☠️🤯 IN DHS’S NEW AMERICAN GULAG (“NAG”), THEIR SPELLING MISTAKE CAN GET YOU DEPORTED! — NDPA Superstar Marty Rosenbluth Saves Another Life (For Now)!

Marty Rosenbluth Immigration Attorney Lumpkin,GA PHOTO: Linkedin
Marty Rosenbluth
Immigration Attorney
Lumpkin,GA
PHOTO: Linkedin

Marty writes on LinkedIn:

Major flying rainbow Unicorn starfish today. We actually got a client pulled off a deportation flight while the plane was on the tarmac in Louisiana. We have been emailing ICE since last week when we first heard that he had been moved from Stewart to Louisiana and was going to be deported, despite the fact that he has a hearing pending in the immigration court here. This of course would be entirely illegal, but since when does ICE care about the law? 

It wasn’t until today that we finally got ICE to admit that they were wrong!!! The poor kid is only 18 and doesn’t speak any English!!! I doubt they had an interpreter who speaks his language. He must have been scared to death!  I am sure he had no idea why he was on the plane, but I trust he was relieved when they pulled him off!  Only about a dozen emails later. 

To their credit ICE actually apologized! Sort of. They said that the asylum office had his name spelled wrong. Pffffft!!!!

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

Way to go, Marty! Thanks for all you do for American justice!  

This is what really happens when politicos and bureaucrats push for restrictions on asylum and tout summary removals. More innocent, vulnerable humans who seek only to have the U.S live up to its legal and moral obligations will die or be tortured without due process. THAT’S what “bipartisan consensus” really means.

The system is already dysfunctional. Speeding things up and eliminating legal rights will only make things worse. Why aren’t politicos discussing ways to fix the broken system, rather than penalizing asylum seekers by eliminating it? This also shows the need for life-saving representation to achieve due process!

🇺🇸 Due Process Forever!

PWS

03-04-24

 

☠️⚰️DEATH IN THE GULAG: 4TH COVID DEATH @ ICE STEWART IS 1ST FOR BIDEN ADMINISTRATION — Killer Policies, Grossly Incompetent Administration, & White-Nationalist Cruelty Across The Immigration Bureaucracy @ DHS & DOJ Need Immediate Attention! — Delay = Death, & Death Doesn’t Care Whether It’s Biden Or Trump!

Grim Reaper
G. Reaper Approaches ICE Gulag With “Imbedded Captive Star Chamber”
Image: Hernan Fednan, Creative Commons License

By Paul Wickham Schmidt

Special to Courtside

Feb. 1, 2021

Today, the Atlanta Journal Constitution reported the first death in the ICE/EOIR Stewart Detention Gulag under the Biden Administration. https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwiA4Iet8cjuAhUpF1kFHeRDBD4QFjAAegQIAhAC&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ajc.com%2Fnews%2Ffourth-ice-detainee-dies-from-covid-19-in-southwest-georgia%2FTNPDEQCTD5AJNEJG3AB5UODNGQ%2F&usg=AOvVaw0dRM3U1mG3KNQFzmiINivM

It was the first reported death at the Stewart Gulag since the Trump regime’s final killing in December 2020.

With “Caretaker Bureaucrats” in charge @ DHS & DOJ, the deadly migrant killing, harming, and terrorizing policies continue unabated. Indeed, as far as I can tell, seedy DOJ lawyers are pushing forward with defending the very cruel, stupid, inhumane, and illegal policies and bankrupt legal positions that the Trump immigration kakistocracy made infamous. The same policies that Biden and Harris campaigned against! EOIR continues to crank out skewed anti-immigrant, anti-asylum jurisprudence. 

The current policies are killers; the bodies continue to pile up, even if they are (quite intentionally) in obscure places like Lumpkin, GA, the “no persons land” near the Mexican border, and in dangerous and corrupt foreign nations where our Government mindlessly “orbits” other human beings without regard to what it will happen to them. 

For now, these stories of death, despair, and unnecessary human suffering are largely “out of sight, out of mind.” But, they are being documented and eventually history will highlight those, from the Roberts’ Court on down, who abjured their duties to their fellow humans and abused their positions of public trust. 

Due Process Forever! Death ⚰️ in The New American Gulag ☠️, never!

PWS

02-01-21

MARTY ROSENBLUTH, ESQUIRE: AMERICAN HERO — In An Era Where Courage, Integrity, & Dedication To The Rule of Law Are Scorned By Political Leaders & Even Ignored By Some Federal Judges, Rosenbluth Stands Tall With Those Whose Legal Rights & Very Humanity Are Being Attacked Daily By A System Gone Badly Awry — Profile By Simon Montlake of The Monitor

https://apple.news/Amlo-pXUXQOijDJIp8pqX7w

 

Simon Montlake of The Monitor (L) & Marty Rosenbluth, Esquire (R)

Simon  writes:

Long shot lawyer: Defending migrants in US’s toughest immigration court

Lumpkin, Ga.

A hazy sun rises over pine-covered hills as Marty Rosenbluth pulls out of his driveway and hangs a left on Main Street. Outside town the two-lane road dips, then climbs before Mr. Rosenbluth slows to take the right-hand turnoff to Stewart Detention Center, a privately run prison for men who face deportation from the United States.

This is where Mr. Rosenbluth, a lawyer, can be found most days, either visiting clients inside the country’s largest immigration detention center or representing them before a judge in an adjacent courtroom. It’s a mile outside Lumpkin, a forlorn county seat that most days has fewer inhabitants than the prison, which has 2,000 beds.

Mr. Rosenbluth parks his red Toyota Prius in the lot and walks to the entrance. He waits at the first of two sliding doors set in 12-foot-high fences topped with coils of razor wire. The first time he came, the grind and clang of the metal doors unnerved him. Now he doesn’t notice, like the office worker who tunes out the elevator’s ping.

Passing the gates, Mr. Rosenbluth enters the court annex and stoops to remove his black shoes for the metal detector. He shows Alondra Torres, his young Puerto Rican assistant who’s on her first day of work, where to sign in and introduces her to the uniformed security guard standing by the detector.

Mr. Rosenbluth, who has a shaved head, black-framed glasses, and a two-inch gray goatee, smiles and spreads his hands. “I’ve never had a paralegal before,” he proudly tells the guard.

Lawyers are in short supply on the ground at Stewart Immigration Court, one of 64 federal courts tasked with deciding the fate of migrants who the U.S. government seeks to send home. The prison is more than two hours from Atlanta, and lawyers often wait hours to see clients and are allowed to bring only notebooks and pens into visitation rooms.

Lawyers who work with these handicaps face longer odds. On average, detained migrants are far less likely to win asylum than those on the outside, in part because it’s much harder to prepare and fight a case from behind bars. Still, of all immigration courts, this may be the toughest of all. “The reputation of Stewart among attorneys is that you will lose,” says Mr. Rosenbluth.

That deters many from taking cases here. But not Mr. Rosenbluth. He moved to Lumpkin two years ago in order to defend people who may have a legal right to stay in the U.S. His clients include recent migrants from the U.S.-Mexico border, whose continued arrival has become a lightning rod for critics of U.S. asylum law and border security. But the majority of his cases involve men who have lived in the country for years or decades, fathering children and putting down roots.

For detainees, having an attorney in immigration court makes a big difference. A 2015 study found that detained immigrants who had legal counsel prevailed in 21% of cases. For those who represented themselves, the success rate was just 2%. Unlike criminal defendants, immigrants have no right to a public defender.

Mr. Rosenbluth, who works for a law firm in Durham, North Carolina, is the only private attorney in Lumpkin. He’s never advertised his services, but word gets around; detainees will pass him notes during prison meetings. Then he consults with his boss on whether to pursue a case.

“If a case has no chance of winning, we just don’t take it,” he says.

