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Thread: DHS blames tech glitch for violating judge’s amnesty injunction

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  1. #1
    Administrator Jean's Avatar
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    DHS blames tech glitch for violating judge’s amnesty injunction

    By Stephen Dinan - The Washington Times - Saturday, May 16, 2015

    The Obama administration blamed a technology glitch for why it continued to approve new amnesty applications in February, even after a federal judge issued an injunction, telling the court late Friday that they are now begging about 2,000 illegal immigrants to tear up their three-year work authorizations.

    U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the Homeland Security agency that approved the deportation amnesty applications for Dreamers despite the judge's order, insisted it's corrected the immigrants' records at headquarters, but said it's also asking the immigrants themselves to send back their three-year documents and accept two-year papers instead.

    The agency also told Judge Andrew S. Hanen that more botched cases could still be found as employees dig through tens of thousands of applications.

    President Obama's lawyers are desperately trying to head off punishment by Judge Hanen after several embarrassing missteps.

    First, the lawyers misled the court as to more than 100,000 three-year amnesty applications that were approved between Nov. 20 and Feb. 16, when Judge Hanen issued his injunction. The lawyers said they didn't intend to mislead, and they assumed the judge knew those applications were being approved.

    Then the Homeland Security Department announced it had approved the 2,000 or so three-year applications even after the injunction — a clear violation of the judge's order, and raising questions about the lawyers' excuses for the first 100,000 botched applications.

    "As the director of USCIS, I accept full responsibility," agency chief Leon Rodriguez said in an affidavit filed with Judge Hanen. "In retrospect, I believe that USCIS should have exercised greater management oversight of the efforts to halt the production and issuance of three-year notices and [Employment Authorization Documents] once the court issued its injunction."

    Judge Hanen has halted Mr. Obama's expanded deportation amnesty, announced in November, that would grant tentative legal status and work permits, or Employment Authorization Documents, to as many as 5 million illegal immigrants. The amnesty expands an earlier 2012 program Mr. Obama announced that covers so-called Dreamers, or young illegal immigrants who came to the U.S. as children.

    Under the original amnesty, known officially as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals or DACA, Dreamers could get two-year status and work permits. As part of his expansion last year Mr. Obama raised that to three years, and USCIS immediately began approving those three-year applications for the Dreamers eligible for the 2012 policy.

    That's what's landed the agency in trouble.

    Administration officials said the more than 100,000 applications approved between November and Feb. 16 were a misunderstanding, while the 2,000 cases approved since the Feb. 16 injunction were a problem with the agency's process.

    Donald Neufeld, the agency employee who is overseeing the deportation amnesty, said when the inunction came down, they stopped all amnesty applications. A few days later they began processing two-year approvals again, but didn't catch thousands of three-year cases that were in the pipeline.

    "The February 20 instruction to resume production of EADs led to the issuance of three-year EADs for the previously held EAD-pending cases, although the intention had been for only the two-year EADs to proceed to production," Mr. Neufeld said in an affidavit. "IT personnel had implemented a system-wide pause on the production of all DACA-related EAD requests in the queue. They had not removed production requests for three-year EADs from the queue."

    Judge Hanen was already weighing what punishment to issue to the administration for the initial 100,000 cases. The judge has yet to comment publicly on the 2,000 additional cases.

    Technology has bedeviled the Obama administration on other big items on the president's agenda. In 2013, the federal Obamacare website, HealthCare.gov, went live despite not having been fully vetted, and the site repeatedly crashed, forcing the government to scramble and rewrite legal deadlines to try to get people to sign up.

    http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/...es-amnesty-in/
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  2. #2
    Senior Member Judy's Avatar
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    I don't accept this. These are actions that shouldn't have been taking place to begin with. Computers are not responsible for the policy or the decisions being made on who receives permits under those policies. These are illegal aliens, violating US immigration, labor and civil rights laws every day they are here. To claim computers are responsible for the "technology glitch" that caused DHS to violate a Judge's Order is absurd and unacceptable, because the computers didn't turn themselves on, the computers didn't rewrite software to issue permits to stay here to people who aren't supposed to be here. DHS personnel did that and the Obama Administration would be held accountable for it. It's a simple legal concept called "fruit from the poison tree". If they weren't legalizing illegal aliens in violation of the US law to begin with, there would be no "glitches" in the second place. This is like some killer who shot the wrong guy trying to tell a judge he's innocent of the murder because of an "identity glitch", because he didn't intend to kill that person, because he intended to kill someone else but the process gave him the wrong address.
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    Super Moderator Newmexican's Avatar
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    This sounds way too familiar. Hasn't the administration blamed "Tech Glitches" for the Obamacare debacle also? That was just before they needed bushels of money to fix the "problem".

