TRAC – Page 2 – immigrationcourtside.com

INSIDE THE NUMBERS: My “Quick & Dirty” Takeaways From TRAC’s Latest Immigration Court Asylum Stats

Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse

Record Number of Asylum Cases in FY 2019

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Immigration judges decided a record number of asylum cases in FY 2019. This past year judges decided 67,406 asylum cases, nearly two-and-a-half times the number from five years ago when judges decided 19,779 asylum cases. The number of immigrants who have been granted asylum more than doubled from 9,684 in FY 2014 to 19,831 in FY 2019. However, the number of immigrants who have been denied asylum or other relief grew even faster from 9,716 immigrants to 46,735 over the same time period.

More Chinese nationals were granted asylum than any other nationality. Next came El Salvadorian nationals, followed by asylum seekers from India.

Six-nine percent of asylum seekers were denied asylum or other relief in 2019. Nevertheless, 99 out of 100 attended all their court hearings.

Access to an attorney impacted the asylum outcomes. Only 16 percent of unrepresented asylum applicants received asylum or other forms of deportation relief. In contrast, twice the proportion (33%) of asylum applicants with an attorney received asylum or other relief.

Overall, asylum applicants waited on average 1,030 days – or nearly three years – for their cases to be decided. But many asylum applicants waited even longer: a quarter of applicants waited 1,421 days, or nearly four years, for their asylum decision.

To read the full report go to:

https://trac.syr.edu/immigration/reports/588/

To examine these results in greater detail by nationality and court location, TRAC’s free asylum app is now updated with data through the end of November 2019 at:

https://trac.syr.edu/phptools/immigration/asylum/

Additional free web query tools which track Immigration Court proceedings have also been updated through November 2019. For an index to the full list of TRAC’s immigration tools and their latest update go to:

https://trac.syr.edu/imm/tools/

If you want to be sure to receive notifications whenever updated data become available, sign up at:

https://tracfed.syr.edu/cgi-bin/tracuser.pl?pub=1&list=imm

Follow us on Twitter at

https://twitter.com/tracreports

or like us on Facebook:

https://facebook.com/tracreports

TRAC is self-supporting and depends on foundation grants, individual contributions and subscription fees for the funding needed to obtain, analyze and publish the data we collect on the activities of the US Federal government. To help support TRAC’s ongoing efforts, go to:

https://trac.syr.edu/cgi-bin/sponsor/sponsor.pl

David Burnham and Susan B. Long, co-directors
Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse
Syracuse University
Suite 360, Newhouse II
Syracuse, NY 13244-2100
315-443-3563
trac@syr.edu
http://trac.syr.edu

The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse is a nonpartisan joint research center of the Whitman School of Management (http://whitman.syr.edu) and the Newhouse School of Public Communications (http://newhouse.syr.edu) at Syracuse University. If you know someone who would like to sign up to receive occasional email announcements and press releases, they may go to http://trac.syr.edu and click on the E-mail Alerts link at the bottom of the page. If you do not wish to receive future email announcements and wish to be removed from our list, please send an email to trac@syr.edu with REMOVE as the subject.

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SOME INTERESTING TAKEAWAYS:

Contrary to regime false narratives, non-detained asylum seekers continued to show up for their hearings approximately 99% of the time.
Contrary to recent EOIR claims, representation of asylum seekers continued to make a huge difference: twice as many represented asylum seekers received relief.
Nearly 20,000 individuals were granted asylum in FY 2019, twice as many as in FY 2014, although the number of cases denied grew even faster by 4.5x, to 46,735.
The three “Northern Triangle” countries, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras ranked among the top five in number of asylum claims granted.
Session’s biased decision in Matter of A-B- appears to have been responsible for artificially depressing asylum grant rates starting in June 2018.
Even with extraordinary efforts by the regime to “game” the asylum system against applicants, 31% of the applicants still were successful in gaining relief in FY 2019.
The New Due Process Army continues to “take the battle” to the regime: despite regime efforts to inhibit and discourage representation, nearly 85% of asylum applicants were represented in FY year 2019, a slight increase over the previous FY.
Unrepresented asylum applicants are “railroaded” though the system at a much higher rate than represented applicants: nearly half of the unrepresented asylum cases that started in 2019 were completed, as opposed to approximately 10% of the represented ones.
Non-detained, represented asylum applicants wait an average of three years for a merits hearing in Immigration Court.
The number of asylum cases decided by Immigration Judges has risen 250% over the past five fiscal years.
Asylum cases were 22.6% of the Immigration Court final decisions in FY 2019, as opposed to 10.7% in FY 2014.
Deciding more asylum cases while intentionally “stacking” the system against asylum seekers has not stopped the mushrooming Immigration Court backlogs.

PWS

01-09-20

MALICIOUS INCOMPETENCE: SESSIONS & BARR ERADICATED DUE PROCESS WHILE DOUBLING THE IMMIGRATION COURT BACKLOG: “[S]uch backlogs result when ‘the government focuses concern on immigrants and puts enforcement ahead of due process and civil rights.'” – Complicit Article III Appellate Courts Are Likely To End Up With The Absolute Disaster They Enabled!

https://apple.news/AbprF_RZWSBmtsn5WT35I_w

By DANAE KING, THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH

Immigration court backlog has nearly doubled under Trump

November 25, 2019 05:00 PM EST

The nation’s backlog of active immigration court cases has surpassed the 1 million mark and has nearly doubled since President Donald Trump took office, a new analysis shows. In Ohio, 12,851 cases are pending in Cleveland’s immigration court, which includes Columbus-area cases. That’s up from 3,295 in 2009.

While most people might look a few weeks into the future when scheduling appointments for work, Amy Bittner has put court dates on her calendar for 2022.

The Columbus-based immigration lawyer already knows she’ll have to make the 280-mile round trip to Cleveland to represent a client at a hearing in three years.

“The backlog is a victim of this administration’s priorities. There did not used to be this backlog,” Bittner said.

Nationwide, the backlog has almost doubled, from 542,411 pending cases when President Donald Trump took office in January 2017 to just over 1 million as of Sept. 30, according to an October report by TRAC, a Syracuse Universityclearinghouse that gathers and analyzes immigration data from government agencies.

In Ohio, 12,851 cases are pending in Cleveland Immigration Court, the state’s only such court. That is up significantly from 3,295 in 2009. It’s also double the 6,184 in 2016.

Hearings are scheduled in the Cleveland court through Dec. 30, 2022.

Trump administration policies have not helped temper the rise in the country’s immigration court backlog, the TRAC report says.

Austin Kocher, a faculty fellow at TRAC and an Ohio State alumnus , said such backlogs result when “the government focuses concern on immigrants and puts enforcement ahead of due process and civil rights.”

“Very little resources actually go to the immigration court system and judges” compared with enforcement efforts, Kocher said.

Although the judges in northeastern Ohio stay busy, the backlog at Cleveland’s immigration court isn’t the worst in the country. In areas such as New York, Chicago and Philadelphia, immigrants are waiting an average of 1,450 days, or just under four years, to see a judge.

Part of the reason for the backlog, TRAC says, is that then-U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions in May 2018 ordered the nation’s immigration judges to end their practice of removing cases from their dockets without issuing decisions. That resulted in formerly closed cases being reopened, according to TRAC.

“The decision to reopen previously closed cases has single-handedly exacerbated the immigration court crisis, yet it has not received sufficient attention,” the TRAC report states. “This single policy decision has caused a much greater increase in the court’s backlog than have all currently pending cases from families and individuals arrested along the southwest border seeking asylum.”

Others blamed the delays in part on one of Trump’s earliest executive orders, from January 2017, when he made every immigrant who was in the country illegally a priority for deportation. The norm had been to prioritize those who had committed crimes.

“It is a senseless waste of taxpayer money to attempt to remove people who are not criminals and who are well-integrated into our community,” Bittner, the Columbus immigration lawyer, told The Dispatch in an email.

She said U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement should close deportation cases involving long-term U.S. residents who are not dangerous.

The Executive Office for Immigration Review, the Department of Justicebranch that supervises the federal immigration court system, did not respond to requests by The Dispatch for comment.

The backlog has grown despite the Trump administration having given the immigration courts “the greatest amount of resources,” said Judge Ashley Tabaddor, president of the National Association of Immigration Judges, a union.

The nation has 442 immigration judges, according to TRAC. Although about 220 judges have been hired in the past three years, about 100 others have left, Tabaddor said. She said that many of those who have left have expressed feeling like the Trump administration doesn’t allow them to do their jobs properly while adding quotas and micromanaging their work.

Each judge has about 2,000 cases, according to TRAC.

In 2016, when Cleveland’s immigration court had three judges, Bittner went to the court only twice. Now it has six judges, and she goes more than once a month.

Hiring more judges hasn’t fixed the backlog, Bittner said.

“It is very frustrating because justice delayed is justice denied, and while foreign nationals wait years for the adjudication of their cases, they are putting down roots here and having families, which makes removal from the United States even crueler if their case is ultimately denied,” Bittner wrote in the email.

She said some of her clients are grateful for the wait because they have more time to build a life here. Others, however, are frustrated, Bittner said, because they feel that they are constantly in limbo, and once they’ve built a life, it could all come crashing down when their day in court finally arrives.

A few of her clients who had waited years to make their asylum case in the U.S. court left for Canada instead, hoping things would go more smoothly up north.

“It just seems to be getting worse,” Bittner said.

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Actually, this article significantly understates the true scope of the backlog. Because, as noted in the article, in Castro-Tum, Sessions unethically, mindlessly, and unlawfully created a situation that, if not halted by the Congress or the Appellate Courts (note the 4^th Circuit Court of Appeals has “just said no” to Session’s bogus ruling), will require that over 300,000 low priority, properly “administratively closed” cases be restored to the docket. They vast majority of these are (absurdly) themselves backlogged, “awaiting re-docketing” (more than a clerical process in the antiquated, non-automated, paper heavy Immigration Courts). That makes the total backlog well over 1.4 million and still growing every day.” “Aimless Docket Reshuffling” at its worst!

And, because of the almost guaranteed legal and quality control problems with the Regime’s “cutting corners to deny due process” approach, many of these will end up in the Circuit Courts of Appeals in a condition that requires “return to sender.”

It doesn’t take a legal scholar or much of a judge to recognize that today’s Immigration “Courts” being run by biased, maliciously incompetent DOJ prosecutors don’t satisfy the basic requirement for “fair and impartial adjudications” to conform to Fifth Amendment Due Process. Moreover, the incompetent, “bad faith” mis-management of the Immigration Courts basically “throws garbage” into the higher courts and precludes effective, timely judicial review.

The solution: recognize that this travesty is unconstitutional and require a court-approved “special master” to run the Immigration Courts in place of the DOJ until Congress fixes the glaring Due Process and court management problems with an independent Article I U.S. Immigration Court as recommended by almost all experts!

