"The Voice of the New Due Process Army" ————– Musings on Events in U.S. Immigration Court, Immigration Law, Sports, and Other Random Topics by Retired United States Immigration Judge (Arlington, Virginia) and former Chairman of the Board of Immigration Appeals Paul Wickham Schmidt. To see my complete professional bio, just click on the link below.
Living 120 miles apart, family shares hopes and anxieties while navigating ‘chaotic’ resettlement process
Lamha Nabizada spent nearly six months at Fort McCoy, a 60,000-acre Army base in Monroe County, Wis., before she was relocated with part of her family to Rockville, Md. Here, she looks through the window of a hotel room on Feb. 22, 2022, during the family’s search for permanent housing. She is among 76,000 Afghans evacuated to the United States during the country’s largest resettlement operation since the Vietnam War. (Eman Mohammed for Wisconsin Watch)
By Zhen Wang February 28, 2022 Wisconsin WatchIn her final hours living at Fort McCoy, an Army base in rural Monroe County, Wisconsin, Lamha Nabizada searched for an interesting place to pose for a photo at this reporter’s request. The task wasn’t easy.“Everywhere is the same thing, same barrack,” the 27-year-old told Wisconsin Watch.Venturing outside into frigid air, she posed in front of a flagpole and gun turret.It was Feb. 6, the day before Nabizada and her 22-year-old brother Masroor would travel to Maryland — continuing a resettlement journey that began last August when the Taliban took over Afghanistan’s capital of Kabul. They were among tens of thousands airlifted from the country with passports, legal documents and little else.Nearly six months later, the siblings were among the last to leave Fort McCoy, which housed as many as 12,600 Afghans.
Lamha felt mixed emotions as she prepared to leave: hope for new opportunities and anxiety about moving to an unfamiliar place.
“I don’t know what will happen in the future,” she said.
On Feb. 15, Fort McCoy became the seventh of eight U.S. military installations to send its final evacuees to host communities. Four days later, the eighth base cleared out the last of the 76,000 total evacuees who arrived for the largest resettlement operation since the Vietnam War.
Through Feb. 23, Wisconsin had resettled about 820 of the 850 Afghan evacuees currently slated for the state, according to Bojana Zorić Martinez, director of the Wisconsin Department of Children and Families’ Bureau of Refugee Programs.
Zorić Martinez said serving so many people at once was difficult. Aside from housing, they need Social Security numbers, jobs, food and other basic items.
Evacuees are eligible to apply for benefits available to refugees, according to the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement. That includes job preparation, English language training and medical aid. They may also be eligible for other federal benefits such as Medicaid and food assistance.
Zorić Martinez said the system shrunk under Trump, who slashed the country’s refugee cap each year he was in office, which meant less money for resettlement agencies.
“We are now seeing the consequences of that,” she said.
Zhen Wang joined Wisconsin Watch as a reporting intern in May 2021. At UW-Madison, she is pursuing a master’s degree in journalism, honing her investigative journalism skills, and preparing herself for a career in health care journalism. She previously worked for the Guardian Beijing bureau and China Daily. Before joining the journalism industry, she worked in various sectors and obtained a master’s degree in international relations in New Zealand. She speaks Chinese and is a member of Asian American Journalists Association.
More by Zhen Wang / Wisconsin Watch
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Reprinted from Wisconsin Watch under Creative Commons License. Full story available at the link. Nice reporting by Zhen Wang!
Here are some additional quotes from Zhen’s article from my good friend and NDPA superstar Professor Erin Barbato of the U.W. Law Immigration Clinic, among the many clinical teams who have “stepped up” for Afghan refugees:
“The government has to provide more resources, if we’re going to ensure that everybody has their basic needs met during this transition time, and it’s wonderful to see people in the community coming together,” said Erin Barbato, director of the Immigrant Justice Clinic at the University of Wisconsin Law School. “But that’s not going to solve the problem for everybody.”
The legal clinic is helping evacuees file for asylum and training attorneys to represent them in that process — positions that are in short supply. Barbato and other immigration experts fear some people will fall through bureaucratic cracks unless the federal government takes action to stabilize the system.
. . . .
Barbato, the UW legal clinic director, said the two-year parolee status leaves evacuees vulnerable to future deportation — a potentially deadly proposition. The U.S. asylum program last year faced a backlog of nearly 413,000 applications.
Congress has historically passed such laws to protect evacuees from U.S. military conflict zones, including in Vietnam and Iraq.
Echoing immigration advocates and veterans, Barbato said an Afghan Adjustment Act, which has yet to be introduced in Congress, could pave a safer, quicker path to citizenship. Lawmakers must also inject more resources into the immigration bureaucracy, she added. How these resources are allocated will shape the fate of applicants who have waited years in the queue — as well as new Afghan arrivals.
Professor Erin Barbato Director, Immigrant Justice Clinic UW Law Photo source: UW Law
Lisa Speckhard Pasque writes in the Madison Capital Times:
Erin Barbato is the director of the Immigrant Justice Clinic at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School.MICHELLE STOCKER
In October 2018, law professor Erin Barbato and her students represented a Cuban man in a political asylum case.
He was “beaten, detained (and) threatened with disappearance by the Cuban authorities twice,” said Barbato, director of the Immigrant Justice Clinic at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School. He fled when his wife was eight months pregnant because he was accused of a crime he didn’t commit and knew he didn’t have any other options. He traveled to South America and walked all the way to the border.
He was granted asylum.
Barbato and her students want to help with even more cases like this, but due to shifting asylum policies at the border, they haven’t been able to, Barbato said. She’s also seen firsthand how these changes have limited access to justice and due process for asylum seekers.