But it’s not just about the strength of an individual’s asylum case or bond request. It’s also about who will hear it: Will it be a judge who has denied scores of other similar motions? Or will it be a judge who might, just might, set a bond that a family can afford so their father or son can go home?

“Your judge is your destiny,” says Monica Whatley, a lawyer with the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Even when Mr. Rosenbluth thinks he has a strong case and the right judge, he knows that his client is more likely than not to be deported – and that an immigration judge in New York or Los Angeles may well have ruled in his favor. It’s usually then that he circles back to a nagging moral question: Is he stopping systemic injustices or just greasing the wheels of the deportation industry?

Human rights crusader 

Mr. Rosenbluth’s route to becoming a champion of immigrants’ rights was circuitous. In 1979 he dropped out of college to become a union organizer. A few years later, in 1985, he moved to the West Bank to work with Palestinian trade unions on conditions in Israel. His original plan was to stay three months, then go back to the United Auto Workers. He ended up staying seven years.

Back in the U.S., he worked for Amnesty International on Israeli and Palestinian issues as a researcher and spokesman. The job required Mr. Rosenbluth, who is soft spoken and a natural introvert, to speak publicly about one of the world’s most exhaustively debated conflicts. But he learned how to talk to a crowd and to prepare for tough questions.

Having worked for decades on labor issues and international human rights, law school seemed a good fit. By then Mr. Rosenbluth was in his late 40s. He had moved to North Carolina, which was emerging as a testing ground for stricter enforcement of immigration law and deportation procedures.

“I’m still working on human rights, just from a different angle,” he says. “And these are human rights violations that my government is committing right here at home.”

Counties in North Carolina were early adopters of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) program that trained local law enforcement officers to locate and turn over unauthorized immigrants. The program predated President Barack Obama, but his administration supported its expansion as a way to target criminals for deportation.

After graduation, Mr. Rosenbluth found work as an immigration lawyer for nonprofits in North Carolina that were inundated with calls from families seeking the release of detained members. Most had no convictions for felonies or violent crimes. Still, the Obama administration insisted that it was deporting criminals and ensuring public safety.

It was maddening, but it could also be useful: Lawyers would challenge deportations in court as contrary to the administration’s policy of going after only serious criminals. “We could use their own propaganda against them to try to get our clients released,” says Mr. Rosenbluth.

He started hearing about Stewart, a remote facility in Georgia that was housing detainees from across the region. Built as a private prison but never used, it reopened in 2006 as a detention center contracted to ICE. Judges in Atlanta ruled on deportations via video link before the Department of Justice opened a court inside the prison complex in 2010.

That same year Mr. Rosenbluth made his first trip to Stewart. “I was scared witless because it’s so intimidating,” he says. It wasn’t just the metal gates, prison garb, and taciturn guards. He couldn’t confer with his client before the hearing; even a handshake wasn’t allowed.

Mr. Rosenbluth lost his first case. He would lose virtually all his cases at Stewart the next six years while traveling back and forth from North Carolina and staying in the nearest hotel, 36 miles away. He hit on the idea of opening a nonprofit law firm in Lumpkin to provide free counsel to as many detainees as possible. He even had an acronym: GUTS, for gum up the system.

When he pitched the idea to national liberal donors, they blanched. It wasn’t the right time to gum up the system, he was told. Mr. Obama was working on comprehensive immigration reform. The president needed to hang tough on removals of unauthorized immigrants. There were “Dreamers” to protect.

Yeah, thought Mr. Rosenbluth. And their parents are being locked up and deported every day.

Courtroom coups

It’s 8 in the morning when the court rises for Judge Randall Duncan. As he settles into his black wingback chair, three rows of Latino men in prison jumpsuits stare back from wooden benches. One of them is Hugo Gordillo Mendez, a Mexican living in Goldsboro, North Carolina, who was detained in January after neighbors called the police to report an incident at his house. His wife, Diana Gordillo, a U.S. citizen, sits next to Mr. Rosenbluth. The previous day she drove nine hours to attend today’s bail hearing, and she’s hoping Mr. Rosenbluth can persuade the judge to release Mr. Gordillo on a bond.

Ms. Gordillo locks eyes for a minute with her husband. He stares at his feet.

Getting out on bail or a bond is a big deal. Lawyers advise clients to do everything possible to secure their release, preferably with a U.S. citizen and family member as sponsor, so they can go back to their community and fight their deportation there instead of at Stewart. “When people get out of Stewart, they get as far away from there as they can,” says Sarah Owings, an immigration lawyer in Atlanta.

Moving to another jurisdiction is no guarantee of success, of course. But the chances improve significantly. Between 2013 and 2018, some 58% of asylum claims in U.S. immigration courts were denied, according to Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. Over the same period, the denial rate at Lumpkin was 94%. Take Judge Duncan: Of 207 asylum cases that he heard in those five years, only 12 were granted. (Others may have won on appeal.) Denials of bond requests are high at Lumpkin too.

Mr. Gordillo’s case begins with an ICE lawyer citing the immigrant’s status and his arrest for assault as reasons not to release him. “The respondent has not shown that he’s not a danger,” he says.

Mr. Rosenbluth points out that the assault charge was dismissed and that Mr. Gordillo supports his wife and two U.S.-born children, one of whom has a severe medical condition. “His wife, Diana, is in court today,” he says, gesturing at her. She suffers anxiety and has bipolar disorder, he adds. And she will be filing a petition for Mr. Gordillo to become a legal U.S. resident.

“I think that we have a very strong, very viable” case against deportation, he says. “We ask that a reasonable bond be set.”

Judge Duncan takes a few minutes to decide, but as he sums up the family’s medical hardship, he’s already scribbling on a document. “Bond is set at $5,000,” he says.

Mr. Rosenbluth ushers Ms. Gordillo out of the courtroom and explains how she can pay the bond; she has already raised $4,300, and her father will loan her the rest. “He’ll be out today,” Mr. Rosenbluth says, his lawyerly demeanor giving way to giddiness.

Had he lost, Mr. Gordillo could have appealed the ruling and contested his removal to Mexico. But that might take months, and the longer his clients are locked up, the more likely they are to accept deportation as a way out.

“There’s no question that ICE uses incarceration as a litigation strategy. They know people will give up,” he says.

 Judges under pressure

While immigration judges are civil servants who are supposed to apply federal law, studies have found wide variations among judges and between courts in how they handle cases. Being assigned to a judge in Lumpkin or Los Angeles is a distinction with a difference – and for defendants who fear persecution in their home country, it’s a distinction with life-threatening consequences.

Some experts blame the Department of Justice for failing to adequately train and equip judges to handle complex immigration cases. “I think it’s a question of resources,” says Jaya Ramji-Nogales, an assistant professor of law at Temple University and co-author of a study of asylum adjudication called “Refugee Roulette.” “The political will is about building border walls.”

As the backlog of immigration cases has grown, so has pressure on judges to speed through dockets. Former Attorney General Jeff Sessions drew criticism last year for faulting judges who failed to clear 700 cases in a year. Judge Dana Leigh Marks, president emeritus of the National Association of Immigration Judges (NAIJ), has called the push to have understaffed courts investigate complex claims the equivalent of “doing death penalty cases in a traffic court setting.”

Ms. Ramji-Nogales found wide variations in asylum claim rulings filed in different courts. Women judges were on average more likely than men to grant asylum, and judges who joined the bench after careers as federal immigration prosecutors were more likely to deny claims.

Judges who see only detainees in their courtrooms develop a thick skin, says Paul Schmidt, a retired judge. “If all you’re doing is detained [cases], you get the preconception that all these cases are losers,” he says. “If you get in a denial mode, it gets harder for judges to see the other side.”

Mr. Schmidt, a former chairman of the Board of Immigration Appeals, spent 13 years as an immigration judge in Arlington, Virginia. He says the judges who go to work in these courts “probably assume that it’ll be mostly denials, and that’s fine with them.” This also serves the political agenda in Washington, says Mr. Schmidt. “People who are known for moving lots of cases for final removal are classified as productive. And there’s a lot of pressure for moving cases.”