We also must remember the DOJ’s & EOIR’s concerted White Nationalist attacks on foreign nationals and their legal and Due Process rights in the Immigration Courts is also a vicious, unprovoked assault on the courageous attorneys representing the most vulnerable among us and trying, against the odds, to make the system function for everyone’s good. By failing to aid and support “officers of the court” in this dire situation, the Federal Judiciary basically undermines our entire justice system and brings it into disrepute!

Constantly Confront Complicit Courts 4 Change!

Due Process Forever; Complicit Courts Never!

PWS

11-26-19

TRAC HITS BACK AGAINST EOIR’S “DATA STONEWALLING” – Requests Retraction Of EOIR’s Inaccurate Response!

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Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse
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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

On October 31, 2019, TRAC published a report that outlined our recent unsuccessful attempts to address inaccurate data published by the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR), the agency within the Department of Justice responsible for overseeing the U.S. Immigration Court system. In a response to a journalist, a spokesperson for the EOIR claimed, “to the best of our knowledge, the EOIR data release is accurate and up-to-date.” We disagree. Based on a careful review of the data published by the EOIR in September and in prior months, we have substantial evidence that the EOIR’s September release remains inaccurate and incomplete.

In response to what we believe are factually inaccurate statements made on behalf of the EOIR, TRAC sent a letter on November 4, 2019 to EOIR Director James McHenry requesting a correction to public statements made by his agency. TRAC enclosed a copy of detailed evidence substantiating the request. We emphasize that the ongoing issues with data accuracy persist despite several rounds of attempted corrections by the EOIR as described on our previous report, and we look forward to working with EOIR to resolve these issues.

To view the letter to the EOIR and the related data, go to:

https://trac.syr.edu/immigration/reports/582

If you want to be sure to receive notification whenever updated data become available, sign up at:

https://tracfed.syr.edu/cgi-bin/tracuser.pl?pub=1

Follow us on Twitter at

https://twitter.com/tracreports

or like us on Facebook:

https://facebook.com/tracreports

TRAC is self-supporting and depends on foundation grants, individual contributions and subscription fees for the funding needed to obtain, analyze and publish the data we collect on the activities of the US Federal government. To help support TRAC’s ongoing efforts, go to:

https://trac.syr.edu/cgi-bin/sponsor/sponsor.pl

David Burnham and Susan B. Long, co-directors
Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse
Syracuse University
Suite 360, Newhouse II
Syracuse, NY 13244-2100
315-443-3563
trac@syr.edu
http://trac.syr.edu

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The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse is a nonpartisan joint research center of the Whitman School of Management (http://whitman.syr.edu) and the Newhouse School of Public Communications (http://newhouse.syr.edu) at Syracuse University. If you know someone who would like to sign up to receive occasional email announcements and press releases, they may go to http://trac.syr.edu and click on the E-mail Alerts link at the bottom of the page. If you do not wish to receive future email announcements and wish to be removed from our list, please send an email to trac@syr.edu with REMOVE as the subject.

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Once, the “Annual Statistical Yearbook” put out by EOIR was a “gold mine” of helpful information for scholars, researchers, reporters, and the public.

No more, under the Trump DOJ. Now, EOIR puts out a steady stream of inaccurate, incomplete, and misleading “statistics” that often are manipulated to distort the truth and offer apparent support to the Trump Administration’s endless store of White Nationalist lies, myths, fabrications, and false narratives calculated to demean, discredit, and dehumanize both migrants and those who are helping them, as well as to discourage any legitimate scholarly inquiries.

Usually EOIR gets away with it. Migrants and their lawyers are too busy fighting for their lives in the biased and unconstitutional EOIR system to spend too much time on “data dumps.” The media sometimes suspect the problems, but generally lack the time and expertise to do the in-depth analysis necessary to debunk many of EOIR’s bogus claims.

But, the folks over at TRAC are statistical pros. They are not about to be deterred or take EOIR’s normal “in your face, you are the problem, not us, response” without a fight.

Good luck in getting any “confession of error” out of EOIR. In an Administration let by the “Man of 10,000 Lies & Counting” when is the last time anyone admitted to getting or doing anything wrong?

But, I sincerely hope that Susan and David will be asked to testify before the House Oversight Committee and that EOIR will be required to respond in detail to their specific criticisms.

As many have noted, unreliable data makes effective oversight impossible. That’s undoubtedly the intent of this Administration.

PWS

11-07-19

TRAC DOCUMENTS “MALICIOUIS INCOMPETENCE” IN EOIR‘S STATISTICS: “Of greatest concern is the lack of commitment from EOIR to ensuring the public is provided with accurate and reliable data about the Court’s operations.”

Incomplete and Garbled Immigration Court Data Suggest Lack of Commitment to Accuracy

TRAC recently discovered gross irregularities in recent data releases from the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR), the agency that oversees the US immigration court system. After attempting – unsuccessfully – to work with the EOIR to fix these problems, TRAC decided to make public our observations of the quality of the agency’s public data releases as well as express our concerns about the lack of commitment within the agency to responsible data management.

Policymakers and the public routinely put their faith in federal agencies to provide complete and accurate information about their work. The value of government transparency is even higher in the area of immigration law and the Immigration Courts, which have become topics of considerable concern for Americans from all walks of life and for all three branches of government. In the present context, TRAC views concerns about EOIR’s data inconsistencies – outlined below – as substantive, ongoing, and in need of prompt attention. Of greatest concern is the lack of commitment from EOIR to ensuring the public is provided with accurate and reliable data about the Court’s operations.

“Significant Errors” in Past EOIR Data

This is not the first time the public has identified significant inaccuracies in EOIR’s reported data. For instance, the Supreme Court of the United States relied upon figures provided by the EOIR as the basis for a major ruling affecting ICE detention practices. After the Supreme Court decided the case, the public discovered that the figures provided by the EOIR were fundamentally wrong. The EOIR did not uncover the data irregularities on its own. The EOIR’s mistakes were only recognized because the public obtained the underlying data through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request and identified the relevant discrepancies.

After the public alerted the government to its inaccuracies, in 2016 the U.S. Solicitor General was compelled to issue a formal letter to the Supreme Court apologizing for providing inaccurate data. The following excerpt of the Solicitor General’s letter on August 26, 2016 attests to this error:

“This letter is submitted in order to correct and clarify statements the government made in its submissions. … EOIR made several significant errors in calculating those figures. … This Court’s opinion cites figures that ‘EOIR ha[d] calculated,’ …, and those are, in fact, the figures EOIR had calculated, albeit incorrectly. … The Court therefore may wish to amend its opinion…” (emphasis added)

This example illustrates the very real danger posed by the EOIR’s mishandling of data, as well as the value to society – and the government itself – of ongoing oversight through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. Despite the EOIR’s past data mistakes, however, the quality of the agency’s data releases has recently declined to unacceptable levels, as we discuss in the following section.

Recent Data Trouble at the EOIR

As a result of TRAC’s ongoing FOIA requests, the Executive Office for Immigration Review releases a large batch of anonymized data about Immigration Court cases every month. Statistics on the operation of the Immigration Courts largely rely on information kept in a massive database maintained by the EOIR. The EOIR records information on each matter filed with the court and tracks subsequent events as the Court processes each case. This data is central to the Court’s ability to efficiently and effectively manage its workload.

Although this data is highly valuable to policymakers and the public, the EOIR’s mishandling of the data undermines its accuracy and public value. These data problems have been occurring with increasing regularity. Severe irregularities with the September 2019 data release set a new low.

On October 9, 2019, the EOIR responded to TRAC’s FOIA request for updated case-by-case data through September 2019. TRAC promptly began processing the data in order to update TRAC’s online tools and reports, and discovered serious inconsistencies that made the data unusable. TRAC alerted the EOIR to the problems we uncovered. The chronology below summarizes the cycle of data mishandling for the September data release, and TRAC’s attempts to work with the EOIR to obtain complete and corrected data.

Data Release, Batch 1. The initial release of the EOIR’s September data included 11 separate files of records on Immigration Court proceedings that were incorrectly formatted. The garbled data resulted in substantial confusion over the relationship between certain variables and values, with some values appearing to apply to the wrong variables in the file. If potential users were even able to read the garbled data, one could reach entirely erroneous conclusions about court events. As soon as TRAC discovered these issues, it alerted the EOIR directly. EOIR promised to look into the matter.

Data Release, Batch 2. In response to TRAC’s notification, the EOIR replaced the first release with a second release and informed TRAC that the problems had been fixed. However, when TRAC processed the second release, it found that while the first set of problems had been fixed, an entirely new set of problems had occurred. In Batch 2, thousands of records of court proceedings and 2.8 million records on scheduled hearings – hearings and proceedings which were included in the first release – had entirely disappeared. TRAC alerted the EOIR directly to the new set of data inconsistencies. EOIR promised once again to look into the matter.

Data Release, Batch 3. The EOIR informed TRAC that it had fixed these new problems, and that TRAC could trust Batch 3 of the EOIR’s data release. Note that EOIR doesn’t change the labels it uses for each release; the file name remains the same and hence on its face indistinguishable from any previous release. After processing millions of records contained in the series of separate tables that made up the new release, TRAC found that problems in batch three were identical to problems in batch two. We again notified EOIR that the problems remained. At first EOIR insisted that TRAC was wrong and that the problems had been fixed. It later emerged that while the General Counsel’s office of EOIR (TRAC’s point of contact) believed a third and corrected release was being supplied, the files had not been changed but were actually the same files that TRAC had received in Batch 2.

Data Release, Batch 3 (cont.) TRAC was finally provided access to what was again billed as the corrected September release. TRAC again processed these files. This time, based on total record counts it appeared that the missing 2.8 million records on scheduled hearings had reappeared. However, some court proceedings that had been contained in Batch 1 were still missing. And there were still other puzzling omissions which we describe in more detail below.

After this series of mistakes, TRAC urged the agency to implement basic quality control procedures to ensure that the EOIR’s data releases to the public were not inadvertently garbled or incomplete. Moreover, TRAC expressed concern about the EOIR’s underlying data management practices which posed a risk to both the public and the government if left unaddressed. We conveyed these concerns to EOIR noting specifically:

“There are standard procedures that anyone in charge of maintaining databases use. The pattern of repeatedly releasing files which are either unreadable or incomplete demonstrates the agency’s standard operating procedures are woefully inadequate.

This really needs to be taken seriously. Without answers to our questions that get to the bottom of what occurred, identifying what went wrong, and implementing a plan to catch mistakes before the agency publicly distributes bad data, means that history will keep repeating itself.”

On Friday, October 25, 2019, while admitting mistakes had been made, the EOIR dug in its heels. The agency responded to TRAC’s entreaties by sidestepping the underlying issue and avoiding responsibility for its routine inaccuracies:

“[T]he FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] does not require the Agency to create records in response to your specific questions, nor to certify the accuracy of data contained in responsive documents.”

