamoros and Monterrey, just one had filed a police report.

Kidnappings of migrants are not a new phenomenon. According to Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission, in just six months in 2009 nearly 10,000 migrants were abducted while passing through the country.

Back then the cartels were splintering amid a government policy targeting their top bosses, leading them to fight among themselves in the people-smuggling business to fill two needs: money and labor. Kidnapped migrants generally were told they could avoid being killed by either paying ransom or working for the cartel.

Tamaulipas became a bloody emblem of the problem in 2010 when 72 migrants were found slain at a ranch in San Fernando, and a year later when the bodies of 193 migrants were found in the same area in clandestine mass graves — apparently murdered by a cartel to damage a rival’s people-smuggling business.

Raymundo Ramos of the Nuevo Laredo Human Rights Committee said gangs today are more interested in squeezing cash from migrants: “They have to recover a lot of the money lost in those wars.”

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has acknowledged that another massacre or escalation of violence is a major fear and has deployed more than 25,000 troops and National Guard agents to police people-trafficking in border regions and along smuggling routes. But all the accounts of violence in this account took place after that deployment.

———

Reynosa, a factory city of about 650,000, is the largest in Tamaulipas and home to some of the worst drug war violence. It’s also a key part of the migratory route and one of the busiest crossing points along with Ciudad Miguel Aleman.

Disputed by rival gangs, Reynosa has the feel of a place with invisible fences demarcating their territories, and numerous migrants said they had to pay to get past checkpoints at the main entrances to the city.

Lawyer and human rights worker Fortino López Balcázar said the gangs first took control of the river, attacking and beating migrants. Then they started grabbing them from bus stations, and then from the streets.

The airport is also tightly controlled.

A 46-year-old teacher from Havana recalled arriving with her 16-year-old son Aug. 13 by plane from Mexico City with the phone number for a taxi driver, provided by a lawyer who arranged their trip. As they drove into Reynosa, two other taxis cut the vehicle off. Two men got in, took away her cellphone and money and whisked them to a home that was under construction.

The lawyer “sold us out,” the woman said.

That night they were moved to a thicket near the Rio Grande where they were held captive in an outdoor camp for a week with dozens of others. They met another group of Cubans, who were also abducted shortly after flying into Reynosa: Several taxi and vans brazenly intercepted them in broad daylight, bringing traffic to a halt.

“It was as if we were terrorists and the FBI had swooped down on us,” one of the men said. He speculated they may have been betrayed by an airport immigration agent with whom they had argued over their travel documents.

López Obrador’s government has said the National Immigration Institute is one of Mexico’s most corrupt agencies. In early 2019 the institute announced the firing of more than 500 workers nationwide. According to a person with knowledge of the purge, Tamaulipas was one of four states where the most firings took place. Some worked in airports, others in the city of Reynosa.

In February the institute’s deputy delegate to the city was fired and accused of charging detained migrants over $3,000 to avoid deportation. Later new complaints surfaced of people being shaken down for $1,500 to be put at the top of wait lists to present claims in the United States.

At the riverside camp, the Cuban teacher was introduced to its “commander” who demanded “rent” and a fine for not traveling with a guide. The ransom was set at $1,000.

Previously the Cuban woman’s only exposure to the world of organized crime came from movies she watched on the illegal satellite TV hookup that caused her to run afoul of authorities back home. Now, they were witnessing things both terrifying and hard to understand.

There was the time a man tried to suffocate another with a plastic bag, or when the kidnappers, some barely in their teens, beat a “coyote” for working for a rival outfit. From what she was able to understand from the shouting, he had been kidnapped along with clients he was guiding and they wanted him to switch loyalties.

The captors at the thicket referred to themselves as “the corporation,” the teacher said. People came and went, some delivered by men in uniforms who may or may not have been police.

Edith Garrido, a nun who works at the Casa del Migrante shelter in Reynosa, said both crooked officers and criminals dressed as police — known as “black cops” or “the clones” — are mixed up in the racket, making the rounds of safe houses to buy and sell kidnap victims.

“They say ‘give me 10, 15, 25.’ They tell them they are going to take them to a safer place, and they give them to the highest bidder,” Garrido explained. “A migrant is money for them, not a person.”

The captors let the Cubans use their cellphones for a few hours to coordinate ransom payments with relatives, always small amounts to different bank accounts. Weeping, the teacher recalled how her 25-year-old daughter in Cuba had to pawn all her belongings.