“These policies are really affecting the work I do, and the way we teach and the way that we can serve,” she said.
Arriving undocumented immigrants used to present themselves at the southern border and tell a customs and border patrol officer they’d like to apply for asylum, Barbato said. They needed to then pass a “credible fear” interview, giving the reasons they believed they would qualify for asylum.
Those who passed the interview could be released on bond or transported to detention centers throughout the U.S., like Dodge Correctional Institution in Waupun, to await their court hearing.
That’s where Barbato and her students found them. They regularly represented clients from Dodge seeking asylum like the Cuban man. It’s a great chance for students to learn and participate in a humanitarian effort, Barbato said.
After the Cuban man was granted asylum, the judge said he would allow IJC to defend asylum cases in Chicago via telephonic appearance, which would let IJC take more cases.
“I think it’s easier for (the judge) when the individual seeking asylum is represented and the government’s represented,” Barbato said. “And so we left there and we’re like, ‘Wow, maybe we can do more.’”
So when they went back to Dodge a few weeks after that successful case, they prepared to take two asylum cases. But there weren’t any asylum seekers at Dodge, which was “really curious,” Barbato said.
And there haven’t been any since, Barbato said. That’s because many asylum seekers aren’t being allowed into the U.S. after passing a credible fear interview. Instead, even after passing the interview, they have to wait in Mexico for their court hearing, she said.
Barbato witnessed this in action this March when she went to Tijuana to serve with a binational legal services organization called Al Otro Lado. While there, she saw several other immigration trends she considers troubling.
Asylum seekers in Tijuana go through a process called “metering,” which began several years ago. Even if a migrant makes it to customs and border patrol, they are directed back to Mexico, where they are then put on a list in a notebook reportedly managed by another asylum seeker, and given a number. They wait in Tijuana for 30 to 40 days for their number to come up before they can present themselves to CBP, Barbato said. A Mexican immigration organization called Grupos Beta is thought to be responsible for managing the number of migrants who can present themselves for asylum on any day.
And the migrants don’t necessarily have anywhere to stay in Tijuana while they wait to present themselves for asylum, Barbato said.
“Many of the shelters are full, and they’re not very safe because most of these people are fleeing gang violence,” Barbato said.
Once a person’s number comes up a month later, the migrant gets in line once again, where humanitarian volunteers hand out sweaters and socks because the person is headed into a holding facility (called “hielera” or “ice box,” for its frigid temperatures) for seven to 10 days as they await their credible fear interview.
“There’s effectively no way for unaccompanied minors to present themselves lawfully for asylum,” Barbarto said.
Barbato met with a 16-year-old girl who fled after her father sold her to a 25-year-old gang leader, and she was beaten, raped and falsely imprisoned for two years.
Now in Tijuana, the girl’s options were all bad: to wait at the one children’s shelter in Tijuana, where she “felt really alone and unsafe,” try to enter illegally where she would be subject to trafficking or the elements, or present herself to Grupos Beta and risk deportation, in which case she would “be most likely murdered because she fled the gang and disobeyed her husband.”
Barbato encouraged those who are concerned to go volunteer themselves in Tijuana, and “speak out on behalf of these children that are stranded in Tijuana.”
“The bottom line is, we can’t save everybody. Not everyone is going to qualify for asylum, that’s just not it. But at least how our laws stand right now, everyone has the right to at least seek those protections,” Barbato said. “And if our government wants to change those laws, they have to go through Congress to do so, they can’t just change these laws through policies.”
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Thanks, Erin, for all that you and your “band of Due Process heroes” do for the New Due Process Army and the never-ending battle to bring Due Process, fundamental fairness, and equal justice for all to the U.S. Immigration Courts. You make me proud to be a U.W. Law alum! And thanks so much for giving us a slice of what’s “really” happening at the border as opposed to the Administration’s fictionalized version:
\“There’s effectively no way for unaccompanied minors to present themselves lawfully for asylum,” Barbarto said.
Barbato met with a 16-year-old girl who fled after her father sold her to a 25-year-old gang leader, and she was beaten, raped and falsely imprisoned for two years.
Now in Tijuana, the girl’s options were all bad: to wait at the one children’s shelter in Tijuana, where she “felt really alone and unsafe,” try to enter illegally where she would be subject to trafficking or the elements, or present herself to Grupos Beta and risk deportation, in which case she would “be most likely murdered because she fled the gang and disobeyed her husband.
Yes, this is what our country is doing to our fellow human beings who seek nothing more than to apply for legal protection supposedly guaranteed by international treaties, our statutes, and our Constitution. Is the Trump Administration’s dishonesty, cruelty, and scofflaw behavior really the way we want to be remembered by future generations? Actions have consequences, and failing to stand up for the legal, Constitutional, and human rights of “the most vulnerable among us” will have adversely affect the future of our nation and of humanity. At the same time, Erin and her courageous students are setting examples that will uplift and inspire future generations.
Like most law school clinics and pro bono organizations, Erin and her clinic operate on a “shoestring budget.” Compare that with the waste, fraud, and abuse of the Administration’s squandering of huge sums money on walls, prisons, and defense of patently illegal programs to strip migrants of their few remaining rights. Think what we could do as a nation if we devoted just a modest amount of additional resources to making the laws and the immigration adjudication system work, rather than funding “built to fail” schemes and gimmicks to evade and violate the laws?
So much for the disingenuously named “Migrant Protection Protocols” (a/k/a/ “Stay in Mexico”). As I had predicted, they are actually “Migrant Rejection Protocols,” which was the intent all along.
