National

Immigration Backlog Shows Need For More Lawyers

December 29, 2014 By CCM Staff

This photo was part of an NBC News report, “Demand Intensifies for Nonprofit Immigration Lawyers” discussing how the US immigration system is seriously lacking in how it represents the poor.

NBC News is among those taking a look back at 2014 and finding the country’s immigration system seriously lacking in how it represents the poor. Says NBC, “… the past summer’s flocking of children and families to the U.S.-Mexico border, the president’s impending executive action on immigration and the two-year-old Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, DACA, have intensified demand for immigration attorneys, particularly those who charge little to nothing. With each success, they amplify the difference good legal help can make in the lives of immigrants.”

NBC has this quote in it’s Storyline report: “We’ve long known that results in immigration court, in particular, vary widely depending on whether you have legal representation or not,” said Crystal Williams, American Immigration Lawyers Association, AILA, executive director. She adds that “… what we are seeing quite honestly, is the people who are getting asylum and are getting bonded out of (the immigration detention center in) Artesia, had the attorneys not been there, they would have been removed already.”

See the NBC report here: Demand Intensifies for Nonprofit Immigration Lawyers

Filed Under: Border Kids, Community, Courts Budget, National Tagged With: Border Kids, Civil gideon, Executive Orders, immigration, immigration court, indigent legal services, Legal news, non-profit, Obama

‘Border Kids’ Noted In AP’s Top 2014 Stories

December 23, 2014 By CCM Staff

AP photo used in Tampa Bay Times report on 12/22/14 shows “Young detainees sleep in a holding cell on June 18, 2014, at a U.S. Customs and Border Protection processing facility in Brownsville,Texas.”

The unaccompanied Central American minors seeking refuge in the United States was a key event as “immigration” was a Top 10 story in 2014, according to the Associated Press annual survey of U.S. editors and news directors. The wire service said “police killing of unarmed blacks” was the top story and the Ebola outbreak in West Africa was second.

On immigration, the AP says that “… frustrated by an impasse in Congress, President Obama took executive actions in November to curb deportations for many immigrants residing in the U.S. illegally. GOP leaders in the House and Senate pledged efforts to block the president’s moves. Prospects for reform legislation were dimmed earlier in the year by the influx of unaccompanied Central American minors arriving at the U.S. border, causing shelter overloads and case backlogs.” Immigration courts are civil justice proceedings managed by the Justice Department. Judges in the system have called for an overhaul, including making the courts independent of law enforcement.

See the AP story list for 2014 here, via the Tampa Bay Tribune.

Filed Under: Border Kids, Community, National, Refugee Children Tagged With: AP report, border crisis, Border Kids, immigration, immigration reform, Legal news, tampa bay times, top stories 2014

BASF Case Focused On Concealing Evidence

December 12, 2014 By CCM Staff

The world’s largest chemical maker and a prominent law firm have lost another court appeal in a class action lawsuit accusing them of concealing and destroying evidence in a batch of asbestos litigation. The federal Third Circuit has declined to “rehear” a September decision that, in effect, re-opened the case. Businessweek reports that the company was “… ordered to face claims it fraudulently hid evidence that its talc products contained asbestos as it sought to scuttle thousands of personal-injury lawsuits.” The company in question was actually acquired by BASF and that business unit mined talc that was used in everything from wallboard to children’s balloons.

Image as reported in The Wall Street Journal 9/4/14 article, “Appeals Court Breathes New Life Into Fraud Case Involving BASF, Cahill Gordon.”

Writing in The American Lawyer (a subscription site) Susan Beck reports that “… BASF, its asbestos litigation has morphed from being a negligible nuisance into an expensive, embarrassing problem. The company stresses that it inherited this situation from Engelhard, and has gone to great efforts to find out what happened. For Cahill, the litigation is also remarkable. Legal ethics expert Stephen Gillers of New York University School of Law says it’s not unheard-of for a law firm to be sued for fraud, noting that several were sued in the wake of the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s. ‘What is rare,’ he says, ‘is for a case like this to target such a prominent law firm.'”

Beck also notes that thousands of cases might be re-opened based on the evidence. The Wall Street Journal also offers background for free.