After the ransom came through, the captors took her picture and she, her son and another woman were put in a taxi and driven off. The cabbie stopped the car along a highway, took her cellphone and said they could go.

She and her son now await their immigration court date in Reynosa, where she has found temporary construction work to pay for rent and food.

There’s not enough space for everyone at the shelters, so many rent rooms, and that demand has pushed prices up. It can range from $35 per person per month for a spot in a cramped five-person bedroom in a seedy area, to $300-$500 for a more secure home.

But nowhere is truly safe. Last month a family from El Salvador missed their turn to present themselves for U.S. asylum after a shootout erupted in the streets and they were afraid to leave their home.

Garrido said some pay protection fees so they are not bothered in their homes, while others rent directly from the gangs.

“So one way or another,” she said, “they make money.”

———

Associated Press writers Peter Orsi in Mexico City and Colleen Long in Washington contributed to this report.

 

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

Beyond disgusting! Profiles in Judicial and Executive cowardice (not to mention Congressional fecklessness) to be sure!

It all goes back to Innovation Law Lab v. McAleenan and a 9th Circuit panel that spoke legal gibberish rather than courageously standing up to the Trump Administration’s outrageously illegal behavior. Then, the full Ninth Circuit has compounded the problem by “sitting on the case” for months. In the meantime, folks are unnecessarily dying and being victimized by judicial abdication of duty.

 

PWS

11-18-19

 

Related posts:

  1. 18 YEARS AFTER 09-11, THE “BAD GUYS” ARE WINNING THE BATTLE TO DESTROY AMERICAN JUSTICE & SPLIT THE COUNTRY! — Here’s The Disturbing Proof Of What Passes For “Justice” In America Today!
  2. WHERE’S THE OUTRAGE? — 9th CIRCUIT JUDGES ASSIST REGIME’S AGENTS IN COMMITTING “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” MERE YARDS FROM THE BORDER! — NDPA Leader Jodi Goodwin, Esquire, Speaks Out: “I’ve been practicing law for 25 years and the last four to five months of practicing law has broken me. I don’t want to fucking do this anymore. [Her voice breaks again] It sucks. How do you explain to people that you know they thought they were coming to a place where there’s freedom and safety and where the laws are just, but that’s not the situation? I’m very mad.”
  3. GROSS NATIONAL DISGRACE: “A Fucking Disaster That Is Designed to Fail”: How Trump Wrecked America’s Immigration Courts — Fernanda Echavarri Reports For Mother Jones On How Our Failed Justice System Daily Abuses The Most Vulnerable While Feckless Legislators &   Smugly Complicit Article III Judges Look On & Ignore The Human Carnage They Are Enabling — “ Two days after US immigration officials sent her to Tijuana, she was raped.”
  4. AMERICA’S “MASS ATROCITY” — Professor Kate Cronin-Furman Says Don’t Kid Yourself About What The Trump Administration Is Doing In Your Name & How “Ordinary Civil Servants” Carry Out The Unthinkable & Unacceptable!

9TH CIRCUIT’S CONTINUING SHAME: “Let ‘Em Die In Mexico” Program Was Ruled “Illegal From The Git Go” By Courageous U.S. District Judge – Then, 9th Intervened To “Open The Killing Fields” –  Empowered By Appellate Judicial Complicity, DHS Agents Now Simply Commit Fraud On Asylum Applicants & Their Lawyers By Returning Them To Mexico With Fake Hearing Dates!      

Gustavo Solis
Gustavo Solis
South Bay Reporter
San Diego Union-Tribune

http://enewspaper.latimes.com/infinity/article_share.aspx?guid=1e0901c7-ba27-4d78-a71a-823c2481d392

 

Gustavo Solis reports for the San Diego Union-Tribune:

 

By Gustavo Solis

Asylum seekers who have finished their court cases are being sent back to Mexico with documents that contain fraudulent future court dates, keeping some migrants south of the border indefinitely, records show.

Under the Migrant Protection Protocols policy, asylum seekers with cases in the United States have to wait in Mexico until those cases are resolved. The Mexican government agreed to accept only migrants with future court dates scheduled.

Normally, when migrants conclude their immigration court cases, they are either paroled into the United States or kept in federal custody depending on the outcome of the case.