TRAC was forced to take note of the EOIR’s unwillingness to fully correct their mistakes and to work with the public to resolve the declining quality in their data releases.

The Case of the EOIR’s Disappearing Data

After recognizing the seeming inability of EOIR to produce a correct and complete data release for September 2019, TRAC began digging deeper into the problem.

Our concern about EOIR’s data was already heightened. We recently discovered that some months ago the EOIR had begun silently deleting swaths of records in their entirety from the data releases that we and other members of the public received. EOIR belatedly told us that withholding of entire records was necessary to protect immigrants’ privacy. This rationale was perplexing since these records were already anonymized and all identifying details deleted. Regardless of the EOIR’s justification for withholding the records, the agency had started making these deletions without alerting us that it was doing so, and failed to mark the data in any way to indicate the magnitude of the deletions or indicate in which files the deletions occurred.

TRAC is in a fairly unique position to examine this problem. For many years, TRAC has been regularly requesting snapshots of anonymized data from EOIR’s database as part of our mission to provide the public (and often other government agencies themselves) with access to reliable, accurate data about the Immigration Courts. Because we receive and retain these monthly snapshots, we are able to monitor changes in these releases over time and assess whether releases are incomplete or inaccurate in some other way.

Therefore, TRAC undertook a careful comparison by matching the records received in the September 2019 release against the EOIR’s release for the previous month, August 2019, and with the release we received a year ago for September 2018. This time we matched records based on unique identification numbers rather than simply comparing total record counts. This allowed us to identify records which the EOIR released in the past but were missing entirely from the current shipment.

The results of this comparison were sobering. Compared to the August 2019 release, the (allegedly-accurate) final September 2019 release was inexplicably missing more than 1,500 applications for relief that were present the previous month. We further found that 896,906 applications for relief which were present in the September 2018 release from a year ago were missing from the September 2019 files we received. This discrepancy of nearly a million records largely occurred because the EOIR appears to have started silently but systematically deleting records.

Compared to the data from August 2019, the EOIR’s files for September were also missing records on over 600 charges DHS had filed. Also missing were over 700 case and/or court proceeding records, and over 900 records on scheduled hearings. An additional 1,200 records flagging various specific types of cases were also missing. For context, this flagging system is used to identify juveniles, recently arrived families seeking asylum, and immigrants required to remain in Mexico under the Migration Protection Protocols, and other special cases.

When the records in the September 2019 release TRAC received were matched with those from the September 2018 release a year earlier, the problems we uncovered multiplied. It was clear that the problem of missing records grew by leaps and bounds with the passage of time.

EOIR Data Management: Problems and Solutions

Based on the investigation above, TRAC identified key gaps in the EOIR’s data verification procedures that lead to unreliable and inaccurate data releases.

Unintentional data removal. The EOIR’s data is inconsistent because the agency apparently does not perform a simple yet essential data verification step: it does not compare the number of records in its source database and the number of records in its released files to ensure that no records have been lost along the way. This is not merely a best practice. It is an industry standard for agencies managing large databases, and it is a routine practice in many of the EOIR’s peer agencies that provide large data releases to TRAC.

Intentional data removal. The EOIR also does not appear to be keeping track of intentionally deleted records. If the EOIR is screening out records for specific reasons, then the number withheld for each reason in a file should be counted and these counts provided. The number withheld plus the number released should match the total number of records read in to ensure reliability.

Garbled data releases. The EOIR is paying insufficient attention to how data releases are produced and formatted. Columns and rows in each table need to properly line up; otherwise information becomes garbled. And since EOIR’s database consists of many closely interconnected tables, copying data in individual tables at widely separated points in time inherently means the information will be out of sync.

Possible data deletion in master database. Deletions of the EOIR’s original source records need to be carefully tracked and procedures in place to prevent unauthorized deletions from occurring. If applied systematically, such a verification process would also pinpoint whether there were deletions made in EOIR’s original source records. Any suspicious deletions need to be investigated to ensure the integrity and completeness of this master database is maintained.

If the EOIR does not implement basic data verification procedures, the public cannot tell if records were intentionally withheld and why they were withheld, or if records were accidentally omitted during the data copying process. The failure to address these problems also means that the public has no way to test for potential problem areas in EOIR’s underlying master data files.

Accuracy, Reliability, Cooperation

Under any circumstance, maintaining a massive database of this nature is challenging. Clearly it requires the resources necessary for day-to-day operations. More fundamentally, however, it requires a commitment on behalf of the agency to provide the public with complete, accurate, and reliable data about the agency’s operations. When TRAC uncovered unexplained data issues in the past, we have brought them to the attention of the EOIR and generally found the agency to be fairly responsive and committed to ensuring accurate reporting. The recent change in posture is therefore concerning. Moreover, because EOIR’s data are relied upon as part of the official record of court filings and proceedings that have taken place, one should not expect official records to simply go missing without explanation.

It is deeply troubling that rather than working cooperatively with TRAC to clear up the reasons for these unexplained disappearances, the agency has decided to dig in its heels and insist the public is not entitled to have answers to why records are missing from the data EOIR releases to the public. TRAC urges the EOIR to take the basic steps necessary for managing any large database, especially a database of as inestimable value and relevance as the one EOIR maintains for the Immigration Courts.

TRAC is a nonpartisan, nonprofit data research center affiliated with the Newhouse School of Public Communications and the Whitman School of Management, both at Syracuse University. For more information, to subscribe, or to donate, contact trac@syr.edu or call 315-443-3563.

Report date: October 31, 2019

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Without accurate data, there can be no effective oversight, by Congress, the Judiciary, or the public (which contrary to their nasty attitude, is whom EOIR actually serves). TRAC’s experience with “malicious incompetence” is typical of the Trump Administration’s “stonewalling” and disregard of honesty and public service. They are too busy denying Due Process and evading the law to bother with facts.

Quality is simply not a factor, or even an objective, at the “New EOIR!” Unfortunately, that’s true not only in record keeping, but also in making life or death adjudications.

The only thing that makes any difference in this Administration is a preconceived White Nationalist agenda that has absolutely nothing to do with facts or public service and everything to do with racism, xenophobia, and political pandering. Obviously, because facts and data don’t support, and typically directly refute, this Administration’s draconian anti-immigrant initiatives, they have no interest in the truth or accuracy. Indeed, as in most things, facts and truth are quite damaging to the Trump Administration’s programs.

There is absolutely no excuse for EOIR’s continued existence. Much of the information that EOIR feeds to the Judiciary, through DOJ attorneys, is misleading, inaccurate, or perhaps even fabricated. By not putting a stop to EOIR’s nonsense and non-responsiveness, both Congress and the Article III Courts are demeaning themselves and shirking their Constitutional responsibilities.

PWS

11-01-19

TRAC: TRUMP DOJ’S “MALICIOUSLY INCOMPETENT POLICIES” SIGNIFICANTLY CONTRIBUTED TO ASTOUNDING 1,346,302 BACKLOG AND 4+ YEAR WAITS FOR HEARINGS — Don’t Let The Villains Blame The Victims & Their Lawyers For This Largely Self-Created Mess!

Crushing Immigration Judge Caseloads and Lengthening Hearing Wait Times

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Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

The current policies of the Trump Administration have been unsuccessful in stemming the rise in the Immigration Court’s backlog. Overcrowded dockets create lengthening wait times for hearings. At some locations, immigrants with pending cases now wait on average 1,450 days or more – over four years! – before their hearing is scheduled.

Despite promises to reduce the backlog, the latest case-by-case records show that the growth in the backlog has actually accelerated each year since President Trump assumed office. At the start of this administration, 542,411 cases were pending before immigration judges. By September 30, 2019, the backlog had grown to 1,023,767 “active” cases. This rises to 1,346,302 when cases that have not yet been calendared are added. Year-by-year the pace of increase has quickened. The active backlog grew 16.0 percent from January 2017 to the end of that fiscal year, climbed an additional 22.1 percent during FY 2018, and this past year jumped by a further 33.3 percent.

While many sources for this rise are outside the court’s control, policy decisions and practices by the Department of Justice which oversees the Immigration Court have significantly contributed to growing caseloads. For example, the decision to reopen previously closed cases has caused a much greater increase in the court’s backlog than have all currently pending cases from families and individuals arrested along the southwest border seeking asylum.

Despite accelerated hiring of new judges and the imposed production quotas implemented last year, the average caseload Immigration Court judges face has continued to grow. On average each judge currently has an active pending caseload of over two thousand cases (2,316) and over three thousand cases when the additional un-calendared cases are added (3,046). Even if the Immigration Court stopped accepting any new cases, it would still take an estimated 4.4 years to work through this accumulated backlog.

In the New York City Immigration Court which has the largest backlog in the country, hearings are currently being scheduled five years out – all the way into December of 2024. Four other courts are scheduling hearings as far out as December 2023. These include courts in Chicago, Illinois; Houston, Texas; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; and Arlington, Virginia.

For full details, including the average wait times and pending cases at each hearing location, go to:

https://trac.syr.edu/immigration/reports/579/

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David Burnham and Susan B. Long, co-directors

Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse

Syracuse University

Suite 360, Newhouse II

Syracuse, NY 13244-2100

315-443-3563

trac@syr.edu

http://trac.syr.edu

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The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse is a nonpartisan joint research center of the Whitman School of Management (http://whitman.syr.edu) and the Newhouse School of Public Communications (http://newhouse.syr.edu) at Syracuse University. If you know someone who would like to sign up to receive occasional email announcements and press releases, they may go to http://trac.syr.edu and click on the E-mail Alerts link at the bottom of the page. If you do not wish to receive future email announcements and wish to be removed from our list, please send an email to trac@syr.edu with REMOVE as the subject.

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Obviously, “Aimless Docket Reshuffling” (“ADR”), stripping Immigration Judges of all authority to manage their individual dockets, the war on Attorney representation, and the complete absence of the type of prosecutorial discretion that all other enforcement systems in America, save for the DHS, use to make reasonable use of the available judicial time are taking a big toll here! A court run by maliciously incompetent political clowns is inevitably going to become “Clown Court.”

Congress and the Article III Courts are heading for an existential crisis in our justice system if they don’t step in and force some Due Process, judicial independence, and normal professional unbiased judicial administration into this corrupt and intentionally broken system that spews out illegal and unconstitutional “removal orders” every day.

Whatever happened to accountability and the supposedly independent role of the Article III Federal Judiciary? Why is a national disgrace like the “Trumped-Up” Immigration Courts operating within the rogue DOJ allowed to continue its daily abuses?

History will judge these failing institutions and those who ignored their sworn duties harshly!

PWS

10-25-19

HARD RIGHT TURN: Barr Appoints “Death Squad” Of New “Appellate Judges” Tasked To “Snuff Out” Any Last Remaining Pockets Of Due Process For Asylum Seekers & Send As Many As Possible Unlawfully Into Harm’s Way! — Judge Earle Wilson Has An Astounding 98.1% Asylum Denial Rate, But His New Colleagues Are Hot On His Tail! — TAL @ SF CHRON REPORTS!

