NEW ORLEANS – A union representing the nation’s immigration judges filed a lawsuit Wednesday in opposition to the Trump administration, arguing that the government is stifling the right of judges to speak publicly about key issues, coVID-19 risk to their lives, and their public health.
The judges’ trial is the latest sign of deep mistrust among professionals running in the country’s immigration courts and President Donald Trump’s administration. The trial comes when the government makes the decision to reopen the immigration courts it had closed in the past due to the pandemic.
Ashley Tabbador, a Los Angeles-based immigration judge and president of the National Association of Immigration Judges, said the government had published little data on how to make decisions about openness and final courts due to coronavirus issues.
“If you’re not going to calculate the percentage of data and you’re not going to tell us what criteria are being used, and you’re necessarily suppressing any ability to hold the government accountable, (this) creates frustration and anxiety,” he says. “So other people don’t trust, they’re not convinced that the company is doing the right thing.”
She said the government is reluctant to talk about national criteria for reopening the courts.
“They basically keep blocking us and telling us, well, that’s something that each and every court and every one and every oversight trial will have to decide,” he said.
She said poor decisions about reopening the courts can lead to infections and deaths. “So it can literally be a life-and-death scenario for members of our network if we don’t do the right thing to make sure everyone’s fitness gets ahead of us and that we stick to the right protocols.”
A spokesman for management declined to comment on the lawsuit on Wednesday.
About 460 immigration judges paint in 67 courts and two arbitration centers in the United States and its territories, ranging from the border like El Paso to inland cities like Atlanta.
Working without a jury, the judges that immigrants deserve to stay in the United States and those who deserve to be deported. Your existing workload is at a record level: more than 1.1 million eviction cases.
More than all immigrants in court come from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.
In some cases, immigration court hearings are a matter of life and death, as others face retaliation from governments, abusive ex-spouses, or organized crimes. This year, Human Rights Watch released a report documenting 138 cases since 2013 of other people killed in El Salvador after being deported from the United States.
The COVID-19 pandemic has prolonged life and death problems to anyone who goes to court, adding the professionals it paints there. Judges, defense attorneys and prosecutors running in immigration courts met on March 15 to consider that it is not easy for the Trump administration to temporarily close all immigration court hearings for security reasons.
The administration shut down “unimtained” courts where immigrants can enter and pass freely, but allowed the courts to operate in detention centers.
The government is now reopening some of the detention courts it has closed. For example, the New Orleans court opened Monday at limited capacity, even when COVID-19 instances in Louisiana soared to more than 60,000. The government is also postponing regulations authorizing the electronic filing of documents, according to the lawsuit.
“These adjustments have already had and will continue to have profound public health implications, few immigration judges have felt free to speak,” the judges wrote in the lawsuit, filed in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia.
The lawsuit notes that the few immigration judges serving as officials of the National Association of Immigration Judges can still speak publicly as union representatives.
“But much more silenced,” the lawsuit says.
New policies announced in 2017 and January have reduced the rights of judges and say they speak in their non-public capacity about immigration law or policy or similar matters, depending on the trial. In other cases, immigration judges can only speak publicly with government approval, judges say. The Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University in New York is cooperating with judges on trial.
The federal firm that administers the courts is called the Executive Immigration Review Office, or EOIR. It is a branch of the Justice Department and ultimately responds to U.S. Attorney General William Barr, appointed through Trump.
In response to questions about COVID-19 in court, the firm did not have any official contacted.
“EOIR takes the safety, fitness and well-being of its workers very seriously,” the firm said in a statement, adding that officials adhere to federal entity rules, adding the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
That said, the firm takes protective precautions, such as using telephone hearings whenever possible. He also claimed that a general remnant of all hearings can help trapped immigrants because they simply can’t apply for a judge’s release.
“EOIR is committed to ensuring that each and every one of the detained aliens receives their day in court,” the government said.
U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat, questioned how the federal government can have that social estrangement when the country’s immigration courts reopen.