Ashley Tabaddor, an immigration judge in Los Angeles and current president of NAIJ, agrees that courts need more resources. But she pushes back against comparisons of harsh versus lenient judges and says there is no “right number” of denials. “Each case is decided on its merits,” she says.

For most of the men in Judge Duncan’s court this morning, this is their first appearance. After he hears another bond motion – “denied” – he asks the 13 remaining detainees to rise and raise their right hands to affirm they understand their legal status. “Sí,” the men mutter. Speaking via a Spanish interpreter, Judge Duncan explains that they have the right to contest their deportation and to appeal any rulings.

Respondents also have the right to hire an attorney, Judge Duncan says. “How many of you have an attorney?” he asks. Two men raise their hands and are given more time to prepare. The others are called up to the bench. The judge rules all will be deported.

Lumpkin’s lone lawyer

After Mr. Rosenbluth took the job here, he bought a house in town for $20,000. He invites visiting lawyers to rent out his second bedroom and share his home office so they can represent clients at Stewart. But a trickle of defenders has not become a flood. Some days Mr. Rosenbluth is the only lawyer in court.

Attorneys who travel to Stewart grow weary of prison lockdowns, talking to clients through plexiglass windows, and dealing with pettifogging guards. “It’s meant to grind you down,” says Ms. Owings, who has defended several detainees at Stewart.

To save time, most lawyers skip client visits and phone into court hearings in Lumpkin. Mr. Rosenbluth never does this. “I consider it to be borderline malpractice,” he says.

At first guards in Lumpkin would stop Mr. Rosenbluth from shaking his clients’ hands or patting their shoulders. Not in here, they’d scold him; it’s not allowed. Mr. Rosenbluth, who is Jewish, persisted, politely, in a way that was more rabbinical than righteous. Eventually he wore down the guards one by one, and now he embraces his clients, a human touch denied in prison.

When he loses his cases, as he often does, Mr. Rosenbluth comforts the detainee, walks out of the prison, and drives his Prius the mile back home. “Then I’ll scream at the walls,” he says.

As a one-man act, Mr. Rosenbluth can juggle only a dozen or so individual cases at Stewart at a time, knowing that most will end in deportation. Far from gumming up the system, he admits he may be just helping put a veneer of due process on mass expulsions.

Still, he takes solace in making a difference where he can. “You bang your head against a wall” trying to stop Israel from torturing Palestinian suspects, and nothing changes, he says. “Here I make a difference on a daily basis, and I can see it.”

That difference could be amplified as his firm, Polanco Law, is looking to add two more lawyers in Lumpkin this year. Mr. Rosenbluth has begun scoping out empty storefronts for an office. A nearby house has also opened its doors to provide free accommodations for family members visiting detainees.

Having a shingle in town would expand Mr. Rosenbluth’s practice – and perhaps send a message that detainees have a shot at success.

‘This is the best’ 

Mr. Rosenbluth is making coffee when he gets the call. Abdallh Khadra, a Syrian imam whose political asylum was granted a week ago, is getting out after five months inside. The lawyer jumps in his car and heads to Stewart, a broad smile splitting his beard. He always makes sure to be at the prison gate when his clients are released. “It never gets old,” he says. “This is the best.”

On the drive his phone rings again, and this time it’s Mr. Khadra himself. “We’re coming to get you now,” Mr. Rosenbluth tells him. He’s brought Mr. Khadra’s driver’s license and credit card so that he can drive himself back to Cary, North Carolina.

But the head of Mr. Khadra’s mosque calls Mr. Rosenbluth, insisting that he take a bus to Atlanta so that he can be picked up from there. Mr. Rosenbluth shrugs. “I will do what my client wants,” he says after he hangs up.

Most men discharged from Stewart don’t get choices. Those without family or friends waiting outside are shunted into a white van and dumped at a bus station in Columbus, usually at night after the last bus to Atlanta has already left. Local volunteers provide backpacks and blankets and a bed for the night.

Mr. Khadra is more fortunate: The sun is still high when the prison’s side gates grind open and he walks out wearing a gray tunic and black pants, carrying two plastic bags. Mr. Rosenbluth is waiting by a picnic table.

He strides forward to greet his client. The two men, Muslim and Jew, hug and exchange Arabic greetings. “God is merciful. May God bless you.”

Then Mr. Khadra steps forward and falls to his knees on a concrete utility cover. He drops his head and begins to pray.

As he drives home afterward, Mr. Rosenbluth cues up a song on his iPhone that he plays after every release. It’s “Freedom” by Richie Havens.

A long

Way

From my home, yeah.

From my home, yeah.

Yeah.

Sing.

Fr-e-e-dom.

Fr-e-e-dom. 

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

Thanks for all you do, Marty! You are indeed an amazing and inspirational role model for a new generation of “New Due Process Warriors.”

They will be out there shortly to help you take the fight against “21st Century Jim Crow” immigration policies to every corner of the country and to every court in America that touches upon the lives and rights of migrants. This is a system that relies on cruelty, coercion, isolation, dehumanization, false narratives, fear, misinformation, denial of representation, fake assembly line justice, “go along to get along judging,” and keeping the true horrors of “The Gulag” and the “Kangaroo Courts” that support and enable it out of the public eye. That’s why I also appreciate Simon’s outstanding work in exposing what’s really happening in “The Gulag” operating in our own country using taxpayer dollars to finance its fundamentally unconstitutional and dehumanizing mission.

I just noted in a recent post the complicity of certain judges of the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals who are turning a blind eye and going out of the way to misinterpret the law to allow places like the Atlanta Immigration Court and the Stewart Detention Court to flourish, continue to arrogantly abuse human rights, and mock Due Process, Equal Protection, and fundamental fairness right under their noses. https://wp.me/p8eeJm-4dF Those Article III judges who “look the other way”  are just as culpable as the corrupt politicos who run this dysfunctional parody of justice inflicted on America’s most vulnerable. History will not forget their roles and derelictions of duty.

As I always told myself, Due Process is fundamentally about saving lives — one at a time. At the same time, every life you save “builds America,” one case, one human being, one precious life at a time. Thanks again, Marty and Simon, for all you are doing!

Due Process Forever!

PWS

04-21-19

INSIDE THE “NEW AMERICAN GULAG” — Jim Crow Lives In Stewart Co., Georgia — Perhaps He Never Left!

https://www.splcenter.org/attention-on-detention/healing-open-wounds-injustice-stewart-county-georgia

Mary Claire Kelly writes for the Southern Poverty Law Center:

On the stretch of highway careening south from Columbus to Lumpkin, patches of Georgia red clay lie like open sores on the road’s shoulder. The sun burns bright orange, through air that is hazy with pollen and smoke from controlled forest fires.

The land here was once valuable. It was coveted. Nearly 200 years ago, white men named this county Stewart, after a revolutionary war militia general. White men massacred the men, women and children of the Creek Confederacy over this land.

Wealthy white men forced black men, women and children to scrape this land and stuff it with cotton. They gouged this land. Farmers, laborers and enslaved Africans dug deep ditches, taking no steps to avoid soil erosion, and those ditches became pits. In one part of Lumpkin, flowing water carved out the enormous pinnacles that mark Providence Canyon State Park. Nicknamed Georgia’s “Little Grand Canyon,” it is a beautiful scar of a violent extractive history.

Today, Stewart is one of the poorest counties in the state of Georgia. Its economic and population peak was in the mid-1800s, when slavery still reigned. Now, nearly half the roads in this majority-black district are still unpaved. Lumpkin’s downtown area, the county seat, has one four-way stop and many boarded up businesses.

The city’s population more than doubles when you include the 2,000 people locked away at the county’s main employer, Stewart Detention Center. The immigration prison is made of concrete and steel, but is sustained by a diversity of barriers.

