"The Voice of the New Due Process Army" ————– Musings on Events in U.S. Immigration Court, Immigration Law, Sports, Music, Politics, and Other Random Topics by Retired United States Immigration Judge (Arlington, Virginia) and former Chairman of the Board of Immigration Appeals Paul Wickham Schmidt and Dr. Alicia Triche, expert brief writer, practical scholar, emeritus Editor-in-Chief of The Green Card (FBA), and 2022 Federal Bar Association Immigration Section Lawyer of the Year. She is a/k/a “Delta Ondine,” a blues-based alt-rock singer-songwriter, who performs regularly in Memphis, where she hosts her own Blues Brunch series, and will soon be recording her first full, professional album. Stay tuned! 🎶 To see our complete professional bios, just click on the link below.
For reference purposes, the average grant rate for FY 2018 and FY 2019 was 33% and 29%, respectively.
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Go to the link for complete individual Immigration Judge asylum stats.
The idea that a “court” system is providing “fair and impartial” decisions toasylum seekers by advancing to important appellate positions biased, obviously unqualified, anti-asylum “jurists”with grant rates that are a small fraction of the already artificially and unethically suppressed “national average” is a total fraud — a grotesque national disgrace rivaled only by the gutless Article III judges who have allowed and encouraged this to happen on their watch!
Somewhat remarkably, after three years of concerted efforts to “zero out” asylum grants, including gimmicks like illegally and unethically rewriting asylum law to screw refugees, denying the statutory and Constitutional right to counsel, using coercive and punitive detention, abusive criminal prosecutions, and family separation to coerce asylum seekers into giving up viable claims, production quotas encouraging rote asylum denials, packing the Immigration Courts with appointees from enforcement backgrounds, and stacking the BIA with anti-asylum zealots, the overall asylum grant rate is still 29%.
That suggests that under a fair and impartial judicial system asylum seekerscould and should succeed in the vast majority of cases. With no material improvements in worldwide refugee-creating conditions, and indeed a record number of refugees fleeing oppression, there is no bona fide explanation for how grant rates would go from 43% in FY 2016 to 29% in FY 2019 without any legislative changes. And, let’s be clear: the 43% in 2016 was already artificially suppressed from 56% in FY 2012. Even the 2012 rate was unrealistically low. A realistic grant rate under a properly generous application of asylum law probably would have been in the 70%-80% range.
The answer is obvious: Government fraud and misfeasance in asylum adjudication on a massive scale, motivated by a White Nationalist, racist, nativist political agenda that clearly violates both the asylum laws and our Constitution. And, this doesn’t even take into account the many asylum seekers artificially denied access to the system at all through the “Let ‘Em Die in Mexico Program,” and ludicrously illegal and fraudulent “Safe Third Country” agreements with patently unsafe and corrupt failed states.
Yet, while it’s all happening in plain view, indeed touted by Stephen Miller and other racist officials, the Article III Courts of Appeals and the Supremeshave taken a dive. They are are allowing the “Second Coming of Jim Crow” to unfold before their eyes, every day, without taking the strong, courageous judicial actions necessary to preserve Due Process and fundamental fairness and to “just say no” to the overt racism driving anti-asylum policies.
Sure, the stock market is up and we’re essentially at full employment. But, that really has little or nothing to do with justice, morality, values, and the rule of law. Eventually, the inevitable economic cycles will turn again.
With social justice, integrity, the rule of law, and our republic in shambles, how will the Article IIIs and the other cowardly enablers justify their roles and dereliction of their duty to stand up for the rights of the most vulnerable among us? And, who will stand up for them and their rights when the anti-American forces driving Trumpism decide that these toady judges’ complicit role is no longer essential to the planned destruction of American democracy?
In INS v. Cardoza Fonseca, 480 U.S. 421, 452 (1987), Justice Blackmun, in his concurring opinion, cautioned:
“The efforts of these courts stand in stark contrast to — but, it is sad to say, alone cannot make up for — the years of seemingly purposeful blindness by the INS, which only now begins its task of developing the standard entrusted to its care.” INS v. Cardoza-Fonseca, 480 U.S. 421, 452 (1987).
Unfortunately, after years of progress under Administrations with more integrity and intellectual honesty, the interpretation and application of U.S. asylum law is now in, perhaps terminal, regression under this corrupt and intellectually dishonest White Nationalist regime and the kakistocracy it has constructed within the immigration bureaucracy, including the parody of justice and Due Process that takes place daily in the Immigration “Courts.”
Even more tragically, this time around the Supremes and the Article III Circuit Courts, far from being part of the solution and fearless defenders of the rule of law and the rights of vulnerable asylum seekers, have become a key part of the “purposeful blindness” feeding and driving the problem — in effect, “slaughtering the innocents.” By their complicity and fecklessness, they are ripping apart our system of justice and our established constitutional order. I’m sure that Justice Blackmun would be both horrified and outraged by the institutional cowardice and dereliction of duty by his black-robed, life tenured successors.
Due Process Forever; Corrupt, Complicit Federal Courts Never!
