Unaccompanied Child Refugee Crisis: Calling Out The Guard

July 21, 2014 By
With Texas Governor Rick Perry doubling-down on the “security option” in the wake of an ongoing children’s refugee crisis on the southwestern U.S. border, it might be a decent time to review just how we got to a point of “calling out the National Guard.” Gov. Perry is announcing that he’s sending 1,000 national guard soldiers to the border, says the New York Times, which adds that “… Democrats, including Texas lawmakers in the border region, immediately lined up in opposition to the deployment plan, calling it an attempt to score political points and to militarize the border.”
 
Of course, for Gov. Perry and others the current crisis around unaccompanied children immigrating from Central America is the latest among ongoing border security issues. But that crisis has focused attention on immigration, and especially immigration of unaccompanied children. National Public Radio, which helped break the story and has been an informational leader, said the situation is “… turning into the largest influx of asylum seekers on U.S. soil since the 1980 Mariel boatlift out of Cuba. Since October, more than 52,000 children — most from Central America and many of them unaccompanied by adults — have been taken into custody. That’s nearly double last year’s total and 10 times the number from 2009.”
 
“Because of a backlog, which is growing greatly with the recent influx, in essence a kid releasedtomorrow could stay in the U.S. for up to three years waiting for that date,” explains NPR’s Carrie Kahn. “And for most of these kids, that’s three years with a long-lost relative or three years away from extreme poverty and violence.” A child migration advocacy group says that “… as many as 90 percent of the children stay with relatives or family friends already living in the U.S., with the rest placed in foster care…”
 
Filed Under: Border Kids, Community, Courts Budget, National Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Gov. Brown Calls Child-Immigration Crisis A ‘Tragedy,’ Critic Says Comments Are ‘Empty’

July 15, 2014 By
Photo: gov.ca.gov.com

Photo: gov.ca.gov.com

California Gov. Jerry Brown, who has said the Golden State could be a “leader” on national immigration policy even though the issues involved are usually federally controlled, has called the border-crossing crisis involving unaccompanied children a “crisis,” but stopped well short of commenting on what the state might do about the situation, according to a Fresno Bee newspaper report. The Bee also reports that Brown “…accused critics of exploiting the situation for political gain.”

 
The Bee also reported that the governor’s state Office of Emergency Services “… said earlier this week that the administration has been coordinating with federal and local law enforcement officials, including providing assistance with crowd and traffic control. Brown said Friday that California is a destination for immigrants because they think the state is ‘great.'”
 
“By the way, they may come in through Texas because they have so many holes in the border down there, but they usually want to get over to California as fast as they can because stuff is happening here,” Brown said. He added, “I’m not saying I’m encouraging that. I’m not.”
 
Meanwhile, Neel Kashkari, the Republican conducting what’s largely seen as a longshot campaign to unseat Brown in the November election, called the governor’s comments “empty.”

Read more here.

 

Filed Under: Border Kids, Community, Courts Budget Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Counter-protests Highlight Ongoing Child-Immigration Crisis

July 14, 2014 By
The ongoing failure of the civil immigration system is bringing counter-protests to the Murrieta community Southern California, where angry residents turned away three Homeland Security buses transporting unaccompanied minors from nations other than Mexico to facilities there. The transfer came after an estimated 37,600 unaccompanied minors were detained at the border since October, overcrowding facilities there.
 
Last week, more than 200 pro-immigrant activists held a vigil at Murrieta City Hall on Wednesday evening for the migrant families that have found themselves in Southern California, the USA Today and other outlets report. That newspaper writes that “… Border Patrol spokesman Paul Carr said the agency has reduced its backlog in south Texas and is now able to process more migrants there… Carr said the decision to discontinue transfers to San Diego and El Centro was not a result of the ongoing protests that have taken place in Murrieta, Calif.”
 
While the reports use the term “arrested,” the immigration issues are actual civil, not criminal, charges. The difference is stark, including that civil defendants do not have the same rights to be represented by an attorney, a situation that has brought its own protests and lawsuits.
 
Read the USA Today protest story here: Debating the nation’s immigration laws – USATODAY.com
Filed Under: Border Kids, Community, Courts Budget, National Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

ACLU Leader Outlines Immigration Lawsuit Argument

July 11, 2014 By
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.

With armed “citizen groups” starting to patrol the U.S.-Mexico border and angry crowds protesting the arrival of children into their communities, the ongoing “unaccompanied children immigration” crisis is growing worse. Clearly, this is a tragic worst-case example of what happens with “rationing justice” in our civil courts, and California has the biggest caseload backup with tens of thousands of kids awaiting a day in court.

 
In a major Los Angeles Times opinion piece, the director of the ACLU of Southern California outlines theories behind this week’s lawsuit against the U.S. Government, filed by his group and other civil rights groups. Among other issues, the groups argue for legal representation, saying that 
“… the appointment of counsel is the only way to ensure that children with potentially valid claims can present the necessary arguments and proof. Given the complexities of immigration law and the language and cultural barriers immigrants face, it should surprise no one that attorneys matter in immigration proceedings. A 2012 study of New York immigration courts showed that immigrants who proceed without representation are five times more likely to lose their cases than those who have counsel.”
 
