L.A. Times Calls Out Congress Over Immigration Court Backlog

August 26, 2015 By
In a major editorial, the Los Angeles Times is calling upon Congress to fix the immigration court backlog and offers some compelling numbers in the process: “… over the last 10 years, the workload of the federal immigration court system has increased by 146% to an astounding 453,948 active cases at the end of July. The average amount of time each of those cases has been pending: 627 days. Some have been lingering for years.”
 
The LAT also notes that the backlog effects are exactly what we don’t want: People who have no legal right to be in the country get lengthy reprieves simply because the judges can’t get to their cases while those with legit claims are left “twisting in the wind.”
 
The editorial says that “… the reason for the enormous backlog is clear. While the government has poured money into enhancing border security — the number of border agents has nearly doubled to 21,000 in the last decade — it has failed to similarly increase the capacity of the immigration court system that hears deportation cases. According to a recent report, immigration enforcement budgets increased 300% from 2002 through 2013, but immigration court budgets rose only 70%.
 
The immigration courts are really an international embarrassment for the United States. The LAT editorial shows just how bad it is, and why it’s likely to get worse: The immigration court backlog: Why won’t Congress act?
Filed Under: Border Kids, Community, Courts Budget Tagged With: , , , , ,

Judge Orders Govt. To Release Detained Kids

August 24, 2015 By
A federal judge in Los Angeles has given the federal government until Oct. 23 to release thousands of “border kids” seeking refuge in the United States. The Los Angeles Times explains that Judge Dolly Gee said that children should not be held for more than 72 hours unless they are a significant flight risk or a danger to themselves and others.
 
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.

The LAT story also noted that “… the case centers on 1997 legal settlement — known as the Flores agreement — that set legal requirements for the housing of children seeking asylum or in the country illegally. In July, Gee found that the government had violated that agreement; she repeated that findingFriday. Federal attorneys had argued that Gee’s initial ruling would spark another surge of illegal immigration across the U.S.-Mexico border. Gee denied the government’s request for reconsideration, equating that argument to “fearmongering.”
 
The Times feels that “… it’s likely that hundreds of immigrant families will remain locked up and in limbo as the case makes its way through the courts — possibly up to the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.”
 
Filed Under: Border Kids, Community, National Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , ,

A Year Later: Obama Border Kids Processing Rush Still Claiming Victims

August 12, 2015 By
POLITICO has published a jarring one-year “lookback piece” on those border kids seeking refuge in the United States – you recall, the ones making headlines last summer. The report says that: “… one year later, child migrants from Central America are still paying a heavy price for President Barack Obama’s decision last summer to rush them into deportation proceedings without first taking steps to provide legal counsel. New government data this week offer a first, full-year tally for the immigration courts, and the numbers show that among the 13,451 cases completed since July 18, 2014, barely half the children had legal representation.”
 
Some local governments, including those in San Francisco and New York City, have stepped in to try to fill some of the holes but POLITICO notes that “… Republicans in Congress are refusing to provide money sought by Obama for attorneys. And a bill introduced by Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) in March to require the Justice Department to appoint counsel remains buried in the House Judiciary Committee. The political stalemate in Washington has driven constitutional appeals to the federal courts, but thus far, these have produced more promises than real relief.
 
Indeed, says POLITICO, “… after all of the public furor over the border surge last summer, the children seem to have dropped off the political map.”
 
Filed Under: Border Kids, Community, National Tagged With: , , ,

At $3-per-day, immigrants detained by U.S. keep detention centers going

August 3, 2015 By

The Los Angeles Times has another story raising questions about how the government goes about detaining would-be immigrants at for-profit detention centers. The report notes that immigrants are allowed to “volunteer” to work, doing chores like landscaping, cleaning and cooking. The reporter talks with a mother who fled Honduras in September with her 11-year-old son and ended up at a family detention center in rural Texas.

“I worked immediately,” the 36-year-old mother said. “In order to have something to eat, to buy treats for my son.” The LAT says the woman “… cleaned bathrooms, hallways and other areas of the government-contracted detention center for $3 a day. At the commissary, a bag of potato chips cost $4, bottled water $2. The facility in Karnes City is run by Geo Group, the country’s second-largest prison company.

