2013 Budget Cuts Still Forcing Adjustments For Court Facilities

The Desert Dispatch newspaper reports that the supervising judge for San Bernardino County will implement a reorganizational plan that will expand services at the Barstow Courthouse in order to enable the Victorville Courthouse to take on more criminal cases. The report offers a reminder that “… budget cuts in 2013 shuttered courthouses in Barstow, Big Bear, Needles and Chino. A last-minute reprieve thanks to $1.2 million from state courts reserves allowed one courtroom to stay open in Barstow. The lone courtroom allowed traffic, landlord-tenant, small claims and domestic violence cases to continue to be heard three days a week.”
 
Reporter Mike Lamb writes about one impact of the change “… a state judiciary report that was released in August showed San Bernardino County kept more of its felony cases on the docket after 12 months than any other county in California during fiscal year 2012-13. The report showed that county courtrooms are dealing with massive caseloads.” Adjusting the civil caseload might help with that backlog.
 

Child-Immigration Crisis Also A Civil Court Crisis

With President Obama asking Congress for a quick $2 billion to address the growing crisis on the U.S.-Mexican border, it is worth noting that the system failure is not just about immigration policy or border enforcement – it’s really a failure of civil courts capacity. Many Americans learning about the crisis are surprised to discover that immigration issues are “civil” and not “criminal,” and that the core of the problem is that tens of thousands of children are due a day in court – and that day will not come for years and years.
 
As reported by NPR: Detainees sleep and watch television in a holding cell where hundreds of mostly Central American immigrant children are being processed at a U.S. Customs facility in Nogales, Texas.

As reported by NPR: Detainees sleep and watch television in a holding cell where hundreds of mostly Central American immigrant children are being processed at a U.S. Customs facility in Nogales, Texas.



Background: National Public Radio and others are drawing attention to the fact that, over the past nine months, “… more than 50,000 children and teenagers have crossed that border illegally on their own, most from Central America. By law, the administration can’t deport those young people until they have an immigration hearing — a process that can take years.” The immigration law is different for people from Mexico, who can be returned much faster.
 
Says NPR: “… law requires the U.S. to hold an immigration hearing before deporting a child from Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador or any other country that doesn’t border the U.S., says Marc Rosenblum of the Migration Policy Institute. The law aims to protect vulnerable young people from being inadvertently sent home into forced labor or the sex trade.”
 
“While they wait for that immigration hearing, the law also requires that they be held in the least restrictive custody setting,” Rosenblum tells NPR. “What that means in practice is that most of these kids are getting placed with family members in the U.S. while they wait for an immigration hearing.”
Because the immigration courts are overloaded, the average wait is nearly two years, Rosenblum adds in the NPR coverage.
 
That means what we’re seeing is really a high-profile example of what happens when civil courts can’t meet demands. There is very likely a similar situation in many of our family courts and other systems, and those will eventually bring their own “crisis” headlines.


Here’s the NPR report: Obama To Ask Congress For $2B To Ease Immigration Crisis

NYT Shines Light On Civil Detainee Labor

The New York Times has published a detailed report on how civil immigration detainees are being used for cheap or free labor in the facilities where they are being held, benefiting not only government agencies but for-profit companies that operate in the facilities. California is one of the states with multiple detention centers, and the report notes that “… near San Francisco, at the Contra Costa West County Detention Facility, immigrants work alongside criminal inmates to cook about 900 meals a day that are packaged and trucked to a county homeless shelter and nearby jails.”
 

The NYT notes that the federal government has become the largest employer of potentially illegal immigrants: “Last year, at least 60,000 immigrants worked in the federal government’s nationwide patchwork of detention centers — more than worked for any other single employer in the country, according to data from United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement, known as ICE. The cheap labor, 13 cents an hour, saves the government and the private companies $40 million or more a year by allowing them to avoid paying outside contractors the $7.25 federal minimum wage. Some immigrants held at county jails work for free, or are paid with sodas or candy bars, while also providing services like meal preparation for other government institutions.”

The report includes the government response of “… the federal authorities say the program is voluntary, legal and a cost-saver for taxpayers. But immigrant advocates question whether it is truly voluntary or lawful, and argue that the government and the private prison companies that run many of the detention centers are bending the rules to convert a captive population into a self-contained labor force.”
 
This is the kind of story that might illustrate the difference in rights people have in criminal vs. civil cases – it is hard to imagine people being held in de facto labor camps if they faced criminal charges, because a different set of rights kicks in. Read the NYT game-changing story here: Using Jailed Migrants as a Pool of Cheap Labor