First, there are the barriers you see: The trees hide Stewart from the roads, the two layers of curly-cue barbed wire fences insulate the facility, the formidable red gates stand tall, and the freshly cut grass stretches like a moat around the building.

Then, there are the barriers you experience: You leave your phone and any other connection to the outside world in your car, wait at two red gates outside the building entrance for an unseen force to open them, endlessly wait for one of three designated rooms to open for visitation, remove your jacket and shoes to endure the TSA-style security process to enter, and then you wait in the empty visitation room for a man with sleepless, red eyes to appear behind the thick, protective, plastic partition.

Next, there are the barriers you hear: the screech of your chair whenever you shift positions, the distracting human resources video blaring in the hallway outside of the visitation room, the echoes reverberating in the small concrete space that prevent you and the immigrant who sits behind the plastic barrier from being able to hear each other, and the static crackling across the telephone line that you must use to listen to the man who is sitting only feet away.

Then, there are the barriers that comprise the very reason this man sits in front of you: the violent political divisions in his home country, the obstacles to making a living wage, the language barrier, the gap in education needed to navigate the labyrinth of immigration bureaucracy.

And, last but not least, there is the barrier that is the entire reason for this place and this situation: the American border.

The logo of CoreCivic Inc. – the private, for-profit prison company that the government pays to run this facility – is a deformed American flag that is missing its stars, leaving only stripes that resemble the bars of a cage.

Through the entrance to the courtroom, President Donald Trump smiles in the lobby from his portrait above the list of that day’s hearings. In those hearings, detainees who have come from all over the world will sit on hard, wooden pews facing the U.S. Department of Justice seal.

Here, an attorney for the government will argue why each of these men and trans women should stay at this immigrant prison, or be sent back to the country they fled. In many cases, these immigrants might not have an attorney to represent them, because they do not have the constitutional right to counsel. Sometimes, family and friends can sit in on the hearing to show support for their loved one’s case.

Here, an immigration judge in black robes will methodically determine whether each of these people will remain caged at Stewart, be returned to the country they escaped, or be allowed to leave the prison. The verdict is delivered either by the judge with an authoritative tone, or the courtroom interpreter with a clinical lilt. If a person is allowed to leave, they will most likely have to continue waiting in this immigrant prison until someone on the outside can pay their bond, which is typically thousands of dollars. If they do leave, it will likely be late in the evening – too late to find transportation out of Stewart County.

The men and trans women who churn through Stewart’s machinery are called by their A-number, not their name. They are reduced to numbers. CoreCivic receives approximately $62 of taxpayer money for each body that fills a bed in its institution each day, according to Shadow Prisons, an SPLC report about the immigration system that is rife with civil rights violations, poor conditions, and little commitment to the safety of detainees. CoreCivic pays the people who are detained here as little as $1 a day for their “voluntary” labor.

To gain their freedom, these detained individuals must prove, through financial statements, that they will not be an economic burden on the government.

This is the knot of racist bureaucracy that staff of the Southeast Immigrant Freedom Initiative (SIFI)a project of the SPLC that provides pro bono legal counsel to those facing deportation proceedings in the Southeast – patiently work each day to untangle. The U.S. immigration system presses every parent, child, sibling and caregiver it entraps into an anonymous mold — a serial number in scrubs — that can be delivered to immigration prisons in a fleet of white vans.

SIFI staff see past the mold. They look into the eyes of each person they represent. They recognize the details that belong to that individual, and that individual alone: their family on the outside working for their release, the aches and pains that prevent them from sleeping, the professional skills they worked for years to achieve.

For many detained individuals, their bureaucratic purgatory in Stewart has been the end of an Odyssean journey to escape torture, the murders of loved ones, and threats on their lives. Every one of these tragic epics is woven with contagious trauma.

Yet, the men and women of SIFI are strong – even when the battles seem uphill every day. They model for volunteers how to confidently perform quality legal work, while treating each client with respect and compassion.

The small community of immigrants’ rights activists in Lumpkin, which also includes local immigration attorneys and the hospitality ministry El Refugio, often supports one another. They celebrate victories — the release of a client, the grant of a low bond amount — and quietly mourn defeats.

Stewart Detention Center is a painful symptom of violent injustice. It festers in a South Georgia landscape that bears deep, historic wounds.

Here, the men and women of SIFI are trying to heal the system.

Mary Claire Kelly is a Harvard Law School student and a former digital media associate at the SPLC.

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

Grotesque abuses of Constitutional Due Process, fundamental fairness, and human decency, not to mention errors of law, go on daily in the “NAG” aided and abetted by its EOIR enablers. What kind of “court” operates in such a one-sided and coercive atmosphere. Why don‘t those in charge insist on neutral hearing sites rather than those controlled by one of the parties in interest?

Bill Barr just went to great pains to insure that even those who pass “credible fear” and who can prove financial responsibility won’t in the future be released from detention (unless, of course, ICE runs out of detention space, which is already happening).

In fact, they won’t even get a chance to make the case for relief to an Immigration Judge. That’s the kind of mindless “Jim Crow” use of the law to promote cruelty and unfairness that corporate “stuffed shirts” like Barr, more concerned with covering for his corrupt boss than upholding the Constitution, can mete out from his protected perch at the DOJ. But, perhaps the folks at SIFI will be able to stuff Barr’s disregard for the Fifth Amendment back in his face in the “real” Federal Courts.

In any event, history won’t forget the Barrs of the world, any more than they have forgotten the Wallaces and others who were on its “wrong side.”

If nothing else, the performance of Bill Barr over the last several days shows why a true “court system” can’t possibly run under his auspices.

PWS

04-19-19

 

JUSTICE DENIED: U.S. Immigration Judge @ Stewart Detention “Court” (“Where Asylum Cases Go To Die”) Denies “Slam Dunk” Asylum Bid To Unrepresented Refugee From DRC, Threatening Him & Family With Death! — System That Once Promised To “Guarantee Fairness and Due Process for All” Is Now A Bastion Of Injustice!

https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/immigration/sd-me-separated-father-20190227-story.htm

Kate Morrissey writes in the San Diego Union-Tribune:

Constantin Bakala and his family have survived kidnapping, torture, rape, poison and a shipwreck.

Now, faced with the complexities of the U.S. immigration system, they may be on the verge of defeat.

Bakala, 48, and his family fled their home in the Democratic Republic of Congo in late 2016 after they were targeted for Bakala’s participation in an opposition party that promoted democracy in the country, according to his wife.

After traveling through more than 10 countries, the family arrived at the San Ysidro Port of Entry in November 2017. Bakala was separated from his wife and seven children and sent to an immigration detention center in Georgia while they were released to live in the San Diego area, a common practice at the time. He hasn’t seen them since.

Because they were separated physically, their cases were also handled separately in immigration court. Since the federal government prioritizes detained cases, Bakala’s finished before the family’s even began, according to their attorney.

Unable to find an attorney to represent him at the detention center in rural Georgia and with little money to even pay for phone calls to the outside world to try to get help, Bakala faced by himself an immigration court known for being tough on asylum seekers. Judge Michael Baird, who heard his case, granted 11 of the 152 asylum cases that he decided between fiscal 2013 and 2018, records show.

Bakala lost.

He tried to appeal the case by himself and was denied that as well, according to court records. Now the family, with the help of a San Diego church, has found an attorney to help him, but it may be too late.

He is convinced that if he returns to the Democratic Republic of Congo, he will be murdered by his own government.

Bakala’s party membership card shows he was part of the Rassemblement des Congolais Démocrates et Nationalistes, or RCDN, which opposed former president Joseph Kabila’s maneuvers to stay in power past his term limit. When Bakala wasn’t at his job at the Ministry of Health, he worked with the party’s youth and advised them on how to demonstrate peacefully against the ruling party, his wife Annie Bwetu Kapongo said.

