Happy Thanksgiving!

To make sure our team has some time to be thankful, the Courts Monitor has suspended posting until Monday, Dec. 1, when we will resume our daily ration of civil justice rationing. Happy Thanksgiving, and watch for our “Year In Civil Courts” series in December. — The Editors.

Another Young Voice For Civil Gideon In Minnesota

Move over New York Times, a student essay from Minnesota is adding another strong voice in support of a “civil Gideon” movement to provide legal assistance in certain civil cases. The Minnesota Lawyer website published the essay by Katelyn Gross, of the Hawley Secondary School, this week.
 
The work was part of an annual scholarship competition, and Ms. Gross makes points like this: “… when someone breaks into a home and steals an expensive television set, that individual is entitled to attorney representation; by contrast, a poor person whose housing is wrongfully being taken from him is not entitled to counsel, even though the result may be homelessness for an entire family… homelessness is much more disastrous for a family than jail is for that one individual, and yet that family is not entitled to legal counsel.”
 

She makes a strong case. Read more here. 

NYT Boards The ‘Civil Gideon’ Train, Sort Of

Talk about an early Christmas gift: The New York Times has discovered the Civil Gideon issue! A Nov. 22 report focuses on a California program to assist people facing eviction, but it extends the conversation into the national crisis. For example, the newspaper says that “… free legal assistance in noncriminal cases is rare and growing rarer. A recent study in Massachusetts found that two-thirds of low-income residents who seek legal help are turned away. Nationally, important civil legal needs are met only about 20 percent of the time for low-income Americans, according to James J. Sandman, president of the Legal Services Corporation, a federal agency that finances legal aid groups.”
 
The story mentions the Eviction Assistance Center, the California legal aid effort that advises “… low-income people in civil cases such as child custody, protective orders against abusers, guardianship and, most commonly, evictions.” The story also takes a shot at explaining the debate, reporting that the “.. pilot projects are part of a roiling discussion in legal circles about what is often called ‘Civil Gideon,’ a reference to Gideon v. Wainwright, the landmark 1963 Supreme Court decision that established a right to counsel in criminal cases.” It also notes that, despite the name, the idea is not to provide help to all poor people, but only those facing challenges to basic human needs, like housing.
 
The piece is also a sort of directory for anyone seeking a list of service providers. For example: “We’re trying to level the playing field,” said Neal S. Dudovitz, the executive director of Neighborhood Legal Services of Los Angeles County, a group that manages the eviction center in the downtown courthouse. With funds from the Shriver project, as the experiment is known, supporting about 16 lawyers from four legal aid groups, the center is providing full or partial assistance to one-third of the 15,000 tenants who face evictions each year in this courthouse alone.”
 
 

Obama Does Congress’ Job on Immigration, is Immigration Court Reform Next?

Courts Monitor Publisher Sara Warner, writing at the Huffington Post “politics” page, notes that President Obama has stepped up to do Congress’ job on immigration; now, she wonders, will the president also address problems in his Justice Department’s immigration courts? With hundreds of thousands of cases pending and a federal investigation into nepotism, it would seem a good next step. Read it here.

N.M. Immigrant Detention Center Closing

The high-profile immigrant detention center in Artesia, N.M., is closing, the San Diego Union Tribune is reporting. The paper says that “… the government told some members of Congress about its plans Tuesday, and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement later confirmed the closure to the AP. The administration indicated the facility was no longer needed because they are expanding jails elsewhere.”
 
The U-T adds that: “The Homeland Security Department opened the detention center at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Artesia, New Mexico, in late June amid a crush of tens of thousands of Central American families caught crossing the border illegally. The facility had space to jail about 700 people facing deportation.”
 
Phillip Burch, the mayor of Artesia, said in the past six weeks 448 Central American mothers and children have been released from the detention center and 28 were deported. You can read the story here.