However, records obtained by the San Diego Union-Tribune show that on at least 14 occasions, Customs and Border Protection agents in California and Texas gave migrants who had already concluded their court cases documents with fraudulent future court dates written on them and sent the migrants back to Mexico anyway.

Those documents, unofficially known as tear sheets, are given to every migrant in the Migrant Protection Protocols program who is sent back to Mexico. The document tells the migrants where and when to appear at the border so that they can be transported to immigration court. What is different about the tear sheets that migrants with closed cases receive is that the future court date is not legitimate, according to multiple immigration lawyers whose clients have received these documents.

This has happened both to migrants who have been granted asylum and those who had their cases terminated — meaning a judge closed the case without making a formal decision, usually on procedural grounds. Additionally, at least one migrant was physically assaulted after being sent back to Mexico this way, according to her lawyer.

Bashir Ghazialam, a San Diego immigration lawyer who represents six people who received these fake future court dates, said he was shocked by the developments.

“This is fraud,” he said. “I don’t call everything fraud. This is the first time I’ve used the words, ‘U.S. government’ and ‘fraud’ in the same sentence. No one should be OK with this.”

The Department of Homeland Security and Customs and Border Protection did not respond to multiple requests to comment about why they had engaged in the practice.

Ghazialam first noticed this in September, when three of his clients were sent back to Mexico after their cases were terminated on Sept. 17. After the judge made his decision, the family spent 10 days in Customs and Border Protection custody.

On Sept. 27, the family was given a document that read, in part, “At your last court appearance, an immigration judge ordered you to return to court for another hearing.” That piece of paper told them to return to court on Nov. 28.

However, the immigration judge ordered no further hearing. Ghazialam’s clients do not have a hearing scheduled on that or any other day.

To confirm Ghazialam’s claims, a reporter called a Department of Justice hotline that people with immigration court cases use to check their status and dates of future hearings. That hotline confirmed that the family’s case had been terminated on Sept. 17 and that “the system does not contain any information regarding a future hearing date on your case.”

“That date is completely made up and the Mexican authorities are not trained enough to know this is a fake court date,” Ghazialam said.

After being returned to Mexico, the mother was stabbed in the forearm while protecting her children from an attempted kidnapping. She still has stitches from the wound, Ghazialam said.

The mother presented herself at the border shortly after the stabbing. She told Customs and Border Protection agents that she was afraid to stay in Mexico. The agents gave her a fear of return interview and tried to send her back to Mexico.

But this time, Mexican immigration officials refused to let her and her children back into Mexico because they did not have a court date, Ghazialam said. She is currently with relatives in New York, waiting to figure out the future of her legal status in the United States while wearing an ankle monitor.

In most of these cases, immigration attorneys aren’t aware that their clients were sent back to Mexico until it’s too late.

In one case, a Cuban asylum seeker was returned to Mexico after an immigration judge in Brownsville, Texas, granted her asylum.

The woman’s lawyer, Jodi Goodwin, remembers hugging her client after the decision and arranging a place to meet after authorities released her later that day following processing.

Goodwin expected the process to take 45 minutes, so she went to a nearby Whataburger and ordered a chocolate milkshake. About 40 minutes later, she got a phone call from her client.

“She was hysterical and crying,” Goodwin said. “I’m like, ‘What happened?’ and she says, ‘I’m in Mexico.’ ”

Goodwin called U.S. and Mexican immigration authorities to try to find out what happened. She spent five hours at the border until 9 p.m. and then went home to draft a lawsuit. It wasn’t until she threatened to sue CBP that her client was paroled into the United States.

“It was total chaos for 24 hours to try to figure it out,” Goodwin said. “It shouldn’t be like that, especially when CBP is blatantly lying. They are creating documents that have false information.”

The American Immigration Lawyers Assn. said it was worried about the practice.

“The idea that even though these vulnerable individuals are able to obtain an asylum grant from an immigration judge and CBP is sending them back to harm’s way in Mexico is really disturbing, especially under the guise that there’s a future hearing date,” said Laura Lynch, senior policy counsel for the organization.

Mexico’s National Institute of Migration did not immediately respond to questions about this practice.

Although Ghazialam and Goodwin were able to eventually get their clients back into the United States, some people are still in Mexico.

That’s what happened to a Guatemalan woman and her two children after a judge terminated their case on Oct. 18. The same day the judge closed their case, a U.S. immigration official gave her a piece of paper with the false hearing date of Jan. 16.