Bwetu Kapongo tells their story slowly, haltingly, sometimes with painful detail and sometimes in circles, a symptom of the trauma she carries from what happened.

She remembers when her husband first told her about getting threatened, and she remembers the day he went missing in 2016.

When she went to the police to ask for help finding him, she was locked in a room that reeked of urine. Later, three policemen came in, beat her and raped her. She tried to stop them and pointed out that she was pregnant.

The men didn’t care, she said. She ended up losing the baby.

When she was eventually able to return home, her husband was still missing. The two stores she owned, one that sold fish and one that sold cakes and juice, were broken into and robbed by people looking for her husband, who had by this point escaped where he had been imprisoned and tortured, according to his attorney.

One night, Bwetu Kapongo woke up to the family dog’s aggressive barking before hearing it abruptly stop. They found the dog dead the next day.

Another night, she and the children got sick. Their heads were spinning, and they were vomiting. Eventually, they found a tool someone had used to release poison into the house, she said.

Finally, one night she heard a knock on her window. It was her husband.

Aided by people he’d brought to help the family, they scooped the children out of their beds while they were sleeping and fled in a boat down a river to the Republic of Congo, where the people helping them paid for their hotel, Bwetu Kapongo said.

They waited a couple of months there until they had travel documents to get to Brazil and left in early 2017 to begin a grueling journey to the U.S. border.

“We came because America respects the law, and they know how to protect people,” Bwetu Kapongo said through a translator.

In each of the countries they passed through, officials told them that they could not stay, she added. They were sent from Panama back to Colombia when they tried to get across the border by boat and ended up having to make the grueling 6- to 7-day walk through the jungle to Costa Rica.

In Costa Rica, they found a boat that would take them to Nicaragua.

After they’d been on it for about 45 minutes, Bwetu Kapongo heard shots fired at them. She told her children to lay down. Then, the boat broke, she said, and it began to sink.All of a sudden, her youngest child Joseph, who is now 5, was no longer in her arms.

She started to drown.

“Is this a nightmare? Is this real? Is this happening?” she recalled asking the darkness that surrounded her.

She felt other bodies in the water, hands pushing her head down as they tried desperately to reach the surface. She felt someone clutch her neck. It was David, her 12-year-old son.

When a rescue boat pulled her to safety, she found her 17-year-old daughter Marie Louise. Bwetu Kapongo began to pray, crying out the names of her five other children and asking God to find them. Her husband was soon rescued from the water and prayed with her.

When rescuers noticed bubbles moving in the water, they found Joseph along with 8-year-old Moses and 10-year-old Augustine clinging to a rope and pulled them to safety.

Emmanuel, her 15-year-old son, had been carried further away into the water with 14-year-old Daniel. They found a life preserver that had been thrown into the water and clung to it, bringing with them two girls from another family who were also nearly drowning.

When Emmanuel used the last of his strength to cry out, rescuers found them, Bwetu Kapongo said. Two people who had been on the boat died, one adult and one child.

Though the family survived, all of the documents and photos that could have been used as evidence were lost in the water.

They would have to journey by boat two more times between Costa Rica and Nicaragua before successfully making it the rest of the way up to the U.S. border.

Bwetu Kapongo said she expected to receive “protection and respect” when they arrived. Instead, her husband was quickly taken away.

It is only when she reaches this point in the story that she begins to cry.

She wouldn’t hear from him for about a month. He told her that he didn’t know how to find her, that it took that long for officials to give him information about where she was.

The family’s attorney Julie Hartlé said the family’s story is “horrific but not unusual.” Other attorneys she knows have had similar cases.

“This family meets every criteria. They were persecuted for being democracy activists, kidnapped and tortured by their own government,” Hartlé said. “It meets the exact definition of asylum for political persecution. It should’ve been straightforward. They were able to use the detention system against them.”

Bakala had to fill out his asylum application in English, a language he does not speak well. Though he told the judge verbally about three times he was taken by police, how he was beaten, interrogated and held without food, he only put information about one of the incidents in his application.

“That sounds like a pretty bad event,” the judge said in his ruling of one of the incidents Bakala described. “Unfortunately, it is never mentioned anywhere in the respondent’s application for asylum.”

The evidence that Bakala was able to gather and present — including a notice from his political party about his disappearance, another notice that the ruling party was looking for him, his voter ID card and party membership card — was not translated into English, so the judge said he couldn’t consider it, according to court records. He found Bakala’s story not credible.

The Executive Office for Immigration Review said it does not comment on judges’ decisions.

Neither Immigration and Customs Enforcement nor Customs and Border Protection were able to respond to request for comment in time for publication.

As immigration officials prepared to deport Bakala, attorneys filed emergency motions to temporarily keep him in the U.S. to try to reopen his case with new evidence. Last week, the 11th Circuit granted him a stay until Friday.

In the meantime, members of the church helping the family here in San Diego are planning a protest outside of the federal building at noon on Thursday in support of Bakala.

Bwetu Kapongo said the most important thing for her is protection for her children.

“He sacrificed his life to protect his kids,” she said in French. “If we hadn’t done what we did, they would already be dead.”

Beyond that, she wishes for her husband’s return. She tries to hide her exhaustion and her tears from her children, but she doesn’t think she can raise them alone.

“After the mountain I went through, I’ve got no more strength,” she said.

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

So, how might a real judge, one committed to guaranteeing fundamental fairness, due process, and properly applying the generous dictates of U.S. asylum law have approached this case?

First, Bakala comes from a country, the Democratic Republic of Congo (“DRC”) which is one of the most repressive regimes in the world, where persecution is rampant. For example, the DRC received a score of 17 on a scale of 100 in the latest Freedom House freedom rankings.

Here’s a quote from the most recent U.S. State Department Country Report summarizing the daily horrors of life in the DRC:

The most significant human rights issues included: unlawful killings; disappearances and abductions; torture and other cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment and punishment, including sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) and rape; life-threatening conditions in prisons and detention facilities; arbitrary arrests and prolonged detention; denial of fair public trial; arbitrary interference with privacy, family, and home; restrictions on freedoms of speech and the press, assembly, and association; abuse of internally displaced persons (IDPs); inability of citizens to change their government through democratic means; harassment of civil society, opposition, and religious leaders; corruption and a lack of transparency at all levels of government; violence and stigmatization against women, children, persons with disabilities, ethnic minorities, indigenous persons, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (LGBTI) persons, and persons with albinism, with little government action to investigate, prosecute, or hold perpetrators accountable; trafficking in persons, including forced labor, including by children; and violations of worker rights.

Authorities often took no steps to investigate, prosecute, or punish officials who committed abuses, whether in the security forces or elsewhere in the government, and impunity for human rights abuses was a problem.

Therefore, knowing that Bakala comes from a notorious “refugee producing country,” the Immigration Judge should have insisted as a matter of due process and fundamental fairness that the case be continued until the respondent could get the assistance of a competent lawyer to fully and fairly present a case for saving his life.

Asylum law has been made intentionally and unnecessarily complicated by a politicized system run with a strong enforcement bias; statistics, as well as experience, show that unrepresented individuals have virtually no realistic chance of success, particularly in a system run by an Administration clearly prejudiced against them. Human lives become mere “case completions.”

Second, Bakala’s wife also appears to have a strong asylum claim in her own right.  If granted, he could also have been protected as a derivative asylee under his wife’s application. Therefore, unless ICE were basically willing to stipulate to an asylum grant, proceeding with the cases separately was presumptively unfair. A judge committed to fairness, would have “pushed” the ICE Counsel on why this family’s cases were not being heard together.

Third, to justify an adverse credibility finding under the statute and BIA precedents, the judge’s ruling must demonstrate significant discrepancies or omissions, provide cogent reasoning, and carefully consider and give reasons for not accepting the respondent’s explanations for any problems. This judge’s ruling appears to have “flunked” all of those tests. The idea that a detained unrepresented individual’s omission of an event from the asylum application is a cogent basis for finding him not credible is facially absurd. That’s particularly true where the respondent is not a native English speaker and is held in detention where his ability to prepare, or, indeed, to even understand what is required for a successful asylum application, is intentionally impaired.