Tal Kopan
Washington Reporter, SF Chronicle

https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/AG-William-Barr-promotes-immigration-judges-with-14373344.php

AG William Barr promotes immigration judges with high asylum denial rates

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration has promoted six judges to the immigration appeals court that sets binding policy for deportation cases — all whom have high rates of denying immigrants’ asylum claims.

The six come from courts that have higher asylum-denial rates than the national average, including two from a court that has drawn complaints of unfair proceedings from immigration attorneys and advocates. A third has a long history of denying asylum to domestic violence victims, something the Justice Department has also sought to do.

The new appeals judges, who will now make up more than a quarter of the appellate board, were appointed as the administration works to speed up the immigration courts and narrow migrants’ use of asylum cases to come to the U.S. The six new appointees were sworn in Friday.

The hires are in a new role, in which judges will be allowed to continue serving at any immigration court in the country rather than having to move to suburban Falls Church, Va., where the appeals board’s headquarters are. The new appeals judges will also be allowed to serve as fill-in lower court immigration judges. Critics had suspected the Justice Department, which oversees the immigration courts, created the new positions to pack the board with judges from courts with high rates of denying immigrants’ claims, who may otherwise not have wanted to move to D.C.

The board serves as the appellate body for the immigration court system, an entity separate from the federal courts.

As in the federal system, the immigration board has the power to overrule lower court decisions with three-judge panels. By a majority vote of all its 21 members, it can make those rulings binding on the nation’s nearly 400 immigration judges. Recently, Barr published a new regulation giving himself the power to make any appellate decision binding as well.

By law, the Justice Department is barred from considering political leanings when hiring judges. Agency officials say judges are selected based only on their qualifications for the job, and that their history of rulings is not taken into account.

According to data tracked by Syracuse University from 2013 through 2018, all the judges promoted Friday have records of denying asylum at much higher rates than immigration judges nationally. The Justice Department has in the past questioned Syracuse’s methodology, but does not provide statistics of its own.

Two of the new appeals judges were promoted by Barr from the Atlanta immigration court, which has one of the highest rates of asylum claim denials in the country. The court rejected 95.3% of claims from 2013 to 2018, compared with a national average of 57.6%, Syracuse found.

One of the two new appeals judges from Atlanta, William Cassidy, had a rejection rate of 95.8%, 22nd highest in the country.

Cassidy was also the subject of 11 complaints from immigration attorneys from 2010-2013, according to material obtained by the American Immigration Lawyers Association through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. That number of complaints was more than roughly 95% of all other immigration judges in that period, according to information from the lawsuit. Five of the 11 resulted in Cassidy being counseled by a superior on proper judicial behavior.

Also promoted by Barr from the Atlanta court was Earle Wilson, who denied 98.1% of asylum claims from 2013 to 2018, according to Syracuse. That was more than all but five immigration judges in the U.S.

Wilson and Cassidy were also named in two complaints filed by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights group, in 2017 and 2018 that argued the Atlanta court was treating immigrants unfairly. The complaints said Wilson and Cassidy behaved in an intimidating fashion toward immigrants and their advocates.

It is not clear whether the Justice Department has responded to those complaints. The department said Friday it does not discuss personnel matters.

The other new appellate judges are:

• Keith Hunsucker, who has spent most of his time on the bench at the immigration court at the Port Isabel Detention Center in Texas. While there, he denied 81.6% of asylum cases, consistent with his court’s 81.1% average. Hunsucker is now in Cleveland.

• Deborah Goodwin, appointed from the Miami immigration court. She began hearing cases in 2017, and through last year had a denial rate of 89.4%, above her court’s average of 79.6% in the 2013 to 2018 time frame measured by Syracuse.

• Stephanie Gorman, promoted from the Houston immigration court. She began hearing cases in 2017 and has an 86.9% asylum denial rate, slightly below her court’s 89.3% average.

• Stuart Couch, who was appointed from Charlotte, N.C., denied 92.1% of asylum claims from 2013 to 2018. That was above his court’s average of 88.2%.

Couch also authored a 2017 ruling denying asylum to a Salvadoran woman who was physically and emotionally abused and raped by her ex-husband, a decision that the Board of Immigration Appeals reversed. It was that appellate decision that Sessions overturned to align the law more closely with Couch’s interpretation, saying domestic violence was largely not grounds for asylum. A federal judge has blocked that ruling for now.

Couch’s original decision was one of 10 domestic violence-related cases in 2017 in which the Board of Immigration Appeals found his rulings were “clearly erroneous.” In all 10, Couch rejected the claims of Central American women who had been beaten, raped and otherwise abused by their husbands or partners. The cases were made public as part of a Freedom of Information Act request by immigration attorney Bryan Johnson.

The Justice Department stood behind all the judges.

“DOJ doesn’t track asylum approval and denial rates for individual immigration judges, and (Syracuse) uses its own methodologies in interpreting the data it receives, resulting in conclusions that we cannot verify,” a spokesperson said in a statement. “Collectively these judges combined, have nearly 120 years of immigration law combined, through multiple administrations. Advocates that attack their integrity and professionalism only undermine the entire system.”

Immigration attorneys fear the hires are part of an effort by the Trump administration to skew the courts against immigrants, who face deportation if their claims are denied.

“The board’s primary function is to ensure rule of law and impartiality, yet the department cherry-picked judges from the harshest jurisdictions with the lowest asylum grant rates in the nation,” said Laura Lynch, senior policy counsel for the American Immigration Lawyers Association. “When we’re talking about asylum cases, these decisions are life or death for those seeking protection.”

Lynch’s group, along with the American Bar Association and national union for immigration judges, have called for the immigration courts to be removed from the Justice Department and made independent. Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-San Jose, has pledged to pursue legislation that would do so through the Judiciary subcommittee on immigration she chairs in the House.

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How many refugees will die or be subjected to additional torture and persecution because of thoroughly biased judges and a corrupt “judicial” system controlled by political hacks like Barr. Will Congress and the Article IIIs ever step in and restore some semblance of Due Process? Unless and until they do, the “blood of the innocents” will be on their hands.

Meanwhile, the complicit/complacent Article IIIs who have let this situation get out of control can look forward to being flooded with petitions for review, because the New Due Process Army will continue to fight this unconstitutional, fundamentally unfair, and evil perversion of American justice!

The idea that six Judges with asylum denial rates astronomically above the national average of 57.1% were the “best qualified” for these appellate jobs is simply absurd. Indeed, probably all of us in the Roundtable of Former Judges know of much better judicial candidates who were passed over so that Barr could install his “Death Squad.”

As Tal points out, unless piling up bar complaints, being cited by the public for rudeness, being reversed by their BIA, and denying an usually high number of asylum claims are among the “quality ranking factors” for these jobs, it’s hard to see how several of these judges would be considered even minimally qualified for promotion, let alone “best qualified.” It seems that a Congressional investigation into the selection process would be well warranted, including a look at the qualifications of candidates who were passed over.

Human lives are being trivialized by this White Nationalist regime and its enablers.

PWS

08-23-19

[BUREAU] ‘CRATS CONTINUE TO FLEE SINKING DHS SHIP AS ABUSES, LIES, COVER-UPS MOUNT — John Sanders Latest To Exit — Trump Taps Mark Morgan, Eager Architect Of Administration’s Temporarily Aborted “Community Reign of Terror” (A/K/A/ “Operation Wetback ‘19”) Program As Next Acting CBP Chief — Expect More Mindless Cruelty, Lies, False Narratives, White Nationalist Racism, Violations Of Law & Human Rights!

https://www.cnn.com/2019/06/25/politics/customs-and-border-protection-john-sanders/index.html

Priscilla Alvarez and Geneva Sands report for CNN:

Washington (CNN)Acting Customs and Border Protection Commissioner John Sanders is resigning, he said in a message sent to agency employees Tuesday, amid the dramatic increase in the number of undocumented migrants crossing the border, a fight over how to address it and controversy over how children are being treated.

“Although I will leave it to you to determine whether I was successful, I can unequivocally say that helping support the amazing men and women of CBP has been the most fulfilling and satisfying opportunity of my career,” Sanders writes. His resignation is effective July 5.

Acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director Mark Morgan is expected to take over as Customs and Border Protection in an acting capacity, according to a Department of Homeland Security official. Sanders’s resignation as acting head of CBP comes amid a crush of migrants at the border that has overwhelmed facilities. Earlier Tuesday, CBP held a call with reporters on squalid conditions at a Border Patrol facility in Clint, Texas.

Officials conceded that children should not be held in CBP custody, noting that the agency’s facilities were designed decades ago to largely accommodate single adults for a short period of time.

The Washington Post first reported Morgan’s move.

Over the weekend, President Donald Trump called off planned raids by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, saying deportations would proceed unless Congress finds a solution on the US-Mexico border within two weeks. Before it was postponed, Mark Morgan had publicly confirmed an operation targeting migrant families and others with court-ordered removals was in the works.

Morgan, a vocal proponent of the President’s efforts, was another of Trump’s picks to lead ICE after abruptly pulling the nomination of Ron Vitiello.

Morgan briefly served as Border Patrol chief during the Obama administration before leaving the post in January 2017. He previously spent two decades at the FBI. He is expected to return to Customs and Border Protection, which encompasses Border Patrol.

Sanders assumed the post after Kevin McAleenan, the former commissioner, moved up to fill the role of acting homeland security secretary in the wake of Kirstjen Nielsen’s ouster this spring. In his role, Sanders has overseen the agency responsible for policing the US borders and facilitating legal trade and travel. It is also the frontline agency dealing with the surge of migrants at the southern border.

Robert Perez, the highest-ranking career official, is the current deputy commissioner. It is unclear if he will step into the acting commissioner position.

<img alt=”100 children moved back to controversial Clint, Texas, border facility” class=”media__image” src=”//cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/180706121423-02-immigration-facility-0628-large-169.jpg”>

100 children moved back to controversial Clint, Texas, border facility

Before becoming acting commissioner, Sanders, served as the Chief Operating Officer at CBP, where he worked with McAleenan to address the operational needs of the agency and work on strategic direction.

As of June 1 this fiscal year, Border Patrol has arrested more than 377,000 family units, over 60,000 unaccompanied children, and over 226,000 single adults.

Sanders did not provide a reason for his departure.

Read Sanders’s letter here:

As some of you are aware, yesterday I offered my resignation to Secretary McAleenan, effective Friday, July 5. In that letter, I quoted a wise man who said to me, “each man will judge their success by their own metrics.” Although I will leave it to you to determine whether I was successful, I can unequivocally say that helping support the amazing men and women of CBP has been the most fulfilling and satisfying opportunity of my career.

