Immigration Judges The ‘Cinderellas’ Of Justice System?

October 15, 2014 By
San Francisco immigration judge Dana Leigh Marks, who sidesteps a Justice Department gag order on her profession because she is also president of the National Association of Immigration Judges, is continuing to give voice to those who work inside the “border kid” crisis. She tells ABC News that “… we call ourselves ‘the legal Cinderellas’ in the Department of Justice, because we feel that we have been ignored resource-wise.”

She told ABC that, this year, “… $18 billion was spent on immigration law enforcement and only 1.7 perfect of that went to the courts…” Marks also cited non-functioning equipment and understaffed offices as key culprits in the “massive dysfunction” that immigration judges are currently facing. The judges are actually Justice Department employees.

Judge Marks outlined the scope of the problem: “Nationwide there’s more than 375,000 pending cases before 227 immigration judges who are sitting in the field,” Marks said. This works out to more than 1,500 cases per judge, but individual caseloads vary across the country. For example, Marks’ docket in San Francisco has more than 2,400 pending cases. The judge said the administration’s decision to “flip” the docket to move border kids to the front has meant longer delays for others. 

Read the story from the front lines of immigration court here: Immigration Judge Says Court System Has Been Ignored, Underfunded
Filed Under: Border Kids, Community, Courts Budget, National Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

‘Kafka’s’ Immigration Trials Spark State and National Response

October 9, 2014 By

CCM’s publisher, Sara Warner, has another post up on Huffington Post regarding the Border Kids legal representation issue. Take a look!

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

Most ‘Border Kids’ Show Up For Court

October 8, 2014 By
It’s been a nagging part of the “border kids” immigration crisis: How many of those children actually show up for court? Especially since many are sent to live with relatives and may have court dates set months into the future – easy enough to miss. A new government report, covered in the Wall Street Journal, says that “… the vast majority of migrants who recently entered the U.S. illegally are showing up for their scheduled deportation hearings, even as the government said most adults who arrived with children have skipped separate required check-ins with immigration offices.”
 
Reports the WSJ: “Between July 18 and Sept. 30, about 85% of unaccompanied minors showed up for a scheduled first hearing, and about two-thirds of adults with children appeared, according to data obtained from the Executive Office for Immigration Review, the agency that oversees the nation’s immigration courts. The agency said on July 18 that it would expedite deportation hearings for the two groups, following the Obama administration’s decision to prioritize their cases to discourage further illegal immigration.”
 
About 30,000 unchaperoned children and 40,000 people entering in family units flocked to the U.S. during a surge of such immigrants between May and August this year, the latest month available, said the WSJ, adding that “… that surge has since subsided.” Some states and the federal government have allotted millions of dollars to provide legal representation for the border kids, who are not provided with lawyers because the violations are potentially civil, not criminal.
 
Filed Under: Border Kids, Community, Courts Budget, National Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Jails Refusing ICE Requests On Immigration Holds

October 6, 2014 By
“Emboldened by recent court rulings, more and more counties and cities across the country are refusing to jail inmates extra days to give federal authorities time to deport them,” reports Governing Magazine in an important trend story from the civil immigration wars, adding that “… in most jails until recently, inmates booked on criminal charges and suspected of being in the country illegally were often held for an additional 48 hours at the behest of federal immigration officials.”
 
Governing explains that “.. these ‘holds’ created a pipeline for the deportation of thousands of people from the United States in the last decade. Now, that enforcement tool is crumbling. Although some localities started limiting the number of immigration holds a few years ago, the trend of completely ignoring the requests gathered steam this spring after a series of federal court rulings determined that the immigration holds are not mandatory and that local agencies should not be compelled to follow them.”
 
In California, for example, a new state law this year orders that Golden State law enforcement can only honor immigration holds if the inmate has been charged with a “serious” crime. And Governing reports that “… most law enforcement agencies in the state — including the Los Angeles Police Department — adopted policies ignoring the immigration holds altogether after the federal rulings came down.” And Colorado this year became the first state to pass a law compelling local agencies to ignore immigration-detain requests.
 
In all, Governing says more than 225 local law enforcement agencies nationwide have adopted policies to completely ignore requests by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials for the 48-hour holds.
 
Read the story, and the immigration enforcement response, here: More and More Localities Rejecting Federal Deportation Requests
Filed Under: Border Kids, Community, Courts Budget, National Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

US House Drops Border-Crisis Bill

July 31, 2014 By
BREAKING NEWS: The U.S. House of representatives has dropped a bill that would have provided some $659 million in funding to address the 60,000 unaccompanied children that have arrived on the southwest border. The Huffington Post noted that “… the bill had significant opposition from Democrats, but GOP leadership decided to add a separate vote, if the first were to pass, on a measure meant to bring on conservative support: ending a key Obama policy that allows undocumented young people in the U.S. for years to remain in the country. 

Citing other reports, HuffPo says the GOP needed to get to 218 votes but managed only 214.

The HuffPo backgrounder graf is pretty good: “More than 57,500 unaccompanied children and teenagers have been apprehended after crossing the U.S.-Mexico border illegally since October, overwhelming a system already plagued by backlogs and in need of significant resources. President Barack Obama requested $3.7 billion to deal with the crisis, and Senate Democrats proposed a $2.7 billion package. House Republicans introduced a bill to approve just a fraction of that sum — with the possibility of appropriating more funds later — with conditions many Democrats oppose, such as changing a 2008 law so unaccompanied minors from countries other than Mexico and Canada can be deported more quickly and sending the National Guard to the border.” 

Read the report here: 
Filed Under: Border Kids, Community, Courts Budget, 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: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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