Moreover, a simple reference to the most current State Department Country Report (quoted above) would have shown the judge that the respondent’s testimony was highly plausible in light of known country conditions.  Indeed, persecution, torture, and abuse are daily occurrences in the DRC.

Additionally, the judge violated due process by requiring a detained individual to get translations of key corroborating documents. It’s simply not possible in most cases. How is a detained unrepresented individual going to find a qualified foreign language translator in the Stewart prison? A judge doing his job fairly would have asked the respondent to summarize the documents and accepted a “proffer;” or he could have had the documents read into the record by the interpreter.

For the purpose of a detained adjudication, I would have assumed that the documents were what the respondent said they were and acted accordingly. If the DHS wanted to challenge the decision, they could have the documents translated.  Just one of many problems in purporting to conduct “due process hearings:” in place where due process often can’t really be achieved.

Then, the “rubber stamp” BIA (a/k/a the “Falls Church Adjudication Center”) also “tanked” by not applying its own precedents which should have resulted in a finding that the Immigration Judge’s specious reasoning was “clearly erroneous.”

I heard a number of asylum cases from the DRC during my time on the bench in Arlington. I doubt that I denied any except for individuals who were aggravated felons, engaged in persecution of others, or had provided material support to a terrorist organization. Even those who failed to establish asylum eligibility often had valid claims for protection under the Convention Against Torture, given the prevalence of government sponsored or endorsed torture in the DRC. Most DRC asylum cases in Arlington were well-represented, well-documented, and either largely unopposed or not appealed by ICE.

Even without a lawyer, it appears that Bakala’s testimony was credible under the circumstances and that he suffered harm that should have warranted a grant of asylum on account of political opinion based on known country conditions. At one time in Arlington, a case like this with representation probably could have been granted largely by stipulation, with brief testimony, on a “short docket.”

That’s how cases can “move” on the Immigration Court’s crowded dockets without compromising due process or fundamental fairness. Instead, this Administration encourages a biased “haste makes waste” approach, issues statements of strong prejudgment against asylum seekers and their attorneys, motivates judges to cut corners, and enables judges to look for “any reason” to deny asylum and crank out final orders of removal. It’s a “cavalcade of worst practices!”

While some judges courageously resist and insist on “doing the right thing,” others choose or feel compelled to “go along to get along” with the Administration’s unethical (and incompetent) administration of these so-called “courts.” Indeed, today’s Immigration Judges are not even properly trained on how to correctly adjudicate and grant asylum under the generous standards mandated by the law, the Supreme Court, and even the BIA’s (seldom followed) precedent supposedly implementing generous standards following the Supreme Court’s admonishment. It’s an exercise in extreme intellectual dishonesty.

Allowing serious, “life or death” cases to be tried in places like Stewart, notorious for being the home of unsympathetic judges and an inherently coercive atmosphere, intentionally located in and out-of-the-way place where it is hard for attorneys to participate, is a stain on America.

The DOJ has abandoned any semblance of running its “wholly owned courts” in a fair and constitutional manner. Congress, ultimately responsible for creating and countenancing this mess, has long abdicated its duty to establish an independent system that complies with Due Process.

Article III Judges also have been largely complicit in allowing this pathetic imitation of a “court” system to continue operating in a fundamentally unfair and unreasonable manner and spewing forth skewed, unjust, often unlawful, and sometimes deadly results. It’s a national disgrace!

Sadly, the individuals being abused by the Immigration Court system are some of the weakest and most vulnerable among us. That’s what allows such systematic injustice to operate “largely below the radar screen.” However, the individuals who are participating in and enabling such outrageous contempt for the rule of law and human dignity, and thereby violating their oaths of Federal office, will not escape the judgment of history.

Fixing this unfair and intentionally broken system is well within our power as a country. It could be done for much less than $5.7 billion. Put an end to the “New American Gulag” and  the “theater of the absurd” masquerading as a “court” that operates within its bowels!

PWS

03-01-19

 

🤡U.S. CLOWN COURT: Where Justice & Logic Are A Bad Joke, & Those We Should Be Welcoming Are Instead Shown The Door!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/my-immigrant-client-won-a-judges-compassion-ice-still-dumped-him-on-the-border/2019/01/24/7802a800-1e9c-11e9-8b59-0a28f2191131_story.html

Attorney Marty Rosenbluth writes in the Washington Post Sunday Outlook Section:

Attorney  ’s client made a passionate case to the judge about our unjust system

This month, I went to court with José. He came to the United States without papers from Mexico when he was 15, in 1999. Now he has a wife, three kids and a job in construction in Raleigh, N.C. It all came apart when police pulled him over and arrested him for driving without a license. He soon landed in the Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, Ga. He fought his deportation case alone for several months before his family finally called my law firm.

We first told him we couldn’t take his case because he had no chance of winning, so ethically we couldn’t take his money. Most people in deportation proceedings have few if any options to stay in the United States through the immigration courts. I urged him to take voluntary departure, which enables people to leave the country without getting a deportation order on their records, so it is easier to come back legally in the future. But he told me he was certain that, if he could just tell the court his story, the judge would see that letting him stay was right and just and fair. I told him that our immigration system had many rules and laws, but little or no justice.

In truth, I think José knew he had no chance, and he knew he’d have to leave. But he didn’t want to leave quietly. We agreed that I would accompany him — I wouldn’t say “help,” because he could have realized his plan without me, and I didn’t charge a penny — but he would address the judge directly. One of the most important things I do as an attorney is to just be present. Since the immigration laws are so defective, and the judges often play by their own rules (routine bond requests are usually denied, and this Georgia court has one of the lowest approval rates for asylum cases in the country), and the detention/deportation centers are designed to break people’s spirits, often there is not much else that can be done. Based on what transpired, I’m glad I went.

José’s whole family came to support him — his wife and his kids and a friend. When we sat down at the bench, I told the judge that José would be speaking for himself. In immigration courts, migrants usually just answer questions, so the judge asked me if I was requesting to withdraw. I said I wasn’t: I was staying at the table, but José was going to do all the talking. And the judge, to his credit, heard him out.

The judge explained the law and what José would have to prove in order to win. Before hiring us, José had submitted an application, on his own, for “cancellation of removal.” There are four elements: He had to prove that he had been living here for more than 10 years, that he was a person of good moral character and that he hadn’t broken any laws that would bar him under the statutes from applying. José could show all of these things. But the fourth criterion is the hardest. José would have to prove that if he were deported, it would cause an “exceptional and extremely unusual hardship” to a spouse, parent or child who is a U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident. Usually it means you have a child with cancer, or a spouse with a disability that makes them unable to work or support a family — something on that scale. If you can convince the court merely that your family would be made homeless or that your children would subsist on food stamps, that is not considered sufficient. That is just the usual hardship that deportees’ families experience.

Without missing a beat, José said to the judge, “I have the first three, your honor, but I do not have the fourth.” Turning around to look at his family, with obvious pride, he told the judge: “This is my family. These are my children. Everything I do, I do for them. But thankfully they are all healthy, which for the moment seems for some reason to be bad.” Truly, logic has no place in immigration court.

The judge said that, based on this testimony, he would have to deny his application for cancellation of removal. Still, the judge offered José voluntary departure and explained, as I had, that it would make it easier for him to return.

I had met with José’s wife, Maria, too, and explained “VD,” which is a safer option than exiting the nation through the usual deportation machinery. People who are deported to Mexico from Stewart and many other detention centers are just dumped on the border, where gangs await them. (People deported to other countries are flown.) They are often robbed, kidnapped, raped or killed. Those who take VD, on the other hand, don’t get to leave jail, but they fly back on a regular commercial flight.