<img alt=”100 children moved back to controversial Clint, Texas, border facility” class=”media__image” src=”//cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/180706121423-02-immigration-facility-0628-large-169.jpg”>

100 children moved back to controversial Clint, Texas, border facility

I’ve spent a significant amount of time over the last several days reflecting on my time at CBP. When I began this journey, Commissioner McAleenan charged me with aligning the mission support organizations and accelerating his priorities. Easy enough, I thought. What I didn’t appreciate at the time was how the journey would transform me professionally and personally. This transformation was due in large part to the fact that people embraced and welcomed me in a way that was new to me — in a way that was truly special. To this day, I get choked up when speaking about it and I can’t adequately express my thanks. As a result, let me simply say I will never stop defending the people and the mission for which 427 people gave their lives in the line of duty in defending. Hold your heads high with the honor and distinction that you so richly deserve.

Throughout our journey together, your determination and can-do attitude made the real difference. It allowed CBP to accomplish what others thought wasn’t possible…what others weren’t able to do. And even though there is uncertainty during change, there is also opportunity. I therefore encourage everyone to reflect on all that you have accomplished as a team. My hope is you build upon your accomplishments and embrace new opportunities, remain flexible, and continue to make CBP extraordinary. This is your organization…own it! Don’t underestimate the power of momentum as you continue to tackle some of this country’s most difficult challenges.

I will forever be honored to have served beside you. As a citizen of this great country, I thank you for your public service.

Take care of each other,

John

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Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the latest TRAC Report confirms that under Trump, the DHS, particularly ICE, has been ignoring real enforcement priorities to concentrate on often counterproductive, yet cruel, wasteful, and polarizing, improperly politicized enforcement aimed at non-criminals and those contributing to our country. In other words, terrorizing primarily Hispanic communities just because they can. And these racist attacks appeal to Trump’s base. Just part of the “ICE Fraud” that Morgan undoubtedly intends to bring over to CBP. https://trac.syr.edu/immigration/reports/564/.

Not surprisingly, some dedicated and professional ICE Agents are tiring of Trump and his sycophants’ “malicious incompetence” that is demoralizing the agency and (as I had predicted long ago) turning it into probably the most hated, least trusted, least useful, and least effective law enforcement organization in America. Michelle Mark at Business Insider covers the “bad things that happen” when you have a “no values” White Nationalist President and exceptionally poor leaders like Tom Homan and Mark Morgan who lacked both the will and the backbone to stand up to Trump’s White Nationalist nonsense. https://apple.news/AxFctS7mET3qBX419lPootw

It’s an out of control agency badly in need of professional leadership, practical priorities, and some restraint and professional discipline in both rhetoric and actions. In other words, it needs a real law enforcement mission with honest, unbiased, professional leadership. Not going to happen under Trump!

So, the next competent President will have her or his work cut out to reform and reorganize ICE into an agency that serves the national interests of the majority of Americans. Whether that can be done in ICE’s current configuration, given its overtly racist overtones and widespread lack of community trust under Trump, remains to be seen. It could be beyond repair.

PWS

06-26-19

INSIDE TRUMP’S IMMIGRATION KAKISTOCRACY WITH TRAC: “Malicious Incompetence” Reigns As DHS & EOIR “Fly Blind” On Asylum System & Are Now Hiding Data From Public To Cover Up Own Malfeasance!

https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__trac.syr.edu_immigration_reports_556_&d=DwMFAg&c=clK7kQUTWtAVEOVIgvi0NU5BOUHhpN0H8p7CSfnc_gI&r=5P7-gWBTtD9g2EDR8U0pyQ5iVCpXWh5b63SXxj7pZPM&m=7PPq-dt8e4s-LLVyEA4t_Pm56qGq-luz6SZ4sXKnbvY&s=04Kf565VLlHoKvcIpERtb5vE2fKENyBuhZ-26wZhkmA&e=

Data Lacking on Why Immigration Courts Not Overwhelmed with Family Cases

Given reports on the number of families arrested at the border, why aren’t there more of these cases before the Immigration Courts? No one seems to know precisely what happens to each family after members are arrested by the Border Patrol and at ports of entry. In general, DHS itself is responsible for providing “notices to appear” to those arrested, and DHS agencies are also responsible for filing copies of these NTAs, where appropriate, with the Immigration Courts. This is supposed to occur whether or not families remain detained.

NTAs are the “notices to appear” that are given individuals providing official notification that the government is seeking to deport them. DHS agencies – including Customs and Border Protection (CBP), Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) – have the authority to issue NTAs, and to file them as needed with the Immigration Courts. Although CBP initially arrests these families at the border and at ports of entry, ICE becomes involved if longer periods of detention are needed. Asylum officers at USCIS also enter the picture as they are responsible for conducting “credible fear” and “reasonable fear” reviews for those seeking asylum.

It appears that the government itself does not actually know what happens to those it arrests at the border. It admits it lacks the ability to reliably follow cases when they pass from one agency of DHS to another – such as CBP to ICE and to USCIS – or to connect those cases when jurisdiction has been passed to the Department of Justice (DOJ) where the Immigration Courts are located. This appears to parallel the difficulties the government has had in reuniting children separated from their parents because separate record systems didn’t pass along relevant information.

In many respects it appears that the Administration continues to be flying blind. Clearly, if agency officials don’t have the data they need, they will be unable to effectively manage the situation, or even to accurately identify what additional personnel and other resources are most urgently needed. They also will be unable to effectively assess the impact of alternative policy choices that may be proposed.

In addition, the public is not being providing sufficient access to the data that is being recorded. A new barrier to public access arose just this month when the Department of Justice decided to review what information was released under the Freedom of Information Act. It stopped providing TRAC with particular case-by-case Immigration Court records tracking the processing of asylum and related applications for relief. Information both on historical as well as new asylum applications are now being withheld during this review. Other vital data TRAC had been routinely receiving and making publicly available on its website are also now being withheld.

As a direct result, TRAC is currently unable to update either its asylum web query tool, or its access tool on representation in Immigration Court by state and county. In addition, several of the fields in its tool that allows the public to drill into details on deportation proceedings, are no longer available.

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Attacks on Due Process fueled by “malicious incompetence” are the real “immigration emergency.” And, unlike the “fake asylum/border crisis” staged by the Kakistocracy, this one is a threat to our national security. Why isn’t anyone being held accountable here?

PWS

04-25-19

THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION LIES, BUT TRAC STATS DON’T: TRAC Exposes Trump’s False Narratives About Families & “Sanctuary Cities” – No Families Are Not “Overwhelming” The System & Most Of Them Already Have Been Absorbed By So-Called “Sanctuary Jurisdictions!”

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Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse
==========================================

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Despite the concern about the number of families arriving at the border seeking asylum, families continue to remain a minor proportion of new cases arriving at the Immigration Courts each month. For example, during March 2019, just 18.7 percent of the new cases that came in involved these families. Despite this, the court’s backlog continues to climb and reached a new historic high of 869,013 cases on its active docket at the end of March.

After being released in border communities, families seldom remain there. Since September 2018, 32 courts in 24 states have received at least 100 new family cases. Over half of these cases are before courts headquartered in sanctuary cities. Among the top ten courts where family cases are located, six are usually classified as sanctuary jurisdictions. These courts include those in New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Chicago.

These results are based upon the latest court records analyzed by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University. These data were obtained from the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

Full data on what happens to families after they are arrested at the border, however, are not available. The Justice Department has now stopped providing TRAC with information needed to track the processing of asylum and related applications for relief. Information both on historical as well as new asylum applications are now being withheld during this review.

In addition, the government admits it lacks the ability to reliably follow cases when they are transferred from one agency to another. Without this information, agency officials are unable to effectively manage the situation. This appears to parallel the difficulties the government has had in reuniting children separated from their parents because separate record systems didn’t pass along relevant information.

For the full report, go to:

https://trac.syr.edu/immigration/reports/556/

In addition, a number of TRAC’s free query tools – which track the court’s overall backlog, new DHS filings, court dispositions and much more – have now been updated through March 2019. For an index to the full list of TRAC’s immigration tools and their latest update go to:

https://trac.syr.edu/imm/tools/

If you want to be sure to receive notifications whenever updated data become available, sign up at:

https://tracfed.syr.edu/cgi-bin/tracuser.pl?pub=1&list=imm

or follow us on Twitter @tracreports or like us on Facebook:

http://facebook.com/tracreports

TRAC is self-supporting and depends on foundation grants, individual contributions and subscription fees for the funding needed to obtain, analyze and publish the data we collect on the activities of the U.S. federal government. To help support TRAC’s ongoing efforts, go to:

http://trac.syr.edu/cgi-bin/sponsor/sponsor.pl

David Burnham and Susan B. Long, co-directors
Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse
Syracuse University
Suite 360, Newhouse II
Syracuse, NY 13244-2100
315-443-3563
trac@syr.edu
https://trac.syr.edu

———————————————————————————
The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse is a nonpartisan joint research center of the Whitman School of Management (https://whitman.syr.edu) and the Newhouse School of Public Communications (https://newhouse.syr.edu) at Syracuse University. If you know someone who would like to sign up to receive occasional email announcements and press releases, they may go to https://trac.syr.edu and click on the E-mail Alerts link at the bottom of the page. If you do not wish to receive future email announcements and wish to be removed from our list, please send an email to trac@syr.edu with REMOVE as the subject.

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Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI), the DHS “Advisory Committee,” and other Trump Apologists to the contrary, neither arriving families nor the current asylum law are the problems (except that the Administration fails to apply the current asylum law and procedures fairly). No, the problem is the “malicious incompetence” of the Trump kakistocracy in the White House, at DHS, and in the DOJ.

Democrats must take care not to be “stampeded” by Trump’s bogus White Nationalist narrative (even parroted by some members of the “mainstream press”) into changing asylum laws to further screw asylum seekers. Rather they need to stand firm on insisting that the Trump Administration follow existing laws on asylum, protection of unaccompanied minors, and other forms of humanitarian protection.

There isn’t going to be a “grand bargain’ on immigration until the Trump kakistocracy and its enablers are removed from power. And “border security” does not require a reduction or truncation of the rights of migrants and asylum seekers as a “trade-off” for legalization programs.

Actually, clearing intentionally and maliciously overcrowded Immigration Court dockets of cases of individuals whose removal actually hurts the U.S. and figuring out a way of getting more of these folks we need into the legal immigration system right off the bat (instead of forcing them into the “immigration black market”) are essential parts of any border security program.

What real border security does require is a competent focus on making the asylum adjudication system and the Immigration Court system function in accordance with protection laws, Due Process, and fundamental fairness. A fair, timely, and efficient Immigration Court system serves everyone’s needs, including DHS enforcement.

Fair, impartial, and independent judges who are not controlled by politicos with a White Nationalist agenda would be the basic starting point. It also includes a fair application of the law to include gender based persecution and persecution by gangs and other entities exercising quasi-governmental authority in “failed states.” Indeed, if any “clarifications” are made in asylum law it should be to specifically write these interpretations into the refugee definition as was done by a bipartisan group of legislators in the past who were dissatisfied with the administrative failure to include victims of persecution in the form of coercive family planning in the refugee definition.