“But this appointment does not exist,” said the woman’s New York City attorney, Rebecca Press. “If you check with the immigration court system, there is no January hearing date and the case has already been terminated.”

It’s unclear how widespread this practice is. Lawyers in San Diego; Laredo, Texas; and Brownsville confirmed they have seen it firsthand.

However, only about 1% of asylum seekers in the Migrant Protection Protocols program have lawyers. Therefore it’s difficult to track what happens to the overwhelming majority of the people in the program.

Lawyers said asylum seekers without legal representation who have been sent back in this manner probably have no way of advocating for themselves. It took Goodwin hours of calls to high-level officials in both U.S. and Mexican immigration agencies plus the threat of a lawsuit to get her client back into the United States.

“If you don’t have someone who’s willing to sit around and spend five hours on the phone and stay up all night drafting litigation to force their hand, you’re going to be stuck,” she said.

As news of these false hearing dates spread among the immigration attorney community, some lawyers are taking proactive steps to protect their clients from being returned to Mexico after their court cases are closed.

Siobhan Waldron, a Los Angeles lawyer, wrote a letter to Mexican immigration officials explaining that her client had no future hearing date and outlined a step-by-step process Mexican officials could take to verify that her client’s case had been closed by using the Department of Justice hotline.

The letter worked at first.

When CBP officers tried to return Waldron’s client to Mexico on Nov. 1 with a false January hearing date, her client showed the note to Mexican officials, who refused to take her in. However, the next day, CBP officers sent Waldron’s client back to Mexico with another false court date and this time did not allow her to show Mexican officials her lawyer’s letter that she kept in a special folder, Waldron said.

“They didn’t let her take it out,” Waldron said. “They said, ‘You can’t present anything from that folder.’ ”

The lawyer plans to file “any complaint you can imagine” to CBP, the Department of Homeland Security and other regulatory agencies because “these agents need to be held accountable.”

Her client is still in Mexico, too afraid to walk outside because she has already been kidnapped and assaulted, Waldron said.

Solis writes for the San Diego Union-Tribune.

 

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

As my friend Laura Lynch points out, the individuals affected by this judicially-enabled outrage are not just “asylum applicants” – they include those who have been GRANTED ASYLUM as well as those whose removal proceedings were terminated because a U.S. Immigration Judge found that DHS ILLEGALLY SUBJECTED THEM to the “Let ‘Em Die In Mexico Program.”

The 9th Circuit’s horrible and incompetent handling of Innovation Law Lab v. McAleenan will live in infamy as a monumental judicial abdication of duty that has actually harmed or killed innocent asylum seekers while inspiring DHS to new heights of illegal behavior and contempt for our entire legal system.

Why have a “Judicial Branch” that won’t stand up for individual legal rights in the face of Executive tyranny, overreach, and downright fraud? What are these robed folks doing to earn their lifetime paychecks? And, given the quality and philosophy of many of Trump”s judicial appointments, rammed through a corrupt GOP Senate by “Moscow Mitch,” these are questions the majority of Americans might be asking for decades to come!

 

PWS

 

11-08-19

 

 

 

 

Related posts:

  1. GROSS NATIONAL DISGRACE: “A Fucking Disaster That Is Designed to Fail”: How Trump Wrecked America’s Immigration Courts — Fernanda Echavarri Reports For Mother Jones On How Our Failed Justice System Daily Abuses The Most Vulnerable While Feckless Legislators &   Smugly Complicit Article III Judges Look On & Ignore The Human Carnage They Are Enabling — “ Two days after US immigration officials sent her to Tijuana, she was raped.”
  2. PROFILE IN JUDICIAL COWARDICE: ARTICLE III’S DERELICTION OF DUTY LEAVES BRAVE ASYLUM APPLICANTS AND THEIR COURAGEOUS ATTORNEYS DEFENSELESS AGAINST RACIST ONSLAUGHT BY TRUMP ADMINISTRATION! – “NDPA” Stalwarts Laura Lynch & Leidy Perez-Davis Blog Daily About What’s REALLY Happening At The Border As A Result Of JUDICIAL MALFEASANCE By Life-Tenured Federal Appellate Judges Who Were Supposed To Protect Our Rights, But Are Failing To Do So!
  3. WHERE’S THE OUTRAGE? — 9th CIRCUIT JUDGES ASSIST REGIME’S AGENTS IN COMMITTING “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” MERE YARDS FROM THE BORDER! — NDPA Leader Jodi Goodwin, Esquire, Speaks Out: “I’ve been practicing law for 25 years and the last four to five months of practicing law has broken me. I don’t want to fucking do this anymore. [Her voice breaks again] It sucks. How do you explain to people that you know they thought they were coming to a place where there’s freedom and safety and where the laws are just, but that’s not the situation? I’m very mad.”
  4. HOW “AMERICA’S KILLER COURTS” PROMOTE “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” — HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH: TRUMP & HIS WHITE NATIONALIST SYCOPHANTS & TOADIES TOUT LAWLESS POLICIES THAT VIOLATE LEGAL OBLIGATIONS & HELP KILL, RAPE, TORTURE THOSE RETURNED TO EL SALVADOR — Supremes & Article III Judiciary Complicit In Gross Human Rights Violations! 