The problem with voluntary departure, though, is the cost: You have to buy your own fare, and it is very expensive, currently around $1,250. Immigration and Customs Enforcement will accept only a “Y” class ticket, or a full-cost coach fare, which can often cost more than first class. José thanked the judge and declined. “The tickets cost a lot of money, and my family will need the money after I leave.”

Maria interjected, crying. “Take the voluntary,” she said. “Take the voluntary!” My client began crying, too, followed by his kids.

I decided to take a chance. I asked the judge if José could talk to his wife over the barrier. Any direct communication and especially physical contact is strictly forbidden in this courtroom. To my surprise, he agreed. So Maria came forward, and she and José started hugging and kissing and crying. The bailiff moved to intervene, but I just shook my head and mouthed the word “Please.”

The couple talked for a few minutes, and then José sat back down and offered that he would take voluntary departure. But he’d gotten to hug his 6-, 8- and 12-year-old children across the barrier. Imagine that. Humanity in what passes for a court. This is not usually how immigration cases go. The judge gave José 30 days to buy his ticket before he would lose the “privilege” of taking VD.

In the end, José sat there smiling. And proud. He was still smiling as his family left the courtroom. And smiling when he gave me a hug. He’d known all along he wouldn’t win, but he wanted to be able to call out the injustice. And the judge, who has low rates of approval for just about anything, heard him out. (Only 31 of 347 judges denied asylum claims at a higher rate, according to the Transitional Records Access Clearinghouse.) It wasn’t a victory, exactly. José wouldn’t be staying with his family. But speaking a truth, to a hostile power, is still a kind of achievement.

But it was a discordant one for such a ruthless corner of the law. And eventually the logic of our immigration system superseded his brave act.

This past week, according to a friend of his who called me to share the news, ICE came to his cell early one morning and said it would fly him to Mexico City; he wouldn’t even have to pay for his ticket. Then, that afternoon, officials came and handcuffed him, brought him to a room to wait with other detainees for several hours and deposited him on a bus. Not to the airport, as they had promised. They drove him to the border and dumped him out in Matamoros. I am looking into his legal options, because apparently no act of courage goes unpunished.

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

Thanks Marty, for giving us insight into the “parody of justice” that goes on daily in our Immigration Courts at the direction of a Department of “Justice” that long ago lost both its way and purpose and must be wrested from control of a major dysfunctional court system that it is so ethically and functionally unable to administer in anything approaching a fair and efficient manner.

I give the Immigration Judge credit for taking time to listen and allowing Jose to speak in court. In the toxic age of Trump, Sessions, Whitaker, and likely also Barr, Immigration Judges are pressured to prejudge cases and cut corners by denying claims without listening to the evidence to keep up with artificial “deportation quotas” imposed by Sessions and to keep up “productivity” which has replaced “guaranteeing fairness and Due Process” as the mantra of today’s “Clown Courts.”

On the other hand, there are alternatives available. The BIA precedents on what constitutes “exceptional and extremely hardship” are intentionally vague and subject to interpretation. How do I know? They were issued while I was serving as BIA Chair (one over my dissent).

They were supposed to be part of a group of cases, sometimes knows as the “basket of pain,” defining the term in a number of different contexts. But, after Ashcroft’s “Saturday Night Massacre” at the BIA “took out” those judges, including me, who sometimes ruled in favor of respondent’s positions, the project was abandoned. My remaining colleagues were afraid that ruling on anything so controversial, and particularly granting anything to a respondent, could be “career threatening,” probably with good reason. So, Immigration Judges were left to their own devices. Many of the BIA panels on the other hand, took a pretty hard line, all, of course, in unpublished decisions.

Coming to the Arlington Immigration Court from the BIA, I actually underwent some “culture shock.” In an early cancellation case, I was thinking that the respondents, although great folks who were doing good things for America and their citizen family, probably wouldn’t “make the cut” under the standards that my last BIA panel had been applying. But, when the Assistant Chief Counsel got up to make a closing, after I had given respondents’ counsel a rather “hard time,” I was surprised to hear an impassioned, well-reasoned, and well-supported plea joining counsel’s request for a finding of “exceptional and extremely unusual hardship” and granting the case. “It’s Recinas, not Andazola,” as we came to say in Arlington, after the names of the BIA precedents that appeared to reach conflicting conclusions.

Some Immigration Judges would have found that deprivation of the support of the “primary breadwinner” is “exceptional and extremely unusual hardship” and granted Jose cancellation of removal. And, some ICE Assistant Chief Counsel would have waived appeal. Just shows what a “crapshoot” justice has become in the Immigration Courts.

BS (“Before Sessions”) at the Arlington Immigration Court, the Assistant Chief Counsel would probably have offered “prosecutorial discretion” or “PD” to Jose. And, I would have encouraged Marty to take that offer and “live to fight another day.” I would have given Jose and his family my “bad things will happen if you screw up again in any way speech,'” “administratively closed” the case, and taken it off my docket. The court and both counsel would have saved time and Jose and his family could have gone on living their lives and contributing to America pending good behavior and an eventual legalization program by Congress.

Not a perfect solution to be sure. But, a fundamentally just one that allowed me, ICE, and the private bar to move on and deal with other higher priority cases that really needed my judicial attention.

Trump, Sessions, Nielsen and their White Nationalist Gang have stripped the Immigration Courts of whatever little sense of justice and judicial control remained. They intentionally have turned a struggling system into a totally dysfunctional and fundamentally unjust and unconstitutional one.

We can only hope that at some point the Article III Courts will have seen enough and will put this totally bankrupt system into “receivership;” or that some future Congress and a more competent and honest Administration will create an independent Immigration Court focused, as it should be, on fairness and Due Process. Until then, justice and logic will continue to be a bad joke in the “U.S. Clown Courts.” 🤡

PWS

01-28-19

DOUBT THAT THERE IS ANTI-ASYLUM BIAS IN THE STEWART (DETENTION CENTER) IMMIGRATION COURT? — Read This Outrageously Wrong IJ Decision (Fortunately) Reversed By The BIA!

Go on over to Dan Kowalski at LexisNexis Immigration Community to read this outrageous abuse of justice by a U.S. Immigration Judge!

Matter of K-D-H-, unpublished (BIA 10-05-17)

Here’s the link:

https://www.lexisnexis.com/legalnewsroom/immigration/b/immigration-law-blog/archive/2017/11/03/unpub-bia-asylum-victory-somalia-matter-of-k-d-h-oct-5-2017.aspx?Redirected=true

The BIA Panel that got this one right was:

Chairman/Chief Appellate Judge David Neal

Appellate Immigration Judge John Guendelsberger

Appellate Immigration Judge Molly Kendall Clark

OPINION BY: Judge Kendall Clark

Interestingly, this panel configuration seldom, if ever, appears in BIA precedent decisions. Nor are these Judges recorded as dissenting or commenting upon the BIA’s generally anti-asylum precedents, some of which almost mock the BIA’s leading precedent on the generous nature of asylum law following the Supreme Court’s decision in INS v. Cardoza-Fonseca: Matter of Mogharrbi, 19 I&N Dec. 439 (BIA 1987).

So, why are the Appellate Immigration Judges who appear to have a good understanding of asylum law that is much more in line with the Supreme Court, the U.S. Courts of Appeals, and the BIA’s own pre-2003 precedents “buried in obscurity?” Meanwhile, those Appellate Immigration Judges who evince a lack of  understanding of asylum law, the realities of being asylum applicants in the “purposely user unfriendly” Immigration Courts, or any visible sympathy for the plight of asylum seekers (even those who are denied under our overly technical legal standards often face life threatening situations upon return — some actually die — we just choose not to take the necessary steps to protect them) seem to be among the “featured” in BIA precedents? Do all of the BIA Judges really agree with every precedent. If not, why aren’t we seeing some public dialogue, debate, and dissent, as with every other collegial, deliberative court in America? What’s the purpose and value of a “deliberative court” that almost never engages in any public deliberation (about some of the most difficult and complex questions facing our nation)? Where’s the accountability if all BIA Appellate Judges are not recording their votes on published precedents?