PWS

04-21-19

THE HILL: NOLAN ON THE CURRENT BORDER CRISIS

Will Democrats be held accountable for diverting attention from border crisis when there was time to fix it?

By Nolan Rappaport

As Chairman of the Committee on Homeland Security, Congressman Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.) must know what is happening at the border. Yet he asserted at a recent hearing that President Donald Trump issued a national emergency declaration on the basis of a “nonexistent emergency” at the border.

Thompson claimed that when it comes to border security, the Trump administration is misleading the American people. Maybe, but I watched a video of the hearing and it seemed to me that the Democrats are the ones who are misleading the American people.

According to the testimony of the hearing’s only witness, DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, the country is facing a very real humanitarian and security crisis. Uncontrolled illegal migration is posing a serious and growing risk to public safety, national security, and the rule of law.

She is not the first DHS Secretary to make that claim. Every DHS Secretary since the Department’s inception has sounded the alarm about our unsecured border.

Nielsen testified that DHS expects to apprehend more migrants crossing the border illegally in the first half of fiscal 2019 than it did in the entirety of fiscal 2017, and the numbers are rising. This, however, is not the only problem.

There also has been a change in who is making the illegal crossings.

Historically, illegal crossers were predominantly single adult males from Mexico who generally could be removed within 48 hours if they had no legal right to stay. Now, more than 60 percent of them are family units and unaccompanied alien children.

The detention facilities were intended to be short-term processing centers that would hold adult men for 72 hours or less. They are not suitable for lengthy detentions of women and children.

Read more at https://thehill.com/opinion/immigration/435994-will-democrats-be-held-accountable-for-diverting-attention-from-border

Published originally on The Hill.

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Please go on over to The Hill at the link to read Nolan’s complete article.

Based on EOIR’s own statistics, the actual overall 2018 asylum grant rate on the merits in Immigration Court was 36.7%.
The actual merits asylum grant rates for 2018 for applicants from El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala were 23%, 20% and 18% respectively. https://immigrationcourtside.com/2018/12/11/upi-analysis-of-latest-eoir-asylum-stats-actually-shows-that-many-from-northern-triangle-particularly-el-salvador-have-valid-claims-for-protection-but-sessionss-political-actions-and-contr/
There is little actual risk to releasing families who apply for asylum pending Immigration Court hearings. Most released on “alternatives to detrention” appear for their hearings, regardless of expected outcome. And, for those represented by counsel the appearance rates are very high — over 90%. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2018/07/11/how-big-a-risk-is-it-to-release-migrant-families-from-custody-before-evaluating-asylum-claims/
The Trump Administration has manipulated both the asylum legal system and asylum statistics in an attempt to prove their false narrative about widespread fraud and abuse. Indeed, it’s notable that even with all these political machinations and roadblocks to fair asylum adjudication, approximately 20% from the Northern Triangle succeed — certainly a significant number. Moreover, many of those who fail actually face danger if returned — they just can’t fit it within our somewhat arcane asylum system. Failing to be granted asylum is not an indication of fraud and has little or nothing to do with our obligation to provide fair and unbiased asylum adjudications consistent with Due Process. https://immigrationcourtside.com/2019/02/15/heidi-altman-heartland-alliance-how-eoir-other-trump-toadies-lie-distort-statistics-to-support-a-white-nationalist-immigration-agenda/
Something that jumps out: those who are represented succeed at a significantly higher rate, understand the system better, and are highly likely to appear. Therefore, the single most cost efficient and obvious measure to take would be providing funding for universal representation of asylum seekers. It’s much cheaper than cruel, expensive, and unnecessary “civil” detention and walls that will have no effect on the current rule flow of asylum seekers. And, as more cases are granted the less necessary it becomes for DHS to waste court time by contesting every case and the more the “problem of removals” diminishes. Those granted asylum don’t have to be removed or monitored — they can actually go to work and begin contributing to our society.
Addressing the causes of the human rights debacle in the Northern Triangle would also be more helpful, logical, and cost effective in the long run than more gimmicks and futile attempts to solve a refugee situation unilaterally at the “receiving” end by “designed to fail” enforcement efforts, while ignoring or intentionally aggravating the causes of the refugee flow.

PWS

03-28-19

TRAC STATS EXPOSE ANOTHER TRUMP ADMINISTRATION LIE: “Newly Arrived Families Claiming Asylum” ARE NOT Causing The Immigration Court Backlog – That Backlog Was A Well-Established Product Of Gross Mismanagement & “Aimless Docket Reshuffling” Over The Last Three Administrations But Aggravated By This Administration’s “Malicious Incompetence” – Recently Arrived Families Are Only 4% Of The Pending Cases!

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Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse
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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASEThe Immigration Court backlog continues to rise. As of February 28, 2019, the number of pending cases on the court’s active docket topped eight hundred and fifty-five thousand (855,807) cases. This is an increase of over three hundred thousand (313,396) pending cases over the backlog at the end of January 2017 when President Trump took office. This figure does not include the over three hundred thousand previously completed cases that EOIR placed back on the “pending” rolls that have not yet been put onto the active docket.

Recent family arrivals now represent just 4 percent of the current court’s backlog. Since September 2018 when tracking of family units began, about one out of every four newly initiated filings recorded by the Immigration Court have been designated by DHS as “family unit” cases. The actual number of families involved were less than half this since each parent and each child are counted as separate “court cases” even though many are likely to be heard together and resolved as one consolidated family unit.

There has been no systematic accounting of how many cases involving families arriving at the border will involve Immigration Court proceedings in their resolution. Families arriving at the border do not automatically have the right to file for asylum in Immigration Court. Thus far, the number of families apprehended by the Border Patrol or detained at ports of entry dwarf the actual number of these cases that have made their way to Immigration Court.

For further details, see the full report at:

https://trac.syr.edu/immigration/reports/551

In addition, many of TRAC’s free query tools – which track the court’s overall backlog, new DHS filings, court dispositions and much more – have now been updated through February 2019. For an index to the full list of TRAC’s immigration tools go to:

https://trac.syr.edu/imm/tools/

If you want to be sure to receive notifications whenever updated data become available, sign up at:

https://tracfed.syr.edu/cgi-bin/tracuser.pl?pub=1&list=imm

or follow us on Twitter @tracreports or like us on Facebook:

http://facebook.com/tracreports

TRAC is self-supporting and depends on foundation grants, individual contributions and subscription fees for the funding needed to obtain, analyze and publish the data we collect on the activities of the U.S. federal government. To help support TRAC’s ongoing efforts, go to:

http://trac.syr.edu/cgi-bin/sponsor/sponsor.pl

David Burnham and Susan B. Long, co-directors
Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse
Syracuse University
Suite 360, Newhouse II
Syracuse

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

Remember, folks, the next time you hear the Administration’s “professional liars” like Kirstjen Nielsen engage in bogus “hand wringing” and call for crackdowns on asylum applicants, their lawyers, and drastic changes to asylum law — she is covering up and shifting the blame for grossly incompetent management of the asylum program and the Immigration Courts by this Administration. “Victim blaming and shaming” — a staple of the Trump Kakistocracy — is about as low as it goes.

While laws can always be improved — for example an Article I U.S. Immigration Court, adding gender-based asylum to the “refugee” definition, supporting legal representation for arriving asylum seekers, and increasing the number and initial jurisdiction to grant asylum of the Asylum Officers should be “bipartisan no brainers” — the real problem here is not the law!

No, it’s the unwillingness of this Administration to follow laws protecting refugees, allow for robust “out of country processing” of refugees from Central America, and eliminate anti-asylum, anti-Latino, and anti-female bias from our asylum adjudication system that has created a “self-constructed crisis.”

Insist that this Administration take responsibility for their “designed to fail,” White Nationalist, restrictionist policies, improve performance, and administer refugee and asylum laws fairly, impartially, and in accordance with Due Process under our Constitution.

Under no circumstances should the already far too limited rights of asylum seekers and migrants to receive fair, honest, and humane treatment in accordance with constitutional Due Process be reduced as this Administration is always disingenuously seeking. And the money being illegally diverted and wasted on a semi-nonsensical “Wall” could and should much better be spent on improving our current asylum system and making it work — without any more illegal “gimmicks” such as attempting to rewrite the statutes by regulation, the bogus and ill-conceived “Migrant Protection Protocols,” and “slow walking” the applications of those who line up patiently to apply for asylum at legal ports of entry.

PWS

11-20-19

TRAC IMMIGRATION: Latest Stats Strongly Suggest That Immigration Court Bond Decisions Are At Best A “Crapshoot,” & At Worst A Farce — Factors Other Than Due Process, Fairness, & Consistent Application Of Transparent Criteria Appear To Control Freedom From So-Called “Civil” Imprisonment Without Conviction!

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Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse
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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

The chances of being granted bond at hearings before immigration judges vary markedly by nationality, as do required bond amounts. Court hearing locations also appear to influence bond outcomes even for the same nationality.

Currently less than half of detained immigrants with bond hearings were granted bond – 48 percent during FY 2018, and 43 percent thus far during FY 2019. The median bond amount was $7,500 in FY 2018, and rose to $8,000 during the first two months of FY 2019.

Differences among nationalities are striking. Currently more than three out of every four individuals from India or Nepal, for example, were granted bond, while only between 11 and 15 percent of immigrants from Cuba received a favorable ruling. And those from China were less likely to receive a favorable ruling than are those from India or Nepal.

The median bond for immigrants from the Philippines was just $4,000, while those from Bangladesh were required to post $10,000-$12,000. These and many other findings are based on a detailed analysis of court records covering all of FY 2018 and the first two months of FY 2019 by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University. The bond hearing-by-bond hearing records were obtained by TRAC under the Freedom of Information Act from the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR).

A brand new free web query tool now allows the public for the first time to examine in detail the bond experience by hearing location for any nationality. The new app covers outcomes in Immigration Court bond hearings as well as subsequent case dispositions after detained immigrants are granted bond.