Filed Under: Community, Courts Budget, National Tagged With: asbestos, BASF, Businessweek, fraudulent, mesothelioma, personal-injury, plaintiff, The American Lawyer, trial lawyers, Wall Street Journal

Immigration Courts Face Obama Actions

December 11, 2014 By CCM Staff

President Obama’s executive actions on immigration will impact the civil courts system, but it’s hard to know how soon that will happen – or how much the impact will be. Southern California public radio station KPCC is reporting it as “promising news” for immigration judges “… who have long sought more resources for their busy courtrooms, says Bruce Einhorn, a former immigration judge who served in the LA courts for more than 15 years.”:

As reported in SCPR, “A judge hears the cases of immigrant teens in Los Angeles.”

The KPCC reports says that a typical judge in Los Angeles has about 2,500 cases on their docket, which means an average case takes more than two years to reach a decision, but that could change with Obama’s action. Einhorn, said it will take time to see the effects on the ground. One group that will likely not find relief are the thousands of child migrant cases that are working their way through the courts. As Take Two has been covering on the program, more than 7,000 children are being heard in Los Angeles alone. Since they arrived in the country within the past five years, they probably will not qualify under the new rules from Obama.

Read and listen to the report here: Obama’s actions could affect thousands at LA’s immigration courts.

Filed Under: Border Kids, Community, Courts Budget, National Tagged With: access to justice, Border Kids, budget cuts, california courts, court backlog, court rationing, immigration, KPCC, Los Angeles, Obama, White House

Tomorrow’s Immigration News Today: Devil In The Details

December 1, 2014 By CCM Staff

Not to equate the United States Justice Department with Lucifer himself, but the old saying that “the devil’s in the details” is holding up with President Obama’s immigration actions. You have to read with a particular eye, but a Washington Post report by Juliet Eilperin and Jerry Markon notes that “… one of the provisions the Justice Department lawyers included, which they also pushed for during the creation of the 2012 program, was to make clear that federal immigration officials would still have the option of deporting individuals who might otherwise qualify for a deferral.”

Wait, what? With some 400,000 cases pending in the Justice Department’s own immigration courts, they also have the option of deporting people who would “otherwise” qualify for defferral? The WaPo also reports that the “… memo states that the new policy ‘provides for case-by-case determinations about whether an individual alien’s circumstances warrant the expenditure of removal resources, employing a broad standard that leaves ample room for the exercise of individual discretion by enforcement officials.’”

One point of the story is that some people who might qualify for protection under the Obama action will no self-identify to authorities. It’s the kind of uncertainty that has kept some “Dreamers” from stepping forward. From what we’ve seen in the past year, “trust the Justice Department” is going to be a tough sell, and a future headline will be “Few Take Obama Up On Protection Offer.”

You read it here first! And you can see the excellent WaPo work here.

Filed Under: Border Kids, Community, Courts Budget, National Tagged With: deportation, Dreamers, ICE, immigration, immigration reform, Justice Department, Obama, President Obama

NYT Boards The ‘Civil Gideon’ Train, Sort Of

November 24, 2014 By CCM Staff

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.”

Read and bookmark the milestone story.

Filed Under: Courts Budget, National Tagged With: Civil gideon, eviction, Gideon, indigent legal services, landlord tenant law, legal aid, legal issues, legal services, Los Angeles County, low-income, New York Times

El Paso TV Station Makes Case For Immigration Reform

November 18, 2014 By CCM Staff

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:

Clogged Courts: Immigration backlog may need reform

Filed Under: Border Kids, Community, National Tagged With: Border Kids, california courts, civil court, immigration reform, Legal news

Obama Said To Be Planning Big Immigration Move

November 13, 2014 By CCM Staff

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.”

Read the NY Times story here: Obama Said to Plan Moves to Shield 5 Million Immigrants

Filed Under: Border Kids, Community, Courts Budget, National Tagged With: border children, border crisis, Border Enforcement, Border Kids, California, California Budget, california courts, civil court, Department of Justice, detainees, detention, DHHS, Gov. Jerry Brown, Homeland Security, ICE, immigration, immigration reform, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, refugee children, Superior Court

Rolling Stone Blows Lid Off Financial Scandal

November 11, 2014 By CCM Staff

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.”

It’s a MUST must-read here.

Filed Under: Community, Courts Budget, National Tagged With: Big Banks, Department of Justice, DOJ, economic collapse, financial collapse, mortgage crisis, SEC, subprime mortgages, Wall Street, whistleblower

Now Nepotism Is Immigration Court Issue

November 10, 2014 By CCM Staff

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.”

Read all about it: IG: Nepotism was rampant with U.S. immigration court’s interns

Filed Under: Border Kids, Community, Courts Budget, National Tagged With: immigration, immigration court, immigration courts, Justice Department, nepotism, Washington Post