"The Voice of the New Due Process Army" ————– Musings on Events in U.S. Immigration Court, Immigration Law, Sports, and Other Random Topics by Retired United States Immigration Judge (Arlington, Virginia) and former Chairman of the Board of Immigration Appeals Paul Wickham Schmidt. To see my complete professional bio, just click on the link below.
TIJUANA, Mexico—If you go early in the morning to the plaza in front of El Chaparral, the border crossing where a person can walk from Mexico into the state of California, you’ll hear shouts like “2,578: El Salvador!” and “2,579: Guatemala!”—a number, followed by a place of origin. Every day, groups of families gather around, waiting anxiously underneath the trees at the back of the square. The numbers come from La Lista, The List: When a person’s number is called, it’s their turn to ask for asylum in the United States.…
We should never forget the life-tenured Article III judges, mostly on the appellate level including the Supremes, whose abandonment of both their oaths of office and their humanity has enabled the Trump Regime’s all-out assault on the rule of law and our democratic institutions to succeed to the extent it already has.
Trump’s dismantling of the U.S. justice system and all the laws he doesn’t like or doesn’t want to follow counts heavily on the complicity or the outright assistance off Article III Federal Judges. To date, notwithstanding some wimpy disingenuous protests from Chief Justice Roberts, bemoaning the predictable lack of respect for the judicial system that he and his colleagues enabled by their complicity, the higher level Article IIIs haven’t disappointed Trump. That’s how the regime’s scofflaws can, without any legislative action, create“exile cities” in “unsafe third countries” right at our border, in violation of both the guarantees of our asylum laws and the Constitutional right to Due Process!
I spent many years of my career dealing daily with the results of failed states, authoritarian regimes, and fallen democracies. I know a lot about how oppression works and how democracies and constitutional republics fail.
I have some very bad news for the “life-tenured ones” in their ivory towers: failed states, authoritarian regimes, and failed democracies ultimately have no use for anything approaching an independent judiciary. Maybe those Article III appellate judges should think and reflect before they cast their next votes to empower autocracy over democracy.
(Reuters) – More than 2,000 Central American migrants seeking to settle in the United States have given up and accepted free rides home under a 10-month-old program funded by the U.S. government and run by a United Nations agency, according to a U.N. official.
A migrant child stands inside a shelter in Tijuana, Mexico, July 20, 2019. REUTERS/Carlos Jasso
The “Assisted Voluntary Return” program has paid for buses or flights for 2,170 migrants who either never reached the United States or were detained after crossing the border and then sent to Mexico to await U.S. immigration hearings, according to Christopher Gascon, an official with the U.N.’s International Organization for Migration (IOM).
The $1.65 million program, funded by the U.S. State Department, is raising concerns among immigration advocates who say it could violate a principle under international law against returning asylum seekers to countries where they could face persecution.
The returned migrants have not been interviewed by U.S. asylum officers. But Gascon said his agency screens all participants to ensure they are not seeking U.S. asylum and want to go back.
Gascon, head of the IOM’s Mexico mission, said the program provides a safer and more humane means of return than the migrants could arrange on their own.
The effort here, whose scope and controversial aspects have not been previously reported, is the first by the State Department and UN to target Central American migrants in Mexico on such a large scale. The State Department would not comment on the record about its role.
Gascon said the State Department reached out to the IOM last year as caravans of thousands of Central American migrants traveled through Mexico toward the U.S. border.
U.S. President Donald Trump called the caravans an “invasion” and has made stemming immigration a centerpiece of his administration and 2020 re-election campaign.
Migrant advocates are particularly concerned about 347 people returned by the IOM who had been stuck in Mexico under a controversial Trump administration policy known as the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP).
Under that policy, which began Jan. 29, some migrants who make it across the U.S.-Mexico border are given a notice to appear in U.S. immigration court, then are then turned back to Mexico to wait the months it can take for their court cases to be resolved. In the past seven months, more than 30,000 migrants have been sent back under MPP, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
(For a graphic on the Migrant Protection Protocols, see reut.rs/2MszcsN)
Advocates say that the migrants often face danger and destitution in Mexican border towns, leaving them no good options.
“How can it be a voluntary decision (to return home) given the conditions they face in Mexico? It’s a choice between two hells,” said Nicolas Palazzo, an attorney with El Paso-based Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center.
Besides any danger they might face back home, there is another significant downside to leaving: If migrants do not show up for a U.S. court hearing, they can be ordered deported “in absentia,” reducing their odds of ever being granted refuge in the United States.
AFRAID TO GO, AFRAID TO STAY
Denia Carranza, a 24-year-old Honduran returned to Mexico to await a court hearing set for October, decided instead to board a bus back home last week.
She said she and her 7-year-old son had fled her hometown and a good job at a shrimp packing company after gang members threatened to kill her if she did not deal drugs to fellow employees. She had hoped to apply for U.S. asylum.
But she said she was frightened in Ciudad Juarez – a battleground for drug cartels where the bulk of migrants await their hearings. Also, she had no job and no way to provide for her son.
“I am scared of going back to Honduras. But I am more afraid to stay,” she said.
The U.S.-based nonprofit Human Rights First said it had documented more than 100 violent incidents perpetrated against migrants waiting in Mexico for U.S. court hearings this year, including rape, kidnapping, robbery, assault and police extortion.
The IOM documented 247 deaths of migrants near the US-Mexico border this year through Aug. 15.
In a July 30 letter to the IOM’s Director General, 30 U.S. and international advocacy organizations said they feared the U.N. organization was returning migrants to countries they had fled “out of desperation, not choice, and where they may not fully understand the consequences of failing to appear whenever summoned by a U.S. immigration court.”