    I foresee the next thing will be that they need a lot of money to fix it. Of course, they just want a lot of money to keep throwing at illegals and all of their buddies through government contracts.
    Last edited by Newmexican; 05-17-2015 at 01:06 PM.

  4. #4
    Senior Member Judy's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Newmexican View Post
    This sounds way too familiar. Hasn't the administration blamed "Tech Glitches" for the Obamacare debacle also? That was just before they needed bushels of money to fix the "problem".

    I foresee the next thing will be that they need a lot of money to fix it. Of course, they just want a lot of money to keep throwing at illegals and all of their buddies through government contracts.
    I have an easy solution. Send everyone involved in handing out work permits, jobs, tax credits, welfare, money and social security numbers to illegal aliens and offspring to jail, send all illegal aliens and offspring back to their home countries, and pass at least a 10 Year Moratorium on Immigration.
    Last edited by Newmexican; 05-17-2015 at 01:06 PM.
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    A computer is like a typewriter, it only knows what and only does what it has ben told! That is what the public and judges need to be telling DHS. Anyone that still believes "OH, computer error," is still living in the 1970's.

  6. #6
    Administrator Jean's Avatar
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    Obama Administration in States’ Immigration Lawsuit: ‘Computer Ate My Homework’

    By Hans A. von Spakovsky — May 21, 2015

    The Justice Department’s latest filings in the immigration lawsuit brought by 26 states in the Southern District of Texas are a little hard to believe — and somewhat comical, in a way.

    Back in February, Judge Andrew Hanen issued a preliminary injunction against the implementation of President Obama’s executive orders on immigration. Now, in an attempt to explain why the injunction was violated, Leon Rodriguez, director of the U.S. Customs and Immigration Services (USCIS), has outlined in an affidavit a long list of instructions and orders he gave to implement Hanen’s order.

    The main excuse given for USCIS’s issuing three-year deferrals and Employment Authorization Documents (EADs) to 2,000 illegal immigrants after the injunction was in place is that its computer system failed. But fear not. Rodriguez is “taking steps, including the modification of USCIS computer systems, to further minimize the potential for human error that could lead to unintended” violations of the injunction “in future DACA cases, regardless of the circumstances.” (There is no indication whether the autonomous computer system that made these errors is named “HAL.”)

    Rodriguez does admit that USCIS “should have exercised greater management oversight of the efforts to halt the production and issuance of three-year notices and EADs.” But that’s not really much of an admission — there is no question thaat USCIS violated Judge Hanen’s injunction despite Rodriguez’s self-proclaimed “clear intent to stop the approval or issuance” of these documents. Rodriguez assures the judge that USCIS will get to the bottom of this, his own failure, noting that DHS has asked its inspector general to “investigate the circumstances” of what happened.

    The Justice Department filed a second affidavit, from Donald W. Neufeld, associate director for service-center operations at USCIS, supporting Rodriguez. Keep in mind that the administration’s main justification for the president’s 2012 program for immigrants who arrived as children (DACA) and for his expanded 2014 program (DAPA) is that, by exercising prosecutorial discretion to legalize illegal immigrants under these programs, DHS could focus on removing the most dangerous aliens — those who are a threat to national security or public safety.

    Yet Neufeld blames DHS’s unlawful issuance on “recently discovered errors in its identification and tracking of cases decided under the 2012 DACA” program. In other words, DHS violated Judge Hanen’s injunction because of tracking errors in its computer system — the same system that supposedly will enable DHS to identify the “most dangerous” illegal immigrants and distinguish them from all of the others receiving benefits under the DACA and DAPA programs.

    In fact, while it has admitted to erroneously issuing prohibited deferrals and EADs to 2,000 illegal immigrants, USCIS isn’t even sure that is the final number. According to Neufeld’s affidavit, his “efforts” to “identify all cases in which individuals” were wrongly issued these documents “remain ongoing.” So the total number of cases “may change from the estimates previously provided to the Court.”

