Congressional Reporter
The Daily Beast
National Reporter
The Daily Beast
Sam Brodey & Scott Bixby report in The Daily Beast:
In a country ground to a standstill by the coronavirus pandemic, there is one place normalcy reigns: immigration courts.
Overburdened judges oversee packed proceedings; attorneys shuttle clients and paperwork from room to room, often with interpreters in tow; aspiring legal citizens, or at least residents, follow closely, sitting through hearings famously described as death-penalty cases held in a traffic court.
The courts, along with visa applications, detention hearings and other immigration related bureaucracy, are seemingly the lone part of the federal government still expected to function as if a global pandemic hasn’t upended nearly every facet of American life. But those tasked with keeping the machine running say that they have received little guidance about how to keep the system running in the era of social isolation, and even less protection despite fears that immigration proceedings put some of the most vulnerable people in the country in the impossible position of choosing between their health or their home.
The Trump administration has refused to allow immigration courts and visa hearings to comply with the same social isolation standards followed by nearly every other civil aspect of government, and has not allowed for previously scheduled hearings to be postponed. The administration has also issued little in the way of guidance for judges, immigration attorneys or immigrants, whose hearings—which often take years to schedule—directly conflict with stay-at-home orders across the county.
“The immigration court’s refusal to adopt policies that protect the health of respondents, lawyers, judges and immigration court staff during the current pandemic forces immigrant families and their lawyers to make an impossible decision: endanger public health or risk being deported,” said Nadia Dahab, senior litigation attorney at Innovation Law Lab, one of half a dozen immigrants-rights groups that on Friday filed an emergency order challenging the operation of immigration courts despite the crisis.
“We are in the middle of a global pandemic, but the immigration court system is continuing to operate as if it’s business as usual,” said Melissa Crow, senior supervising attorney with the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Immigrant Justice Project. “The government has turned the court system into a public health hazard.”
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Read the rest of the article at the link.
With very few exceptions, deportations are hardly “essential” during a worldwide pandemic. Indeed, given that even asymptomatic individuals can and have spread the disease, deportation will certainly spread the risk to other countries that likely won’t be able to control it.
There is currently no cure, no vaccine, and no known way of controlling the coronavirus other than staying home. While this well-known information might have gone over the heads of EOIR and Article III Judges, you really wouldn’t need a law degree of even be very smart to figure out that Immigration Courts and the DHS Gulag need to be shut down. Now! No Article III Judge would actually want to trust his or her life to operating under the messed up “guidelines” issued by EOIR! So why is it OK for others?
Statistics show that the longer we wait to keep everyone home, the more individuals who will die! Why is that such a hard concept for EOIR officials and Article III Judges to grasp?
This is a time for “radical prudence” not “criminal recklessness.” The Government should have to demonstrate “clear and convincing” reasons and “best health practices” to go forward with any individual removal case during the pandemic.
Because so many Federal Judges have little understanding of what it means to appear in the Immigration “Courts” (which are not “courts” in any sense of the word) and because they use exceptionally poor judgement in believing regime bureaucrats who have no credibility on issues of public health or anything else, over experts in the field, individuals will unnecessarily suffer and die.
At some point in the future, there will have to be an accounting for the whole mess that has been allowed to unfold as a result of Trump’s biased and irrational immigration policies. Examination of the unconscionably poor response by the Article III Judiciary must be part of that process. They are a key part of unnecessarily “endangering public health” as described in this article.
The Article III Judges we have now are what we have — they have life tenure. But, going forward we can do better — much better. And, our lives and the future of humanity will depend on it.
Due Process Forever! Better Judges For A Better Future! Constantly Confront Complicit Courts 4 Change!
PWS
04-02-20