U.S. IMMIGRATION JUDGE LEE O’CONNOR EXPOSES MASSIVE DHS ILLEGALITY & FRAUD IN IMPLEMENTATION OF SO-CALLED MIGRANT PROTECTION PROTOCOLS (“LET ‘EM DIE IN MEXICO”) – “Indeed, the vast majority of respondents subjected to the MPP program involve cases where DHS has compelled -without authorization of law – aliens who were present within the United States and were not arriving aliens to return to Mexico to await their removal proceeding. It appears that over 90 percent of the MPP cases involve aliens were not properly subject to INA § 235(b)(2)(C). The court finds that termination is the appropriate action.”

U.S. IMMIGRATION JUDGE LEE O’CONNOR EXPOSES MASSIVE DHS ILLEGALITY & FRAUD IN IMPLEMENTATION OF SO-CALLED MIGRANT PROTECTION PROTOCOLS (“LET ‘EM DIE IN MEXICO”) – “Indeed, the vast majority of respondents subjected to the MPP program involve cases where DHS has compelled -without authorization of law – aliens who were present within the United States and were not arriving aliens to return to Mexico to await their removal proceeding. It appears that over 90 percent of the MPP cases involve aliens were not properly subject to INA § 235(b)(2)(C). The court finds that termination is the appropriate action.”

Here’s Judge O’Connor’s decision, dated 09-17-19:

9-17-19 IJ termination MPP

Here’s key language from Judge O’Connor’s decision:

Respondents appeared for a hearing on September 9, 2019, with counsel and were granted a continuance for attorney preparation. The court reset the case to September 17, 2019. Respondents moved to terminate removal proceedings on the ground that they are not arriving aliens and were therefore not properly subjected to the MPP program. The court concludes thatDHS has not proven its fundamental allegation that respondents are arriving aliens and that DHS has not acted properly in subjecting aliens who were apprehended within the United States to the MPP program. Indeed, the vast majority of respondents subjected to the MPP program involve cases where DHS has compelled -without authorization of law – aliens who were present within the United States and were not arriving aliens to return to Mexico to await their removal proceeding. It appears that over 90 percent of the MPP cases involve aliens were not properly subject to INA § 235(b)(2)(C). The court finds that termination is the appropriate action.

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

So this is the “legacy” of “Powerful Woman” Kirstjen Nielsen and her successor “Big Mac With Lies:” Massive violations of legal and human rights of asylum seekers!

And, don’t forget the complicit Article III Judges of the 9th Circuit in Innovation Law Lab v. McAleenan whose mindless “green-lighting” of this abusive and clearly illegal program is responsible for daily mockeries of the very U.S. laws they were sworn to uphold as well as continuing human misery.

It also shows:

  • The great potential of an independent Article I U.S. Immigration Court to stop DHS abuses in their tracks, at an early point in time (this would also save time and public money now being squandered on various illegal, ill-advised, and always inhumane “enforcement schemes and gimmicks”);
  • The potential of an independent Immigration Court with a true merit selection system for judges;
  • The value of effective representation of asylum seekers (which is either impeded or actively blocked by DHS and EOIR these days);
  • The corruption of leadership at DHS and DOJ and the lawyers representing them in court in defending the indefensible;
  • The dangers of abuses in a system run by a prejudiced Executive with no meaningful oversight and outside the public eye;
  • That while some Article III Judges have gone “belly up” in the face of massive illegality and abuses of our system, others like Judge O’Connor, even without the benefit of life tenure, have courageously continued to stand tall for Due Process and the legal rights of migrants to fair treatment under the law.