“It’s ironic — it’s illegal for them to work, but they’re working for the immigration service in a sense,” says Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a conservative think tank in Washington. An ACLU source in the report uses another word for the practice: slavery.

Read the LAT story here.

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

Federal Judge Ready To Close 3 Immigration Detention Centers

July 30, 2015 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.

A federal judge is poised to order immigration authorities to close three family detention centers housing some 1,700 people awaiting decisions on their stay-or-go arguments. Dolly Gee, a U.S. District judge in Southern California, ruled that federal authorities have violated key provisions of an 18-year-old court settlement that placed restrictions on detention of migrant children.
 
The Los Angeles Times notes that “…  The ruling, released late Friday, is another blow to President Obama’s immigration policies and leaves questions about what the U.S. will do with the large number of children and parents who crossed the border from Latin America last year.”
 
Judge Gee blasted the government and the conditions at both the detention centers (two in Texas and one in Pennsylvania) as she gave the government until Aug. 3 to explain why an order she plans to issue should not be implemented within 90 days. Read the LAT report here:
 
Filed Under: Border Kids, Community, National Tagged With: , , , , , ,

California, Texas Lead In Immigration Court Delays

July 15, 2015 By
It may the one of the few places where Texas does not mind being second to California: immigration case backlog. A Houston Chronicle newspaper report notes that  “… the stack of cases at Texas’ overburdened immigration courts grew by nearly 60 percent since October 2013, bringing the state’s pending cases to a record high of nearly 77,000, making it the largest backlog in the country after California.”
 
The delays are truly staggering, especially for younger people. The Chronicle says “… nationwide it now takes an average of 604 days to process an immigration case, according to an analysis of federal data through April by Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. In Houston, where the pending case load grew by 13 percent from late 2013 to nearly 32,000 so far this year, the highest in the state, the delay is 636 days.”
 
That’s to be “processed.” Some cases are taking five years to resolve. The HC explained that “… the long overburdened and underfunded immigration court system has been further overwhelmed by the influx of more than 67,000 unaccompanied Central American children who streamed across the Southwest border in 2014. In response, the Obama administration prioritized their cases and those of other migrants who arrived here last year to deter more from coming.” That means folks waiting years for a day in court might have to wait years longer.
 
(Immigration courts are not criminal courts, but rather an administrative function of the Justice Department and are considered civil cases.) Read more here. 
 
 
Filed Under: Border Kids, Community Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

Report Offers Details About Immigration Court Backlog

July 8, 2015 By
As reported in Al Jazeera America: "The nation’s immigration courts got a bit of relief at the beginning of June, when the Department of Justice hired 18 new immigration judges. But the courts are still facing a major backlog.Illustration by Sam Ward for Al Jazeera America"

As reported in Al Jazeera America: “The nation’s immigration courts got a bit of relief at the beginning of June, when the Department of Justice hired 18 new immigration judges. But the courts are still facing a major backlog.Illustration by Sam Ward for Al Jazeera America”

A new report by Bruce Wallace, writing for Al Jazeera America, details just how stalled the nation’s busiest immigration courts are, and how backlogged they remain. Writing from New York, he reports that “… depending on how you count it, this courthouse — actually a collection of 31 small courtrooms scattered across two floors of a tall federal office building in downtown Manhattan — is either the busiest or second busiest of the 58 immigration courts in the country. The one in Los Angeles got more new cases last year — a little over 18,000, compared with around 17,700 for Manhattan. But Manhattan has more cases pending: 60,538 compared with 51,878 in L.A. Or, on average, about 2,240 cases per New York judge. Judges in comparable courts have about 700 cases a year, according to the American Bar Association.
 
The story goes on: “Death-penalty cases in a traffic-court setting” is how Dana Leigh Marks likes to put it. She’s an immigration judge in San Francisco and president of the National Association of Immigration Judges (and, as such, one of two immigration judges in the country who are permitted to speak to the media). “The volume alone is like traffic court, and yet the stakes for someone who asserts a claim of asylum, if I am wrong — or even if I’m right but, because the law doesn’t allow me to grant relief, I have to deny them — they could be going back and facing death.”
 