    When this “computer error” admission is combined with the May 4 inspector-general report that DHS “does not gather and analyze prosecutorial discretion data” on DACA participants, it makes it difficult for the Justice Department to credibly argue that the DACA and DAPA programs will enable the administration to concentrate its efforts on deporting the most dangerous illegal immigrants. As Texas and the states say in a brief filed on May 20, these “explanations” by the government “further confirm the unwieldiness of the DAPA/DACA bureaucracy — so large and complex that not even Defendants have a full grasp of what their machinery is doing.”

    DHS violated Judge Hanen’s injunction because of supposed tracking errors in its computer system, which supposedly will enable DHS to identify the “most dangerous” illegal immigrants.

    The inspector general concludes that, because of these defects, DHS may “be missing opportunities to strengthen its ability to remove aliens who pose a threat to national security and public safety.” In fiscal year 2013, the year following the implementation of the DACA program, DHS actually released 36,000 convicted-criminal aliens. It released another 30,558 such aliens in 2014.

    The Justice Department filed an additional response to Judge Hanen’s April 7 order, which had castigated DOJ lawyers for misleading the court into believing that no action would be taken to implement the president’s plan until late February. On March 3, DOJ informed Judge Hanen in an “advisory” that, in fact, more than 100,000 illegal immigrants had been granted three-year deferrals prior to the issuance of the injunction.

    Hanen also criticized the DOJ’s lawyers for waiting two weeks after his February 16 injunction order to inform him of this problem. On April 7, Hanen ordered DOJ to produce every draft of the “advisory” and the names of everyone at DOJ and DHS who knew about it and the granting of the 100,000 deferrals.

    The DOJ lawyers apparently had a hard time understanding this order. Although they filed more than a thousand pages of supposedly “privileged” documents related to the “advisory,” along with a privilege log listing these documents, they apparently neglected to do what any lawyer knows is necessary when you file a privilege log (which lists documents a party to a lawsuit is claiming are privileged, the date they were prepared, the subject, and the individuals who prepared and received the legal documents). Judge Hanen had to issue another order on May 12 telling the government “to identify to the Court the individuals referenced in the privilege log,” including each one’s “name, position (and whether the individual is a lawyer or paralegal), title, and agency for whom the individual works.”

    DOJ’s response has a key portion of the brief redacted. Those redactions appear to delete any information that would indicate when the DOJ lawyers discovered that DHS had been implementing part of the president’s plan. Although the response apologizes for the “misunderstanding that inadvertently resulted” from the misstatements by the DOJ lawyers, DOJ absolutely refuses to admit that its lawyers deceived Judge Hanen.

    Instead, DOJ claims that its lawyers simply misunderstood Hanen’s inquiries about the implementation of the amnesty plan. The government even tries to blame the states, saying that they had not challenged the 2012 DACA program, ignoring the fact that the states had challenged the expansion of that program that the president announced on November 20, 2014.

    DOJ also makes the astonishing claim that its lawyers “did not appreciate that the immediate implementation of three-year deferrals [under the expanded DACA program] was an issue of consequence in the timing of the preliminary injunction litigation.” The failure to “appreciate” what was a basic issue in this litigation, evident from all of the pleadings filed by the states and Judge Hanen’s crystal-clear questions in the hearing he held, raises troubling questions about the competence of the DOJ lawyers handling the case.

    DOJ tries to convince Judge Hanen that he should not actually review any of the documents DOJ filed with the court because its response and the privilege log should convince the judge that the DOJ lawyers informed Judge Hanen of the problem as soon as they realized there was a “potential for misunderstanding.” DOJ also warns that the exposure of “sensitive materials” could cause “significant difficulties, and thus should be avoided.”

    Those “sensitive” materials, by the way, include two envelopes, given to the court in camera, that contain “communications between DOJ and the White House concerning the Advisory” as well as “purely internal White House documents” and a “list of attorneys at the White House with whom DOJ corresponded about the Advisory.” Even if Judge Hanen decides to review these documents, however, DOJ argues that in no event should the government be ordered “to provide those privileged materials” to the states.

    So these filings are more of the same: the government claiming that its lawyers did nothing wrong and that DHS unintentionally violated the injunction order because of a computer glitch, although the filings raise the intriguing issue of possible White House involvement in the misinformation given to the court. We will have to see what Judge Hanen thinks of the administration’s nothing-to-see-here excuses.

    http://www.nationalreview.com/articl...ework-hans-von
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  7. #7
    Senior Member vistalad's Avatar
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    Judge Hanen had the backbone to call an end to 'Bama's illegal executive amnesty. Let's hope that he also has the backbone to drag out the judicial decision making process.
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