The current immigration system and those administering it in an unlawful and unconstitutional manner is a national disgrace! Something to remember when Kelly, Nielsen, “Big Mac With Lies,” and other senior officials of DHS and DOJ try to “reinvent” themselves in the private sector and disguise or disavow their truly disgusting record of subservience to Trump and the massive human rights violations for which they are morally responsible.

Due Process Forever; “Malicious Incompetence” Never!

 

PWS

 

10-25-19

 

 

Related posts:

  1. GROSS NATIONAL DISGRACE: “A Fucking Disaster That Is Designed to Fail”: How Trump Wrecked America’s Immigration Courts — Fernanda Echavarri Reports For Mother Jones On How Our Failed Justice System Daily Abuses The Most Vulnerable While Feckless Legislators &   Smugly Complicit Article III Judges Look On & Ignore The Human Carnage They Are Enabling — “ Two days after US immigration officials sent her to Tijuana, she was raped.”
  2. 18 YEARS AFTER 09-11, THE “BAD GUYS” ARE WINNING THE BATTLE TO DESTROY AMERICAN JUSTICE & SPLIT THE COUNTRY! — Here’s The Disturbing Proof Of What Passes For “Justice” In America Today!
  3. WHERE’S THE OUTRAGE? — 9th CIRCUIT JUDGES ASSIST REGIME’S AGENTS IN COMMITTING “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” MERE YARDS FROM THE BORDER! — NDPA Leader Jodi Goodwin, Esquire, Speaks Out: “I’ve been practicing law for 25 years and the last four to five months of practicing law has broken me. I don’t want to fucking do this anymore. [Her voice breaks again] It sucks. How do you explain to people that you know they thought they were coming to a place where there’s freedom and safety and where the laws are just, but that’s not the situation? I’m very mad.”
  4. “SITTING DUCKS” IN “UNSAFE THIRD COUNTRIES” — How The Supremes, The 9th Circuit, The 5th Circuit, & Other Complicit Federal Appellate Courts Aid & Abet The Trump Regime’s Human Rights Violations — Would The “Privileged Robed Ones” Take Due Process & The Rule Of Law More Seriously If It Were THEIR Kids & Grandkids Being Kidnapped & Held for Ransom For The “Crime” Of Seeking Protection Under U.S. Laws?  

NICOLE NAREA @ VOX: As Life Threatening Due Process & Statutory Violations Predictably Mount Under The Ninth Circuit’s “Let ‘Em Die In Mexico” Program, Congressional Dems Demand IG Investigation Of “Tent Courts,” A/K/A Kangaroo Courts!

Nicole Narea
Nicole Narea
Immigration Reporter
Vox.com

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/10/18/20920000/house-democrats-investigation-tent-courts-border-port

 

House Democrats are calling for investigations into two temporary immigration courts that opened along the southern border last month where migrants who have been waiting in Mexico are fighting to obtain asylum in the US, according to a letter sent Thursday.

The courts — located in tent complexes near US Customs and Border Protection ports in Laredo and Brownsville, Texas — were built to hear cases from migrants who have been sent back to Mexico under President Donald Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy, officially known as the Migrant Protection Protocols.

Unveiled in January, the policy has affected over 50,000 migrants found to have credible asylum claims, including those who present themselves at ports of entry on the southern border and those who are apprehended while trying to cross the border without authorization.

The tent courts, which opened in early September with no advance notice to the public, have the capacity to hold as many as 420 hearings per day in Laredo and 720 in Brownsville conducted exclusively by video. Immigrants and their attorneys video conference with judges and DHS attorneys appearing virtually, streamed from brick-and-mortar immigration courts hundreds of miles away.

Democratic leaders, led by Congressional Hispanic Caucus chair Joaquin Castro, raised concerns Thursday that the tent facilities have led to violations of migrants’ due process rights by restricting their access to attorneys and relying on teleconferencing. They also expressed alarm that asylum seekers processed in the facilities are being returned to Mexico even though they are in danger there and that the public has largely been barred from entering the tent facilities, shrouding their operations in secrecy.

“Given the lack of access to counsel and the limitations of

, we are concerned these tent courts do not provide full and fair consideration of their asylum claims, as required by law,” the lawmakers wrote, urging the Department of Homeland Security and Department of Justice’s inspectors general to investigate. “The opening and operations of these secretive tent courts are extremely problematic.”