“We are involved in the rush to reopen the courts with rigorous proceedings or sufficient communication with interested parties,” he wrote in a June 23 letter to the Executive Board for Immigration Review.
Louisiana this year is the largest coronavirus hot spot in the South. It is also one of the leading immigrant detention centers in the United States.
Although many instances of the new virus have made the impression at the state’s migrant detention centers, immigration courts have never stopped in the small towns of Jena and Oakdale, which oversee the instances of more than 5,000 people locked up in migrant detention centers. across Louisiana.
After many states imposed quarantine restrictions in March due to the pandemic, judges still ordered the deportation of immigrants and dozens of deportation flights took off from Alexandria, Louisiana, to countries.
One case concerned a 26-year-old Guatemalan boy held at Richwood Correctional Center, an expanding 1,129-bed facility in northeastern Louisiana. He was tested for the virus on April 12, said his lawyer Veronica Semino.
Semino said he had developed a debilitating cough and had been remote with a boy in a giant facility bedroom, which is controlled through the LaSalle Correction. Meanwhile, she had tried to postpone a scheduled hearing twice just four days after her test, without success.
The guy can speak slightly to the audience, which he took position on the phone, according to Semino.
“He had no lung capacity. During the hearing, they activated the EMS shipment and literally within 15 minutes he was in an ambulance on the way to the hospital,” Semino said.
He later learned that his client’s important symptoms were being monitored at the hearing.
“This is a user who is seriously ill, who had to be taken care of and everything went well,” he said.
He was hospitalized for about two weeks and returned to Richwood Correctional Center, according to Semino. On Wednesday, ICE showed 65 instances on the premises.
Although COVID-19 instances reached more than 1,200 in Louisiana on March 23, it was only that week that lawyers realized they were asking them to bring their own N-95 gloves, goggles and mask to meet with clients or attend court proceedings. in person, said Phillip Hunter, an immigration attorney founded in Baton Rouge who has clients at the LaSalle Ice Remedy Center in Jena. That same week, he began to see inmates escorted to the five courtrooms in LaSalle dressed in a mask to cover his nose and mouth.
Hunter said that as the epidemic evolved in Louisiana, lawyers can now file motions over the phone for what they appear to appear in court, and that some judges have begun to release on bail to others with severe physical fitness disorders.
“But it’s not like they stopped stopping people,” he added.
Homero Lopez, an immigration attorney representing clients in Oakdale Immigration Court, said at the beginning of the Louisiana outbreak, was not transparent if lawyers could record documents online or participate in telephone hearings.
“It wasn’t like we were being informed,” he said.
Eventually, some judges began granting motions to pursue COVID-19-based cases, he said.
“If we said we can’t go to court because of lack of child care or a physical condition problem, they’d settle for the motions to continue,” Lopez said.
During the pandemic, the government announced openings and court closures on Twitter. But uncertainty persists for many judicial officials.
“I’m afraid. I cling to the life of what will happen in a few weeks,” immigration attorney Fanny Behar-Ostrow said last May. I’m very afraid if they start reopening our offices and we have to go physically. I hope they continue to let us do telework. I don’t think this pandemic is over under any circumstances. »»
Behar-Ostrow heads the American Federation of Government Employees, Local 511, a union that represents lawyers that paints for ICE, a role that means advocating for deportation.
She said she feared for her colleagues because small immigration courts are not prepared for any kind of social estrangement. He said he would like to see the suspension of all hearings, detained and unful halted, and does not understand why the Trump administration is trying to keep the immigration courts running.
“I suppose it’s political. But that’s a guess. I’d rather not get into this because, like I said, I’ve noticed a lot of administrations. I’ve noticed the swing of the pendulum in any of the instructions and things are done for policy reasons,” he said.
The courthouse where he works in downtown Miami is now open to inmate hearings.