As you read the BIA decision and the decision below of Judge Randall Duncan of the Stewart Immigration Court here are a few questions you might keep in mind:

  • Why doesn’t Judge Duncan cite any actual cases?  (He refers to “the Eleventh Circuit” with no specific citations.)
  • Why didn’t Judge Duncan follow (or even discuss) either the BIA’s precedent in Matter of O-Z- & I-Z-, 23 I&N Dec. 22 (BIA 1998) or the Eleventh Circuit precedent in De Santamaria v, U.S. Att’y Gen., 525 F.3d 999, 1008 (11th Cir. 2008) both of which discuss “cumulative harm” and would inescapably have led to the conclusion that this respondent suffered past persecution?
  • Why isn’t this a published precedent in light of Judge Duncan’s clear misunderstanding of the applicable asylum law and because of the notorious reputation of the Atlanta-Stewart Immigration Courts as an “asylum free zone.”
  • Why did Judge Duncan, a relatively new Immigration Judge (Nov. 2016), attempt to dispose of this case with an obviously inadequate “Oral Decision.”
  • What kind of asylum training did Judge Duncan get?
  • What would have happened if this individual had been unrepresented (as many asylum applicants are at Stewart)?
  • What steps have the DOJ and EOIR taken to improve the poor substantive performance of some Immigration Judges who ignore applicable legal standards and deny far too many asylum cases?
  • What will Jeff Sessions’s “more untrained Immigration Judges peddling even faster” do to due process and justice in a court system that is currently failing to achieve fairness and due process in too many cases?

Taking a broken system and trying to expand it and make it run faster is simply going to produce more unfair and unjust results. In other words, it would be “insanely stupid.” The Immigration Court system has some serious quality of decision-making, bias, consistency, and due process issues that must be solved before the system can be expanded. Otherwise, the system will be institutionalizing “bad practices” rather than the “best practices.”

PWS

11-06-17

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

DOJ’s Location Of U.S. Immigration Courts At Obscure Detention Locations Helps DHS To Deny Due Process, Punish Lawyers!

https://www.propublica.org/article/immigrants-in-detention-centers-are-often-hundreds-of-miles-from-legal-help

Patrick G. Lee writes in ProPublica:

“One morning in February, lawyer Marty Rosenbluth set off from his Hillsborough, North Carolina, home to represent two anxious clients in court. He drove about eight hours southwest, spent the night in a hotel and then got up around 6 a.m. to make the final 40-minute push to his destination: a federal immigration court and detention center in the tiny rural Georgia town of Lumpkin.

During two brief hearings over two days, Rosenbluth said, he convinced an immigration judge to grant both of his new clients more time to assess their legal options to stay in the United States. Then he got in his car and drove the 513 miles back home.

“Without an attorney, it’s almost impossible to win your case in the immigration courts. You don’t even really know what to say or what the standards are,” said Rosenbluth, who works for a private law firm and took on the cases for a fee. “You may have a really, really good case. But you simply can’t package it in a way that the court can understand.”

His clients that day were lucky. Only 6 percent of the men held at the Lumpkin complex — a 2,001-bed detention center and immigration court — have legal representation, according to a 2015 study in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review. Nationwide, it’s not much better, the study of data from October 2006 to September 2012 found: Just 14 percent of detainees have lawyers.

That percentage is likely to get even smaller under the Trump administration, which has identified 21,000 potential new detention beds to add to the approximately 40,000 currently in use. In January, President Trump signed an executive order telling the secretary of homeland security, who oversees the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, to “immediately” start signing contracts for detention centers and building new ones.

If history is any guide, many of those facilities will end up in places like Lumpkin, population 2,741. The city’s small downtown has a courthouse, the police department, a couple of restaurants and a Dollar General. There’s no hotel and many of the nearest immigration lawyers are based 140 miles away in Atlanta.

“It’s been a strategic move by ICE to construct detention centers in rural areas,” said Amy Fischer, policy director for RAICES, a San Antonio-based nonprofit that supports on-site legal aid programs at two Texas facilities for detained families. “Even if the money is there, it’s very difficult to set up a pro bono network when you’re geographically three hours away from a big city.”
ICE currently oversees a network of about 200 facilities, jails, processing centers and former prisons where immigrants can be held, according to a government list from February.

Unlike criminal defendants, most immigrants in deportation proceedings are not entitled to government-appointed lawyers because their cases are deemed civil matters. Far from free legal help and with scant financial resources, the majority of detainees take their chances solo, facing off against federal lawyers before judges saddled with full dockets of cases. Frequently they must use interpreters.

An ICE spokesman denied that detention facilities are purposely opened in remote locations to limit attorney access. “Any kind of detention center, due to zoning and other factors, they are typically placed in the outskirts of a downtown area,” said spokesman Bryan Cox. “ICE is very supportive and very accommodating in terms of individuals who wish to have representation and ensuring that they have the adequate ability to do so.” At Lumpkin’s Stewart Detention Center, for instance, lawyers can schedule hourlong video teleconferences with detainees, Cox said.

But a ProPublica review found that access to free or low-cost legal counsel was limited at many centers. Government-funded orientation programs, which exist at a few dozen detention locations, typically include self-help workshops, group presentations on the immigration court process, brief one-on-one consultations and pro bono referrals, but they stop short of providing direct legal representation. And a list of pro bono legal service providers distributed by the courts includes many who don’t take the cases of detainees at all. Those that do can often only take a limited number — perhaps five to 10 cases at a time.

The legal help makes a difference. Across the country, 21 percent of detained immigrants who had lawyers won their deportation cases, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review study found, compared to just 2 percent of detainees without a lawyer. The study also found that 48 percent of detainees who had lawyers were released from detention while their cases were pending, compared to 7 percent of those who lacked lawyers.

Legal counsel can also speed up the process for those detainees with no viable claims to stay in the country, experts said. A discussion with a lawyer might prompt the detainee to cut his losses and opt for voluntary departure, avoiding a pointless legal fight and the taxpayer-funded costs of detention.

Lawmakers in some states, such as New York and California, have stepped in to help, pledging taxpayer money toward providing lawyers for immigrants who can’t afford their own. But such help only aids those detainees whose deportation cases are assigned to courts in those areas.

“What brings good results is access to family and access to counsel and access to evidence, and when you’re in a far off location without those things, the likelihood of ICE winning and the person being denied due process increase dramatically,” said Conor Gleason, an immigration attorney at The Bronx Defenders in New York.”

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Read the complete article at the above link.

Lumpkin is “at the outskirts” of what “downtown area?” Don’t all major metro areas have “metropolitan correctional centers,” city jails, county jails, or some equivalent located near the courts and hub of legal activities for criminal defendants awaiting trial? Why are civil detainees allowed to be treated this way?

For far too long, under AGs from both parties, the DOJ has participated in this disingenuous charade designed to promote removals over due process. Because cases often have to be continued for lawyers, even where none is likely to be found, the procedure actually adds to detention costs in many cases.  Why not house only those with final orders awaiting removal or with pending appeals at places like Lumpkin? Why don’t the BIA and Courts of Appeals rule that intentionally detaining individuals where they cannot realistically exercise their “right to be represented by counsel of their own choosing” is a denial of due process?

Look for the situation to get much worse under Sessions, who envisions an “American Gulag” where detention rules as part of his program to demonize migrants by treating them all as “dangerous criminals.”

Meanwhile, as I pointed in a recent panel discussion at AYUDA, the only part of the immigration system over which the private sector has any control or influence these days is promoting due process by providing more pro bono lawyers for migrants. Eventually, if those efforts are persistent enough, the Government might be forced to change its approach.

PWS

05-18-17