Immigration courts, despite their name, are not actually part of the federal courts system. They are part of the Justice Department and the judges do not have much power over their colleagues who represent the government. They are civil courts, so there is no right to have counsel provided. Nationally, some 450,000 cases are pending with wait times reaching half a decade.
 
Filed Under: Border Kids, Community, Courts Budget, National Tagged With: , , , , ,

SF Immigration-Murder Case May Be ‘Willie Horton’ of 2015

July 7, 2015 By
The broad-daylight killing of a woman by an undocumented immigrant is becoming a political football, and the San Francisco Chronicle gets it right by saying: “… from the presidential stage to California’s local political contests, it may be accused killer Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez, a Mexican citizen with a string of deportations and drug-related felonies in the U.S., who becomes this year’s Willie Horton and shapes the debate over illegal immigration.”
 
The report quotes a political science professor saying that the victim’s death “… has catapulted itself onto the national stage, because it allows those who are running in the heartland to talk about all the liberal icons and all the stereotypes associated with San Francisco… in some way, this is becoming a Willie Horton moment for the country.”
 
But the story also reminds us that  more than 320 jurisdictions have sanctuary policies similar to San Francisco. Supporters say such policies help, among other things, foster trust with people living in the community without documentation. Meanwhile, the USA Today coverage tells us that more than 10,000 people have been released that federal authorities wanted held.
 
The USA Today and Chronicle stories are below.
 
 
 
 
Filed Under: Border Kids, Community Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

It Had To Happen: Immigrant Avoids ICE Hold, Now A Murder Suspect

July 6, 2015 By
It made headlines last year as jurisdictions, acting on a federal court decision out of Oregon, decided they would not honor “hold” requests by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, known as ICE. Now a San Francisco murder suspect was freed despite such a hold request just before committing the alleged killing. But an attorney for the San Francisco Sheriff’s Department says “…nothing in his background showed anything like that.”
As reported in the LA Times: Liz Sullivan and Jim Steinle, parents of Kathryn Steinle, who was fatally shot Wednesday in San Francisco. A suspect with seven felony convictions who had been deported five times has been arrested in connection with the shooting. (Lea Suzuki / San Francisco Chronicle)

As reported in the LA Times: Liz Sullivan and Jim Steinle, parents of Kathryn Steinle, who was fatally shot Wednesday in San Francisco. A suspect with seven felony convictions who had been deported five times has been arrested in connection with the shooting. (Lea Suzuki / San Francisco Chronicle)

 
Says an ICE spokesperson: “An individual with a lengthy criminal history, who is now the suspect in a tragic murder case, was released onto the street rather than being turned over to ICE for deportation… we’re not asking local cops to do our job. All we’re asking is that they notify us when a serious foreign national criminal offender is being released to the street so we can arrange to take custody.”
 
San Francisco County Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi said ICE misses the point. “ICE was informed about San Francisco’s position on detainers,” he said, “but did not seek a court order for Sanchez’s transfer as required under the law.”
 
The Courts Monitor follows immigration issues because the cases are civil, not criminal. Read more from the L.A. Times here:
 
Filed Under: Border Kids, National Tagged With: , , , , , ,

How Clinton’s Immigration Policy Would Differ From Obama’s

May 8, 2015 By
 
Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton made headlines by calling for a path to full and equal citizenship for undocumented immigrants, but offered few details on how her programs as president would go beyond what President Obama has done by executive order. Immigration cases are civil actions and some 400,000 cases are backed up in the special “immigration courts” which are actually operated by the U.S. Justice Department, not the usual courts system.
 
The left-leaning website ThinkProgress has a solid analysis of how Clinton’s ideas differ from Obama’s, noting that the candidate “… called for granting ‘full and equal citizenship’ to undocumented immigrants; extending an existing executive action that provides deportation protections to so-called DREAMers, or undocumented immigrants, giving legal representation to immigrants in immigration court; and reforming immigration enforcement and detention practices ‘so they’re more humane, more targeted, and more effective.'”
 
See more of the analysis here.
Filed Under: Border Kids, Community Tagged With: , , , ,
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