Arelis R. Hernandez reports for the Washington Post:
A federal judge in Washington halted a deportation in progress Thursday and threatened to hold Attorney General Jeff Sessions in contempt after learning that the Trump administration tried to remove a woman and her daughter while a court hearing appealing their deportations was underway.
“This is pretty outrageous,” U.S. District Court Judge Emmet G. Sullivan said after being told about the removal. “That someone seeking justice in U.S. court is spirited away while her attorneys are arguing for justice for her?”
“I’m not happy about this at all,” the judge continued. “This is not acceptable.”
The woman, known in court papers as Carmen, is a plaintiff in a lawsuit filed this week by the American Civil Liberties Union. It challenges a recent policy change by the Department of Justice that aims to expedite the removal of asylum seekers who fail to prove their cases and excludes domestic and gang violence as justifications for granting asylum in the United States.
Attorneys for the civil rights organization and the Department of Justice had agreed to delay removal proceedings for Carmen and her child until 11:59 p.m. Thursday so they could argue the matter in court.
But lead ACLU attorney Jennifer Chang Newell, who was participating in the court hearing via phone from her office in California, received an email during the hearing that said the mother and daughter were being deported.
Activists rally against the Trump administration’s immigration policies outside the New York City offices of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in July. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)During a brief recess, she told her colleagues the pair had been taken from a family detention center in Dilley, Tex., and were headed to the airport in San Antonio for an 8:15 a.m. flight.
After granting the ACLU’s request to delay deportations for Carmen and the other plaintiffs until the lawsuit is decided, Sullivan ordered the government to “turn the plane around.”
Justice Department attorney Erez Reuveni said he had not been told the deportation was happening that morning, and could not confirm the whereabouts of Carmen and her daughter.
The ACLU said later that government attorneys confirmed to them after the hearing that the pair was on a flight en route to El Salvador. The Justice Department said they would be flown back to Texas and returned to the detention center after landing, the ACLU said.
Calls and emails to the Justice Department’s communications office were not immediately returned Thursday afternoon.
“Obviously my heart sank when I found out,” Chang Newell said. “The whole point of this was to get a ruling from the court before they could be placed in danger.”
To qualify for asylum, migrants must show that they have a fear of persecution in their native country based on their race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a “particular social group,” a category that in the past has included victims of domestic violence and other abuse.
Carmen fled El Salvador with her daughter in June, according to court records, fearing they would be killed by gang members who had demanded she pay them monthly or suffer consequences. Several coworkers at the factory where Carmen worked had been murdered,and her husband is also abusive, the records state.
Under the fast-track removal system, created in 1996, asylum seekers are interviewed by to determine whether they have a “credible fear” of returning home. Those who pass get a full hearing in immigration court.
In June, Sessions vacated a 2016 Board of Immigration Appeals court case that granted asylum to an abused woman from El Salvador. As part of that decision, Sessions said gang and domestic violence in most cases would no longer be grounds for receiving asylum.
“The mere fact that a country may have problems effectively policing certain crimes — such as domestic violence or gang violence — or that certain populations are more likely to be victims of crime, cannot itself establish an asylum claim,” Sessions wrote at the time.
The ACLU lawsuit was filed on behalf of 12 migrants from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala — three of them children — all of whom failed their initial “credible fear” interviews.
Two of the children and their mothers were deported before the suit was filed. None of the adults had been separated from their children as part of President Trump’s “zero-tolerance” policy.
The lawsuit says Sessions’s ruling, and updated guidelines for asylum officers that the Department of Homeland Security issued a month later, subject migrants in expedited removal proceedings to an “unlawful screening standard” that deprives them of their rights under federal law.
Asylum seekers previously had to show that the government in their native country was “unable or unwilling” to protect them. But now they have to show that the government “condones” the violence or “is completely helpless” to protect them, the lawsuit says.
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Here’s Tal Kopan’s report for CNN:
Judge blocks administration from deporting asylum seekers while fighting for right to stay in US
By Tal Kopan, CNN
A federal judge on Thursday blocked the Trump administration from deporting immigrants while they’re fighting for their right to stay in the US — reportedly excoriating the administration and threatening to hold Attorney General Jeff Sessions in contempt.
DC District Judge Emmet Sullivan on Thursday agreed with the American Civil Liberties Union that the immigrants they are representing in a federal lawsuit should not be deported while their cases are pending.
During court, Sullivan was incensed at the report that one of the plaintiffs was in the process of being deported, according to The Washington Post. He threatened to hold Attorney General Jeff Sessions in contempt if his order wasn’t followed, the report added.
“This is pretty outrageous,” Sullivan said, according to the Post. “That someone seeking justice in US court is spirited away while her attorneys are arguing for justice for her?”
More: http://www.cnn.com/2018/08/09/politics/judge-halts-deportations-sessions/index.html
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Is a real judge finally going to hold America’s most notorious child abuser and scofflaw accountable? Is a strategy of sending DOJ lawyers into Article III Federal Courts to lie, misrepresent, obfuscate, and present largely frivolous legal positions finally going to backfire? Too early to tell, but this is a hopeful sign.
My recollection is that Judge Sullivan has always had a well-deserved reputation as a no-nonsense judge who demands the same professional performance from Government litigators as he does from the private bar. By contrast, I have previously pointed out how under Sessions DOJ lawyers too often conduct themselves in a flip and contemptuous manner that would have landed private lawyers in hot water. Things like falsely claiming that “there was no policy of family separation” when it was precisely what Sessions had created, as a deterrent, through his outlandish “zero tolerance” policy, and actually publicly bragged about.
That is, when Sessions wasn’t busy misrepresenting statistics, misapplying Biblical quotes, telling demonstrable lies (“asylum fraud is a major cause of eleven million undocumented individuals” — what a whopper!), and dehumanizing vulnerable asylum seekers and their families who are merely trying to get a fair chance to plead for their lives under US and international law. Or perhaps trying to promote a ludicrous fictional connection between Dreamer relief and genuine national security.
Hopefully, Judge Sullivan will continue to be outraged when he gets into the merits of the case and finds out just how Sessions has intentionally misconstrued asylum law, manipulated an agency that he de facto runs, and used CINO (“Courts In Name Only”) to deny Due Process, intentionally inflict misery, and impose potential death sentences on fine people, vulnerable human beings, many of whom deserve protection, not rejection, and all of whom deserve to be treated with respect and given a full chance to present their claims. I believe that the ACLU will be able to show Judge Sullivan how Sessions has arrogantly abused his authority and corrupted both the USDOJ and our entire justice system to advance his White Nationalist agenda.
The Government obviously knew that this mother and daughter were plaintiffs in this case. Their presence during litigation presented no threat whatsoever to the United States. The Government’s disingenuous, unnecessary, and contemptuous actions show exactly what kind of racial animus and disdain for human life and for the American justice system are behind Sessions’s actions. Let’s hope, for sake of our country and the innocent people he is harming, that Judge Sullivan finally holds “Scofflaw Sessions” accountable!
PWS
08-08-18