There is no way of knowing how many of the migrants who opt to go home with IOM help might have been able to present a successful asylum claim. U.S. courts ultimately deny most such claims brought by Central Americans and the Trump administration has said many are fraudulent.
Migrants who are sent to Mexico under MPP may or may not be seeking U.S. asylum, but they generally have no opportunity to initiate such claims before being sent back across the border. The policy cuts out a traditional asylum screening step in which migrants are interviewed to establish whether they have a “credible fear” of returning home.
Slideshow (35 Images)
SEEING ‘REALITY’
When the U.S. State Department approached IOM last fall, Gascon said, part of the goal was to counter what is saw as misinformation about how easy it was to get into the United States.
IOM set up kiosks at a stadium in Mexico City, which was along the caravan route, and on the U.S.-Mexico border. It also helped spread the word about free rides back in migrant shelters.
“When they saw the reality, some decided to go home,” he said of migrants.
Three quarters of the migrants in the voluntary return program went back to Honduras, a fifth to El Salvador and the rest to Guatemala and Nicaragua, according to IOM figures through July 26 of this year. More than half were “family units” and about 100 were unaccompanied minors. Most of the migrants have been sent back from Mexico, and a small fraction from Guatemala.
The IOM screens all migrants who ask to go home, but those awaiting U.S. hearings in Mexico also undergo an orientation program with Grupo Beta, an arm of Mexico’s National Migration Institute, to ensure migrants understand their options, Gascon said.
So far, Gascon said, two people awaiting U.S. court hearings in Mexico who wanted a ride back were instead referred to the Mexican government to gauge their eligibility for asylum in Mexico.
But advocates said they worried that Grupo Beta is not the best partner for IOM to ensure migrants’ safety.
“Many organizations have documented time and again that Mexican migration officials don’t refer people to (the national refugee office), they don’t register fears of return, and they have even pressured people to withdraw (asylum) claims,” said Kennji Kizuka, a researcher at the nonprofit Human Rights First.
Mexican migration officials did not respond to a request for comment.
More than a dozen migrants awaiting U.S. hearings at the Casa de Migrante shelter in Ciudad Juarez told Reuters the weekly south-bound bus rides held some appeal. Though reluctant to give up on their American dreams, many didn’t have lawyers and saw little prospect for success.
“All that effort we made to get here from Honduras and now we’re going back,” said Angel Estrada, who had hoped to get care in the United States for his 9-year-old son, who has hemophilia. “It’s really sad.”
PHOTO ESSAY: U.S. buys tickets home for Central American migrants – reut.rs/2ZeyOoV
Reporting by Daniel Trotta in Ciudad Juarez, Kristina Cooke in San Francisco and Mica Rosenberg New York; Additional reporting by Julia Love in Ciudad Juarez, Lizbeth Diaz in Tijuana and Stephanie Nebehay in Geneva; Editing by Julie Marquis and Brian Thevenot
Someday, the full tawdry story will be told of how our rich and powerful nation turned its back on vulnerable forced migrants whose countries we helped destroy. And, the anti-Latino racism throughout our Central American policies will be fully exposed.
Until then, thanks to Mica and her colleagues, we are learning about highly questionable programs and expenditures that our Government has tried to hide from public view.
Molly O’Toole Immigration Reporter LA TimesCarolyn Cole Staff Photojournalist LA Times
Molly O’Toole & Carolyn Cole Report for the LA Times:
A group of roughly 100 Haitians, Africans and South Americans cross the Rio Grande, just shallow enough for adults to wade despite an overnight storm.
As they wait on the muddy bank near Del Rio, Texas, to surrender themselves to the Border Patrol, the voices of children in the group carry across the river to the Mexican side.
There, in the city of Ciudad Acuña, hundreds of migrants have formed an impromptu refugee camp in an ecological park bound on one side by the river. Just outside the park, the official port of entry to the United States sits at the end of a short bridge.
They’ve crossed thousands of miles by foot, boat and bus to seek asylum in the U.S., only to find themselves stalled in a purgatory of soggy tents and overflowing bathrooms. Now, they face an uncertain wait prolonged by Trump administration policy.
The temptation to make the risky and illegal river crossing mounts daily.
“If you see people jumping over the river, it is because they are tired of staying here,” said one resident of the camp, Luis, who declined to give his last name out of fear for the safety of his family back home.
Home for him would be the West African nation of Cameroon, where Luis was vice principal of a school until he fled last fall. He escaped a widening conflict between the country’s English-speaking minority and its Francophone-majority government, which receives security assistance from the U.S.
He was jailed and tortured before escaping to neighboring Nigeria, Luis said. After a trek across three continents, he landed here, where he has waited for six weeks to present himself to U.S. officials at the Del Rio port of entry.
He hopes to join a sister in Ohio.
“At times, it is really disheartening,” he said, “so it is difficult to wait.”
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Read the complete article along with Carolyn’s wonderful photography at the link.
Cruel, “designed to fail” policies and complicit judges who fail to protect the statutory, constitutional, and human rights of others are unlikely to stop the flow of forced migrants in the long run. They will, however, succeed in killing some, torturing others, ruining many lives, and causing permanent damage to large numbers of their fellow human beings, particularly children.
NBC/Reuters just reported on continuing concerns, confusion, and accusations regarding treatment of migrants in Mexico by the National Guard.https://apple.news/APdRhfQFnTneror8AprpRZQ I’m willing to bet that this is just the “tip of the iceberg.” Eventually, the true “body count” and extent of the human rights violations chargeable to Trump, the 9th Circuit, and the Mexican Government will surface. It will be unbelievably ugly.
Future generations will also find it difficult to understand and explain our national complicity, since the facts about the abuses the Trump Administration is heaping on humanity in our name are out in the open for life-tenured judges to ignore at the peril of their lasting reputations. And, too many of them are doing just that.