Few have been allowed to enter the courts

Acting Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan had assured that members of the public and the press would be permitted to access to the facilities so long as they do not “disrupt proceedings or individuals’ privacy.”

In practice, however, that’s not how they have operated, and as House Democrats pointed out Thursday, preventing the public from viewing immigration court proceedings violates federal regulations.

“We are concerned that the administration has intentionally built these tent court at Customs and Border Protection ports of entry to justify limited public access to these facilities, and that this lack of transparency may allow DHS to hid abuse and due process violations that may occur in the tents,” their letter said.

Laura Lynch and Leidy Perez-Davis, attorneys with the American Immigration Lawyers Association who visited the port courts shortly after they opened in September, said they and other lawyers from the National Immigrant Justice Center, Amnesty International, and the Women’s Refugee Commission were barred from observing proceedings in the courts absent a document showing that they were representing one of the migrants on site.

The few attorneys that had such agreements were allowed to enter the facility a little more than an hour before their clients’ hearings to help them prepare — insufficient time given that, for many, it is their first opportunity to meet in person, Perez-Davis said.

In the first few days that the courts were open, the only people allowed in the hearing rooms were immigrants and their attorneys — but critically, not their translators, Lynch said. There were few attorneys representing asylum seekers in proceedings at the port courts, and even fewer spoke fluent Spanish and could have conversations with their clients.

Officials have since allowed translators into the hearing rooms, Lynch said, but neither DHS nor the DOJ have issued any formal clarification of their policy.

Attorneys are also not allowed to attend “non-refoulement interviews” at the tent facilities, in which an asylum officer determines, usually over the phone, whether a migrant should be sent back to Mexico or qualifies for an exemption allowing them to go to a detention facility in the US.

Limiting access to the port courts also inhibits legal aid groups’ ability to conduct presentations for migrants informing them of their rights in immigration proceedings, as they typically do in immigration courts.

Perez-Davis said that she observed one hearing from San Antonio — where some of the remote immigration judges handling cases in the ports courts are based — in which a young migrant woman was confused about what “asylum” means. That kind of knowledge would have previously been provided in presentations by legal aid groups.

Videoconferencing doesn’t facilitate a fair proceeding

The use of video conferencing in immigration court proceedings has long been a subject of controversy. In theory, teleconferencing would seem to make proceedings more efficient and increase access to justice, allowing attorneys and judges to partake even though they may be hundreds of miles away.

But in practice, advocates argue that teleconferencing has inhibited full and fair proceedings, with some even filing a lawsuit in New York federal court in January claiming that it violates immigrants’ constitutional rights.

Immigrants who appear in court via teleconference are more likely to be unrepresented and be deported, a 2015 Northwestern Law Review study found. Reports by the Government Accountability Office and the Executive Office of Immigration Review have also raised concerns about how technical difficulties, remote translation services, and the inability to read nonverbal communication over teleconference may adversely affect outcomes for immigrants.

Yet despite such research, the immigration courts have increasingly used video as a stand-in for in-person interaction.

In the port courts in Laredo and Brownsville, video substitutes for that kind of interaction entirely — but it has not been without hiccups so far.

Lynch, Perez-Davis, and Yael Schacher, a senior US advocate at Refugees International, said they all observed connectivity issues. For migrants who must recount some of the most traumatic experiences of their lives to support their asylum claims, video conferencing makes their task harder, Perez-Davis said.

“I have been asking myself what happens if you’re in the middle of the worst story you’ve ever had to tell, and the video cuts out?” she said.

These courts are sending immigrants back to danger in Mexico

Migrants are required to travel in the dark and show up for processing before their hearings at the port courts early as 4:30 in the morning.

That puts them at increased risk, with recent reports of violence and kidnappings in Nuevo Laredo, which is directly across the border from Laredo, and Matamoros, which is adjacent to Brownsville. The State Department has consequently issued a level four “Do Not Travel”warning in both Nuevo Laredo and Matamoros.

Lynch and Perez-Davis said that attorneys are also increasingly afraid of crossing the border into Mexico in light of those safety concerns. Where they used to cross over the border to deliver presentations informing migrants of their rights and the US legal process in Mexican shelters, that is no longer happening to the same degree.

“It has chilled any sort of ability to provide legal representation,” Perez-Davis said.