The ACLU director also argues that, while we may use the term “immigration,” these children are more accurately classified as refugees fleeing for their lives. These are the emerging talking points on the escalating crisis, and you can find them here: Kids caught at the border deserve due process, including lawyers
Filed Under: Border Kids, Community, Courts Budget, National Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Child-Immigration Crisis Also A Civil Court Crisis

July 8, 2014 By
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

Filed Under: Border Kids, Community, Courts Budget, National Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Sen. Feinstein Discovers Need For Child Representation

June 30, 2014 By
The Los Angeles family court may be limping along and we may be closing facilities and programs important to juvenile justice, but Sen. Dianne Feinstein has at least discovered the need for representation for children being detained under civil (as opposed to criminal) immigration issues. In an opinion piece for the Los Angeles Times, she says of the detained, “… it is also imperative that child advocates be provided for these children, both while they are in federal custody and upon release to family members or sponsors. The children need representation as their court cases advance, and no child should be forced to navigate the U.S. legal system alone.”
 
She also wrote that she applauds “… the Justice Department’s Executive Office for Immigration Review for expanding juvenile dockets across the country to handle immigration cases for these children. Otherwise, these cases could easily get lost in current backlogs, forcing these children to live in the shadows indefinitely.” All this, of course, only after a flood of negative publicity over current practices of holding thousands of children without much of a plan on how to process them or return them home. 
 
Read the senator’s position here:
Filed Under: Border Kids, Community, Courts Budget, National Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

After Fed Court Ruling, ICE Detainee Requests Go Unheeded

June 6, 2014 By
 
Reflecting on the fact that many immigration detentions are civil, rather than criminal, actions, more than 100 jurisdictions across the United States have stopped enforcing “holds” issued by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, or ICE. The policy changes follow a federal court ruling in Oregon declaring such practices unconstitutional.
 
More than a dozen of the counties changing the practice are in California, including Los Angeles and San Diego, where authorities have stopped complying with the ICE detainer requests, reports the Orange County Register. The newspaper quotes Julia Harumi Mass, a senior staff attorney with the ACLU of Northern California: “Detaining people based on suspected civil immigration violations without probable cause not only wastes scarce local public safety resources and contradicts our sense of fairness – it undeniably violates the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.” 
 
Read the Register report by Roxana Kopetman here.
Filed Under: Border Kids, Community, National Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

NYT Shines Light On Civil Detainee Labor

May 27, 2014 By
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
Filed Under: Community, Courts Budget Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Gov. Signs Law, Illegal Immigrants Can Become Lawyers

October 10, 2013 By
Surprising nobody, Gov. Brown has signed legislation that allows an illegal immigrant to become an attorney — if they have gained the proper academic credentials and passed the state bar. The law comes after a Chico man named Sergio Garcia, a law school graduate who has awaited a green card for almost 10 years, appealed his license denial all the way to the state supreme court.
 
The Obama administration had opposed the idea, arguing that federal immigration law blocks such professional licensing unless states pass a specific law allowing law licenses for illegal immigrants. Stumped, the state’s supreme court judges asked the legislature to adopt such a law and it did, leading to Brown’s signature this week.
 
Filed Under: Community, Courts Budget Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , ,

Long Waits Render Issues Nearly Moot, Ridiculous

September 4, 2013 By
At first, the story of Sergio Garcia seems merely interesting: He was born in Mexico but has spent much of his life in the United States, where he earned a law degree but is not yet a citizen. Now the California Supreme Court will decide if it sides with Garcia’s supporters, which happen to include the state’s attorney general, or with the Obama Administration, which opposes giving professional degrees to non-citizens.
 
But the issue seems almost beside the point when you realize that Garcia has waited FOUR YEARS for a court decision on his case, and according to a story by Howard Mintz in the San Jose Mercury News “… his immigration status has been in flux since 1994, when he returned from years of schooling in Mexico to rejoin his family and finish high school in Durham. His father and most of his siblings are citizens, but the sluggish federal visa process for Mexican immigrants has slowed his bid for legal status.”
 
Mintz notes that “… at the current pace, Garcia, who is too old for a federal program that aids some illegally brought into the country as youths, estimates he will not get his green card until about 2019 — and he does not want to wait that long to be eligible to be a lawyer.” This could be a valid issue, and the state bar wants to award the license, but when it takes four years to get a true day in court and you’re backed up about a QUARTER CENTURY in the immigration process, at what point is the “issue” a joke? And remember, the courts are slowing down with budget cuts.
 
“I’m very excited to get my day in court,” Garcia told the Mercury News, showing a gift for understatement that will serve him well if he actually becomes an attorney.
 
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