To read the full report, go to:

https://trac.syr.edu/immigration/reports/545/

To examine the underlying results for any nationality, go to:

https://trac.syr.edu/phptools/immigration/bond/

In addition, many of TRAC’s free query tools – which track the court’s overall backlog, new DHS filings, court dispositions and much more – have now been updated through November 2018. For an index to the full list of TRAC’s immigration tools go to:

https://trac.syr.edu/imm/tools/

If you want to be sure to receive notifications whenever updated data become available, sign up at:

https://tracfed.syr.edu/cgi-bin/tracuser.pl?pub=1&list=imm

or follow us on Twitter @tracreports or like us on Facebook:

http://facebook.com/tracreports

TRAC is self-supporting and depends on foundation grants, individual contributions and subscription fees for the funding needed to obtain, analyze and publish the data we collect on the activities of the U.S. federal government. To help support TRAC’s ongoing efforts, go to:

http://trac.syr.edu/cgi-bin/sponsor/sponsor.pl

David Burnham and Susan B. Long, co-directors
Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse
Syracuse University
Suite 360, Newhouse II
Syracuse, NY 13244-2100
315-443-3563

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

The U.S. Immigration Court System has deep Constitutional Due Process, fundamental fairness, and quality control issues that are being intentionally swept under the carpet by the Trump Administration in an attempt to just “move ’em out, to hell with the law, Constitution, or human rights.” And, while the Article IIIs occasionally step in, they are basically complicit in allowing this parody of justice affecting life and freedom to go on without honest, effective, professional judicial administration and accountability. Don’t get me started on Congress which created and then abandoned this dysfunctional mess that they mindlessly allow to continue in a “death spiral” that threatens to take the integrity of the entire U.S. justice system down with it.

These problems can be solved! But, not as long as politicos in the DOJ are involved and improperly and unethically using the Immigration Courts as an adjunct of ICE Enforcement.

And, remember that ability to be released on bond pending removal proceedings is often “outcome determinative.” Those free on bond can usually get attorneys, prepare and document a case for relief, and have a decent chance of prevailing. Those forced to proceed in DHS detention (a/k/a the “New American Gulag”) are usually “shot like fish in a barrel” — with little chance of understanding, preparing, or presenting a case.

Then, there is the intentionally and inherently coercive effect of detention in the DHS’s substandard, sometimes life threatening, “Gulag.” Detainees too often are treated like statistics rather than human beings with rights. That’s how politicos “jack up” removal statistics. But, it bears little resemblance to Due Process or justice in any independent court system in America.

That’s why we need the “New Due Process Army” fighting every day to make the unkept, now openly disregarded, promise of “guaranteeing fairness and Due Process to all” of those appearing in our Immigration Courts a reality rather than a sick joke!

PWS

02-13-19

ANOTHER UGLY TRUMP MILESTONE: Administration’s “Malicious Incompetence” Jacks Immigration Court Backlog To 1.1 Million! — Even With 17% Increase In Judges, Trump & Sessions Incredibly DOUBLED Backlog In Under Two Years!

https://trac.syr.edu/immigration/reports/536/

Immigration Court Backlog Surpasses One Million Cases

Figure 1. Immigration Court Workload, FY 2018

The Immigration Court backlog has jumped by 225,846 cases since the end of January 2017 when President Trump took office. This represents an overall growth rate of 49 percent since the beginning of FY 2017. Results compiled from the case-by-case records obtained by TRAC under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) from the court reveal that pending cases in the court’s active backlog have now reached 768,257—a new historic high.

In addition, recent decisions by the Attorney General just implemented by the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) have ballooned the backlog further. With a stroke of a pen, the court removed 330,211 previously completed cases and put them back on the “pending” rolls. These cases were previously administratively closed and had been considered part of the court’s completed caseload[1].

When the pending backlog of cases now on the active docket is added to these newly created pending cases, the total climbs to a whopping 1,098,468 cases! This is more than double the number of cases pending at the beginning of FY 2017.

Pending Cases Represent More Than Five Years of Backlogged Work

What does the pending case backlog mean as a practical matter? Even before the redefinition of cases counted as closed and cases considered pending, the backlog had reached 768,257 cases. With the rise in the number of immigration judges, case closures during FY 2018 rose 3.9 percent over FY 2016 levels, to 215,569. In FY 2017, however, closure rates had fallen below FY 2016 levels, but last year the court recovered this lost ground[2].

At these completion rates, the court would take 3.6 years to clear its backlog under the old definition if it did nothing but work on pending cases. This assumes that all new cases are placed on the back burner until the backlog is finished.

Now, assuming the court aims to schedule hearings eventually on all the newly defined “pending” cases, the backlog of over a million cases would take 5.1 years to work through at the current pace. This figure again assumes that the court sets aside newly arriving cases and concentrates exclusively on the backlog.

Table 1. Overview of Immigration Court Case Workload and Judges
as of end of FY 2018

	Number of Cases/Judges	Percent Change Since Beginning of FY 2017
New Cases for FY 2018	287,741	7.5%
Completed Cases for FY 2018	215,569	3.9%
Number of Immigration Judges	338/395*	17.0%
Pending Cases as of September 30, 2018:
On Active Docket	768,257	48.9%
Not Presently on Active Docket	330,211	na
Total	1,098,468	112.9%

* Immigration Judges on bench at the beginning and at the end of FY 2018; percent based on increase in judges who served full year.
** category did not exist at the beginning of FY 2017.

Why Does the Backlog Continue To Rise?

No single reason accounts for this ballooning backlog. It took years to build and new cases continue to outpace the number of cases completed. This is true even though the ranks of immigration judges since FY 2016 have grown by over 17 percent[3] while court filings during the same period have risen by a more modest 7.5 percent[4].

Clearly the changes the Attorney General has mandated have added to the court’s challenges. For one, the transfer of administratively closed cases to the pending workload makes digging out all the more daunting. At the same time, according to the judges, the new policy that does away with their ability to administratively close cases has reduced their tools for managing their dockets.

There have been other changes. Shifting scheduling priorities produces churning on cases to be heard next. Temporary reassignment and transfer of judges to border courts resulted in additional docket churn. Changing the legal standards to be applied under the Attorney General’s new rulings may also require judicial time to review and implement.

In the end, all these challenges remain and the court’s dockets remain jam-packed. Perhaps when dockets become overcrowded, the very volume of pending cases slows the court’s ability to handle this workload – as when congested highways slow to a crawl.

Footnotes

^[1] The court also recomputed its case completions for the past ten years and removed these from its newly computed completed case counts. Current case closures thus appear to have risen because counts in prior years are suppressed. Further, the extensive judicial resources used in hearing those earlier cases are also disregarded.

^[2] For consistency over time, this comparison is based upon the court’s longstanding definition, which TRAC continues to use, that includes administratively closed cases in each year’s count. Under this standard, numbers are: 207,546 (FY 2016), 204,749 (FY 2017), 215,569 (FY 2018).

^[3] The court reports that the numbers of immigration judges on its rolls at the end of the fiscal year were: 289 (FY 2016), 338 (FY 2017), and 395 (FY 2018). The 17 percent increase only considers judges who were on the payroll for the full FY 2018 year. See Table 1. For more on judge hires see: https://www.justice.gov/eoir/page/file/1104846/download

^[4] New court cases based upon court records as of the end of FY 2018 were: 267,625 (FY 2016), 274,133 (FY 2017), and 287,741 (FY 2018). Due to delays in adding new cases to EOIR’s database, the latest counts may continue to rise when data input is complete. TRAC’s counts use the date of the notice to appear (NTA), rather than the court’s “input date” into its database. While the total number of cases across the FY 2016 – FY 2018 period reported by TRAC and recently published by EOIR are virtually the same, the year-by-year breakdown differs because of the court’s practice of postponing counting a case until it chooses to add them to its docket.

TRAC is a nonpartisan, nonprofit data research center affiliated with the Newhouse School of Public Communications and the Whitman School of Management, both at Syracuse University. For more information, to subscribe, or to donate, contact trac@syr.edu or call 315-443-3563.

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This is truly “Kakistocracy in Action.” Remember these numbers are as of the end of FY 2018, September 30, 2018. Trump’s Shutdown added another 80,000 to 100,000 to the backlog. Combined with “normal mismanagement,” the backlog is probably over 1.3 million by now and growing daily.

Unfortunately, this isn’t going to stop until either Congress or the Article III courts step in, put an end to this travesty, and force due process, fairness, and administrative competence back into this dysfunctional national disgrace.

PWS

02-05-19

NO, WE’RE NOT “OVERWHELMED” WITH ASYLUM SEEKERS – BUT TRUMP’S SHUTDOWN IS ADDING TO THE IMMIGRATION COURT BACKLOG, CREATING MORE “AIMLESS DOCKET RESHUFFLING” THAT HELPED CREATE THE BACKLOG IN THE FIRST PLACE, AND SCREWING ASYLUM SEEKERS WITH PENDING CASES! — We Won’t Be Able To Solve Immigration Until The Immigration Court is Removed From The Executive Branch & Becomes An Independent Court!

The latest TRAC IMMIGRATION report confirms what most of us familiar with the dysfunctional U.S. Immigration Courts already knew: Trump has already needlessly added 42,000 cases to the backlog and will have added at least 100,000 of the shutdown lasts through the end of January.

==========================================
Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse
==========================================
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Since the beginning of the federal government shutdown, most Immigration Court hearings have been cancelled. As of January 11, the estimated number of cancellations reached 42,726. Each week the shutdown continues, cancelled hearings will likely grow by another 20,000. As many as 100,000 individuals awaiting their day in court may be impacted if the shutdown continues through the end of January.

Each week the shutdown continues the practical effect is to add thousands of cases back onto the active case backlog which had already topped eight-hundred thousand (809,041) as of the end of last November. Individuals impacted by these cancellations may have already being waiting two, three, or even four years for their day in court, and now may have to wait years more before their hearing can be rescheduled once the shutdown ends.

Immigration Courts in California have experienced the most hearing cancellations – an estimated 9,424 as of January 11. These and many more details are based on analyses of court records by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University.

For state-by-state impacts, see the full report at:

http://trac.syr.edu/immigration/reports/543

In addition, many of TRAC’s free query tools – which track the court’s overall backlog, new DHS filings, court dispositions and much more – have now been updated through November 2018. For an index to the full list of TRAC’s immigration tools go to:

http://trac.syr.edu/imm/tools/

If you want to be sure to receive notifications whenever updated data become available, sign up at:

http://tracfed.syr.edu/cgi-bin/tracuser.pl?pub=1&list=imm

or follow us on Twitter @tracreports or like us on Facebook:

http://facebook.com/tracreports

TRAC is self-supporting and depends on foundation grants, individual contributions and subscription fees for the funding needed to obtain, analyze and publish the data we collect on the activities of the U.S. federal government. To help support TRAC’s ongoing efforts, go to:

http://trac.syr.edu/cgi-bin/sponsor/sponsor.pl

David Burnham and Susan B. Long, co-directors
Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse
Syracuse University
Suite 360, Newhouse II
Syracuse, NY 13244-2100
315-443-3563

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

But, that’s not all folks!

Amy Taxin reports for NBC LA:

https://apple.news/AB_FhnUCjSkylre8-ue8cZQ

The partial government shutdown over President Donald Trump’s demand for a border wall is playing havoc with the nation’s already backlogged immigration courts, forcing the postponement of hearings for thousands of immigrants.

For some of those asking for asylum in the U.S., the impasse could mean years more of waiting — and prolonged separation from loved ones overseas — until they get a new court date.