Memphis immigration attorney Lily Axelrod, who acts as a liaison with the local immigration court, said the administration’s willingness to keep the courts active shows an underlying political goal: to keep deportations high, even if it jeopardizes public safety.
“So I think everyone noticed that this administration doesn’t care about the human rights of immigrants or the protection of immigrants, or necessarily respect for the law with respect to immigrants. But she had no idea how much contempt or apathy they had for their own employees,” she says.
In this case, the American Immigration Lawyers Association and other teams filed a federal complaint on March 30 in Washington, D.C., on behalf of a small organization of immigration detainees involved in hiring COVID-19. They asked the court to close the detained and untained immigration courts, with the exception of bail hearings.
On April 13, the government responded, saying the trial would “force the release of tens of thousands of foreigners despite legislation enacted by Congress.”
EOIR Director James McHenry argued that if the government arrested hearings on inmates, the government might have to free immigrants from constitutional disorders of indeterminate imprisonment. And that, he said, can harm the public because some immigrants have corrupt records or raise national security concerns.
On April 24, inmates’ lawyers stated that some judges were still insisting on harmful personal hearings and that some remote hearings were working well, at least because some judges had called inmates’ lawyers.
On April 28, U.S. District Court Judge Carl Nichols rejected the lawyers’ request for a transitional restraining order, and determined that the government is already doing enough to respond to the pandemic.
The plaintiffs later withdrew their lawsuit.
ICE spokesman Brian Cox said that to protect against COVID-19, the agency is arresting and detaining far fewer people than usual.
As of June 27, a total of 2,2805 more people were arrested in the United States through U.S. immigration and customs agencies, according to an ICE website.
This is less than about 38,500 on March 1, a minimum of 41%. Many of the existing detainees were arrested through the border patrol, through non-border police through ICE, Cox said.
Of the recently detained, 51% had convictions for offenders, 14% had noticeable criminal fees and 35% were arrested only for alleged immigration violations.
Tabbador, head of the immigration judges’ union, said the pandemic revealed a long-standing challenge in immigration courts: lack of independence.
Unlike federal judges who listen to civil and criminal cases, immigration judges do not belong to a separate, independent branch of government. Instead, they are workers with the U.S. Department of Justice. And the Trump administration, the same branch of government that will pay immigration lawyers.
The administration must withdraw the certification of the judges’ union, which would make it much harder for them to speak and oppose the government.
This decision, known as the “A-B Affair,” has made it much harder for immigrants to download shelter applications about domestic violence or gang violence.
Even before COVID-19, appear before an immigration trial about a terrifying celebration for many immigrants.
Yoselin Alejandra Madriz-Chacón, a 27-year-old woman who now lives in Little Rock, Arkansas, briefly made the impression at the Memphis Immigration Court in February. She told the ruling that she had recently experienced a bad separation and that she had not been able to rent a lawyer. The passing sentence gave him a few weeks.
She was born in Costa Rica and brought to the United States at the age of six on an expired tourist visa. She said she hadn’t been able to adjust her status.
“You never know when other people will say you have to go home,” she says. “I haven’t been there since I was six, and it’s scary, especially when you’re going through a difficult time with your non-public life and you still have to face this challenge.”
In June, he said his trial had continued until February 2021 due to the coronavirus pandemic. The delay has given her time to earn more money as a painter on structure projects, and she hopes to use that source of income to rent a lawyer and return to Memphis to solve her case.
In New Orleans, the immigration court reopened Monday at limited capacity. The courtroom is reserved for judges, lawyers, their clients and interpreters. Witnesses were asked to give their testimony through an affidavit or to report them by telephone. People with COVID-19 symptoms and those who have been positive cannot appear in court.
Emily Trostle, an immigration attorney in New Orleans, said restrictions can make it difficult for immigration lawyers to constitute their clients.
“I’m comfortable with that,” she says.
Maria Clark of New Orleans for The American South. Daniel Connolly writes for The (Memphis) Commercial Appeal.