DHS purports to exempt “vulnerable populations” from the Remain in Mexico policy and allow them to remain in the US, but in practice, few migrants have been able to obtain such exemptions in non-refoulement interviews.

The advocacy group Human Rights First issued a report earlier this month documenting dozens of cases in which inherently vulnerable immigrants — including those with serious health issues and pregnant women — and immigrants who were already victims of kidnapping, rape and assault in Mexico were sent back under MPP after their interviews.

With attorneys barred from advocating for migrants in these interviews, migrants will likely continue to be sent back to Mexico even if they should qualify for an exemption under DHS’s own guidelines.

“These interviews are a basic human rights protection to ensure that no one is returned to a country where they would face inhumane treatment, persecution or other harm,” Democrats wrote Thursday. “We are concerned that DHS is returning asylum seekers to harm in Mexico.”

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

This situation persists as a direct and predictable consequence of the Ninth Circuit’s atrocious decision staying the District Court’s properly issued injunction in Innovation Law Lab v. McAleenan!

As I told the US District Court, District of Rhode Island, 2019 District Conference on “Independence & the Courts” today:

Constantly Confront Complicit Courts 4 Change. Make the guys in the ivory tower “own” the deaths, human rights abuses, unrelenting human misery, and mockeries of justice that their intransigence and failure to carry out their oaths to faithfully support and defend the Constitution of the U.S. is causing to the most needy and vulnerable among us — that is, to those who have the audacity to assert their legal rights under our laws.

What good are “independent” courts who won’t stand up for our individual rights under the Constitution? “Independence” does not entitle judges to use their privileged positions to be complicit or complacent in the face of great tyranny and the human misery and irreparable harm it causes!

And, thanks to Nicole for “keeping on” this horrifying chronicle of calculated and premeditated human rights abuses by an Executive Branch “gone rogue,” and the disastrous real life human consequences of ivory tower appellate judges failing to perform their Constitutional duties. They will not escape the judgment of history for their unwillingness to stand up to the abuses of a White Nationalist regime carrying out a predetermined agenda totally unrelated to governing in the public interest or complying with the rule of law.

Also, many thanks too Laura and Leidy for having the courage and dedication to put themselves “on the line” to let us know exactly what’s happening as a result of the massive failure of all three branches of our Government.

Join the New Due Process Army and take the fight to preserve our American values and our Constitution to all three branches of Government until they do their duties and stop the illegal and unconstitutional abuses of asylum seekers! 

PWS

10-18-19

 

 

 

Related posts:

  1. PROFILE IN JUDICIAL COWARDICE: ARTICLE III’S DERELICTION OF DUTY LEAVES BRAVE ASYLUM APPLICANTS AND THEIR COURAGEOUS ATTORNEYS DEFENSELESS AGAINST RACIST ONSLAUGHT BY TRUMP ADMINISTRATION! – “NDPA” Stalwarts Laura Lynch & Leidy Perez-Davis Blog Daily About What’s REALLY Happening At The Border As A Result Of JUDICIAL MALFEASANCE By Life-Tenured Federal Appellate Judges Who Were Supposed To Protect Our Rights, But Are Failing To Do So!
  2. GROSS NATIONAL DISGRACE: “A Fucking Disaster That Is Designed to Fail”: How Trump Wrecked America’s Immigration Courts — Fernanda Echavarri Reports For Mother Jones On How Our Failed Justice System Daily Abuses The Most Vulnerable While Feckless Legislators &   Smugly Complicit Article III Judges Look On & Ignore The Human Carnage They Are Enabling — “ Two days after US immigration officials sent her to Tijuana, she was raped.”
  3. WHERE’S THE OUTRAGE? — 9th CIRCUIT JUDGES ASSIST REGIME’S AGENTS IN COMMITTING “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” MERE YARDS FROM THE BORDER! — NDPA Leader Jodi Goodwin, Esquire, Speaks Out: “I’ve been practicing law for 25 years and the last four to five months of practicing law has broken me. I don’t want to fucking do this anymore. [Her voice breaks again] It sucks. How do you explain to people that you know they thought they were coming to a place where there’s freedom and safety and where the laws are just, but that’s not the situation? I’m very mad.”
  4. 18 YEARS AFTER 09-11, THE “BAD GUYS” ARE WINNING THE BATTLE TO DESTROY AMERICAN JUSTICE & SPLIT THE COUNTRY! — Here’s The Disturbing Proof Of What Passes For “Justice” In America Today!