But for those immigrants with little chance of winning their bids to stay in this country legally, the shutdown could help them stave off deportation that much longer — adding to the very delays the Trump administration has railed against.

“It is just dripping with irony,” said Sarah Pierce, policy analyst at the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute. “This administration has put a lot of emphasis on speeding up court cases, and the shutdown obviously is just going to cause massive delays.”

The shutdown has furloughed hundreds of thousands of government employees and halted services that aren’t deemed essential, including, in many instances, the immigration courts overseen by the Justice Department.

Hearings involved detained immigrants are still going forward. But untold thousands of other proceedings have been postponed. No one knows for how long; it depends on when employees return to work and hearings can be reset.

Immigration experts said cases could be delayed months or years since the courts have more than 800,000 pending cases, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University, and many courtrooms are tightly booked.

Immigration Judge Dana Marks, former president of the National Association of Immigration Judges, said she has at least 60 hearings a day in her San Francisco courtroom and no space on her docket for at least the next three years.

“The cases that are not being heard now — there is no readily available place to reschedule them until at least 2022 or beyond,” Marks said of her courtroom.

Immigration judges hear a wide range of complex cases from immigrants from across the world, some who have recently arrived in the United States, others who have lived in the country for years and the government is seeking to deport.

Immigration judges have long sought more staffing to handle the ballooning caseload, which has roughly doubled in five years following a surge in Central American children and families arriving at the southern border. The Trump administration has tried to speed up the courts by assigning immigration judges quotas and stopping them from shelving cases.

Some of the toughest cases immigration judges hear are claims for asylum, or protection from persecution. And long wait times can be especially difficult for asylum seekers, since they can’t bring spouses or children to join them in the United States unless their asylum requests are approved.

Reynold Finnegan, an immigration attorney in Los Angeles, said one of his Afghan clients hasn’t seen his wife or children in nearly nine years. After being kidnapped and tortured by the Taliban, the man left his homeland, traveled across the world and made his way to the U.S.-Mexico border to seek asylum, Finnegan said.

He waited more than six years for his final hearing before an immigration judge, but it was canceled last week because of the shutdown, and he doesn’t know how much longer it will take.

“He is devastated,” Finnegan said. “He was really planning on seeing his wife later in the year when he got approved, and his children.”

Since the shutdown began in December, immigrants have had to prepare for their scheduled court hearings and in many cases travel to court, knowing the proceedings might be postponed. In Northern states, that can mean hourslong car trips through ice and snow and taking days off from work.

The delays are painful for many immigrants, especially those who have strong asylum claims or green card applications and want to get their lives on solid footing in the United States.

Those with the weakest asylum claims actually benefit from the delays, because they are able to remain in the U.S. in the meantime and hold out hope of qualifying for legal status by some other means down the road.

In the 2017 fiscal year, immigration courts decided more than 52,000 asylum cases. About 1 in 5 were approved, according to statistics from the courts.

Courts have been crippled by a government shutdown. More than 37,000 immigration hearings were delayed by one in 2013.

And it isn’t just immigration courts that are affected. Since Justice Department attorneys are allowed to work in limited circumstances only, some high-profile civil cases have been put on hold, including a lawsuit in Oregon by the widow of Robert “LaVoy” Finicum, a man shot by police in 2016 after the takeover of a wildlife refuge.

Government attorneys have also sought to put on hold environmental cases, including challenges to logging projects and wild horse roundups in Montana and a lawsuit over the disposal in Oklahoma of toxic coal ash from power plants.

Most major criminal cases are expected to stay on track because of federal requirements for a speedy trial.

One aspect of immigration unaffected by the shutdown is the review of applications for green cards and citizenship. That’s because those tasks, which are handled by an agency in the Homeland Security Department, are paid for by application filing fees.

One asylum seeker, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of persecution in her home country, said the wait has been unbearable since her 2014 court date was twice delayed. It is now set for February.

“The past four years have been horrible enough, but this uncertainty, and my life being handled with such, I don’t know, no one cares, basically,” she said. “The process takes forever — just to get the date in front of the judge.”

Associated Press writers Dave Kolpack, Amy Forliti and Matthew Brown contributed to this report.

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But, wait! That’s not all folks. There’s more!

Brittany Shoot @ Fortune writes that Immigration Court waiting times could double as a result of Trump’s shutdown!

https://apple.news/AEy1h1oc7RSux5Cdw1fo4PQ

The United States immigration courts are overburdened. Roughly 800,000 cases are portioned out between around 400 immigration judges, according to PBS NewsHour.And with the federal government shutdowncontinuing into its third week, applicants who have already waited years for their court date may now be shuttled to the back of the line, their hearings rescheduled as late as the 2022. This directly effects people’s everyday lives, as immigration status impacts basics such as the ability to get a work permit.

Focus on immigration enforcement under the Department of Homeland Security may be up, but the immigration courts, which fall under the Department of Justice, have not been given much attention despite the record-high demand for hearings that has been growing over the past decade. Judge Dana Leigh Marks, president emeritus of the National Association of Immigration Judges, told NewsHour the effects of the shutdown are having a “devastating impact.” San Francisco-based Judge Marks says that her own caseload of nearly 4,000 dockets includes cases that are already several years old. With no scheduling slots available, she says those cases may be reset to another date several years in the future.

Non-detained immigrants make up about 90% of judges’ caseloads, and those cases can end up involving anything from asylum decisions to deportations. The other 10% of cases, those for immigrants who are detained by immigration officials, are the only ones that can be processed during the shutdown. And that’s why the vast majority of those waiting for a hearing will simply be moved to the back of the line again.

The effects of the record-long government shutdownare also touching the lives of everyone from private-sector contractorsto Transportation Security Administration (TSA) agents and travelers. And if the shutdown continues for another two weeks, its cost to the economy will surpass $5.7 billion, the amount it would cost to build President Trump’s border wall.

Visit FORTUNE.com

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Yeah, it’s going to continue to get worse until the shutdown ends and the Immigration Courts are removed from the DOJ.

Also, don’t let Trump, the DOJ, or any of their apologists in Congress or elsewhere “con” you into blaming the largely contrived “flood of asylum applicants” for this. We must stop “blaming the victims” for the lousy policies and gross incompetence of this Administration!

The Immigration Court has been in trouble and should have been fixed years ago. But, Trump, Sessions, Nielsen, and Miller intentionally have made things much, much worse—with no hope of improvement in sight.

Returning Due Process and fairness as the primary focus of these courts as well as placing them under professional court administration working for the Immigration Judges, not bureaucrats in Washington or Falls Church, wouldn’t solve the current immigration issues overnight. But, it certainly would be a head start and a beginning of a solution. That’s one heck of an improvement over the “downward spiral” promoted by this Administration. And, it wouldn’t cost $5.7 billion to fix, either!

PWS

01-15-19

THE HILL: NOLAN SAYS TRUMP HAS THE WRONG “BORDER CRISIS”

https://thehill.com/opinion/immigration/424893-there-is-a-border-crisis-its-just-not-quite-what-the-president-said-it-is

Nolan writes, in part:

. . . .

Unfortunately, Trump has made it easier for them by basing his request on claims about who is crossing the border that can be disputed readily, such as that many of them are terrorists or criminals.

He should base his otherwise correct argument instead on the numbers — on the fact that the sheer number of illegal crossings has overwhelmed our immigration courts, creating a backlog crisis that has made it virtually impossible to enforce our immigration laws, and that the border cannot be secured when illegal crossers are allowed to remain here indefinitely.

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Go on over to The Hill at the link for Nolan’s complete article.

Democrats aren’t destroying Trump’s credibility; he’s doing that himself with his constant lies and false narratives; this is just the latest and one of the most egregious examples;
By all reliable counts, illegal border crossings at the Southern Border are down substantially;
What is “up” are crossings by unaccompanied children and families from the Northern Triangle seeking asylum;
Such individuals present a humanitarian situation arising from a crisis in the Northern Triangle; but, they are not a “security threat” to the US; almost all turn themselves in at ports of entry or shortly after entering to apply for asylum under our legal system as they are entitled to do;
Those (other than unaccompanied children) who don’t establish a “credible fear” can be returned immediately without ever getting to the Immigration Courts (except for brief “credible fear reviews” before Immigration Judges);
The vast majority have a “credible fear” and should be referred to Immigration Court for full hearings on their claims in accordance with the law and our Constitution;
When matched with pro bono lawyers, given a clear understanding of the requirements, and time to prepare and document a claim, they appear for court hearings almost all the time;
Even with the Trump Administration’s “anti-asylum campaign” directed primarily at applicants from the Northern Triangle, and the lack of representation in approximately 25% of the cases, asylum claims from the Northern Triangle succeed at a rate of approximately 20%, https://wp.me/p8eeJm-3oo;
Undoubtedly, there is a “crisis” in our U.S. Immigration Courts — a Due Process and mismanagement crisis;
But, the Trump Administration with its often illegal actions and gross mismanagement, has actually managed to artificially increase the Immigration Court Backlog from just over 500,000 to more than 1.1 million in less than two years — despite having at least 100 additional Immigration Judges on duty, https://wp.me/p8eeJm-3qN;
Indeed, Trump’s shutdown is unnecessarily “ratcheting up” the Immigration Court backlog and initiating a new round of “Aimless Docket Reshuffling” right now;
In addition to not understanding the true complexities of the immigration system, the Administration’s incompetent administration of the Immigration Courts is another reason why Trump might choose to shift attention elsewhere.;
Somebody will have to address the Due Process and administrative mess in the Immigration Courts in a constructive manner, starting with an independent, apolitical, court structure; but it won’t be the Trump Administration.

PWS

01-10-19

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Crushing Immigration Judge Caseloads and Lengthening Hearing Wait Times

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Data Lacking on Why Immigration Courts Not Overwhelmed with Family Cases

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Immigration Court Backlog Surpasses One Million Cases

Pending Cases Represent More Than Five Years of Backlogged Work

Why Does the Backlog Continue To Rise?

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The latest TRAC IMMIGRATION report confirms what most of us familiar with the dysfunctional U.S. Immigration Courts already knew: Trump has already needlessly added 42,000 cases to the backlog and will have added at least 100,000 of the shutdown lasts through the end of January.

But, that’s not all folks!

But, wait! That’s not all folks. There’s more!

Brittany Shoot @ Fortune writes that Immigration Court waiting times could double as a result of Trump’s shutdown!

Yeah, it’s going to continue to get worse until the shutdown ends and the Immigration Courts are removed from the DOJ.

Also, don’t let Trump, the DOJ, or any of their apologists in Congress or elsewhere “con” you into blaming the largely contrived “flood of asylum applicants” for this. We must stop “blaming the victims” for the lousy policies and gross incompetence of this Administration!

The Immigration Court has been in trouble and should have been fixed years ago. But, Trump, Sessions, Nielsen, and Miller intentionally have made things much, much worse—with no hope of improvement in sight.

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