El Paso TV Station Makes Case For Immigration Reform

The ABC affiliate TV station in El Paso, Tx., KIVA, is making the case for immigration courts reform. In a multiple-part series, the station is outlining that “… the nearly 60,000 Central American migrants who came to the U.S. – many unaccompanied children – are going to the front of the line of the immigration courts – worsening the chronic backlog. Because the migrants mostly didn’t cross through El Paso though, Holguin said it’s not affecting the six El Paso immigration courts. 
 
But that’s not the problem in the El Paso region, says KVIA. Their problem is simply capacity. The stories outline the budget situation: “while the U.S. Border Patrol’s budget increased by 30% to $3.5 billion from 2009 to 2013, the immigration court system budget increased by 8% to $289 million in the same time frame. President Obama’s request this summer for $45 million, partly to hire more judges, was denied by Congress.”
 
The reports take a look at how long waits can put pressure on families and institutions. It can be found here: 

Obama Said To Be Planning Big Immigration Move

While early reports do not focus on the more than 300,000 recent Central American “border kids” awaiting deportation hearings, it does seem President Obama is making good on his immigration policy promises. The New York Times reports that “… part of Mr. Obama’s plan alone could affect as many as 3.3 million people who have been living in the United States illegally for at least five years, according to an analysis by the Migration Policy Institute, an immigration research organization in Washington. But the White House is also considering a stricter policy that would limit the benefits to people who have lived in the country for at least 10 years, or about 2.5 million people.”
 
The NYT added that “… extending protections to more undocumented immigrants who came to the United States as children, and to their parents, could affect an additional one million or more if they are included in the final plan that the president announces.” Immigration cases, thought by many to be criminal cases, are actually civil actions. For example, immigration “judges” are actually employees of the Justice Department.
 
But officials also said, according to the Times, that patrol agents and judges at the Department of Homeland Security, the Justice Department and other federal law enforcement and judicial agencies, “will make clear that deportations should still proceed for convicted criminals, foreigners who pose national security risks and recent border crossers.”
 

Rolling Stone Blows Lid Off Financial Scandal

It did not take long for Matt Taibbi to return Rolling Stone to the top of your must-read list. His story on the financial coverup behind those huge civil lawsuit settlements is making the rounds. He reports, among many things, that “… six years after the crisis that cratered the global economy, it’s not exactly news that the country’s biggest banks stole on a grand scale. That’s why the more important part of Fleischmann’s story is in the pains Chase and the Justice Department took to silence her… she was blocked at every turn: by asleep-on-the-job regulators like the Securities and Exchange Commission, by a court system that allowed Chase to use its billions to bury her evidence, and, finally, by officials like outgoing Attorney General Eric Holder, the chief architect of the crazily elaborate government policy of surrender, secrecy and cover-up…”
 
The report focuses on a whistle-blower attorney, he calls her the $9 billion witness, with insider knowledge. It notes that the woman this year “… watched as Holder’s Justice Department struck a series of historic settlement deals with Chase, Citigroup and Bank of America. The root bargain in these deals was cash for secrecy. The banks paid big fines, without trials or even judges – only secret negotiations that typically ended with the public shown nothing but vague, quasi-official papers called ‘statements of facts,’ which were conveniently devoid of anything like actual facts.”
 

Now Nepotism Is Immigration Court Issue

It turns out that the under-staffed immigration courts still found time to hire family members of officials, sometimes in apparent violation of federal law, according to various reports. Says the Washington Post, “… the Federal investigators found rampant nepotism in recent years within the agency that oversees U.S. immigration courts, including three top officials who used their positions to help relatives land paid internships.
 
Adds WaPo in one of its federal government blogs: “In a report this week, Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz said about 16 percent of the interns hired between 2007 and 2012 for the Executive Office of Immigration Review’s Student Temporary Employment Program were family members of employees.”
 

Warner Posts Challenge To GOP Senate

Courts Monitor Publisher Sara Warner is suggesting the new GOP Senate might find success with bankruptcy reform, but only once the Democrats come up with consumer protections for “perjury pawns.” See her ideas at the Huffington Post: Sara Warner