Immigration courts postpone already-scheduled cases to make room for Remain In Mexico
San Diego’s immigration court postpones already-scheduled cases to make room for Remain in Mexico hearings
https://ca-times.brightspotcdn.com/d...dzv-snap-imageFILE. This July 26, 2018 file photo shows people lining up to cross into the United States to begin the process of applying for asylum near the San Ysidro port of entry in Tijuana, Mexico.A federal judge has extended a freeze on deporting families separated at the U.S.-Mexico border, giving a reprieve to hundreds of children and their parents to remain in the United States.(AP Photo/Gregory Bull, File) (Gregory Bull / AP)
Immigration lawyers throughout San Diego are having their cases postponed – some by as much as a year – so that judges can focus primarily on immigration cases in the Remain in Mexico program.
By GUSTAVO SOLIS
AUG. 22, 2019 6:42 PM
Immigration lawyers throughout the southwestern border are having their cases postponed — some by as much as a year —so that judges can focus primarily on immigration cases in the Remain in Mexico program.
The move, which one lawyer described as the equivalent of a government shutdown for San Diego’s downtown immigration court, means that lawyers who already had cases scheduled between now and October will have to wait until 2020 or even 2021.
“People started getting noticed about case being rescheduled in August,” said Attorney Tammy Lin, who had a case scheduled for Monday August 26. “Mine was pushed back to March 2020 but there are some that were all the way back to 2021.”
Lawyers said this prolonged waiting could seriously jeopardize people’s immigration cases. Over time, important witnesses could become unavailable and memory becomes fuzzy. Additionally, the longer wait could prolong family separation for people who are waiting on immigration court decision to be reunited with family.
For example, Lin had a merits hearing on an asylum case postponed for nearly seven months. The case began in 2014 and her client had been preparing for that hearing for more than a month. Part of that preparation involved getting mentally and emotionally prepared to retell a traumatic story about persecution to an immigration judge, Lin said.
When Lin told the client that they’d have to wait an extra seven months to tell that story, she could feel the disappointment.
“I find myself having to be a little bit of an optimist,” she said. “I say this isn’t a bad thing, it just means we have more time to prepare. But, for my client, I know it’s just a sense of disappointment.”
Those notices are somewhat normal — for example, sometimes a San Diego judge has to temporarily fill vacancies in other courts so they postpone cases for a few days. But in this new development, every judge seems to be impacted by the postponements, said immigration lawyer Andrew Nietor.
“Every now and then we’ll get notices that a judge has to go on special detail and he has to continue cases for a day or a week,” he said. “So it’s not unheard of but it was still relatively rare and certainly never like this where the continuances cover the entire court.” A DOJ spokesperson did not immediately respond to questions about the rescheduled cases and whether this is happening in other immigration courts along the border.
Immigration judges in San Diego and El Paso have said in court that the reason behind the rescheduling is to make room for Remain in Mexico cases.
Initially, judges were told not to reschedule pre-existing cases on their docket even while they were also adding more Remain in Mexico cases. But now, those judges are being asked to put aside their scheduled caseload and take on hundreds of these new cases instead, said Ashley Tabaddor, president of the National Association of Immigration Judges.
“What I am told is that the number of cases assigned to judges is being mandated from above without compromise,” she said. “I’m hearing from judges that they are being assigned upwards of 50, 80 to 100 cases per session. That pace is frankly not sustainable but all of this is falling on deaf ears.”
That heavy case load has the National Association of Immigration Judges concerned about burnout and mental health.
“I’m hearing from judges telling me they wake up tired and exhausted, that they are having dreams and nightmares about their work, that their tempers are becoming shorter, that they feel intimidated and they are afraid to speak up,” Tabaddor said.
Immigration judges have no control over how many cases are scheduled in their court. Tabaddor criticized the rescheduling as another example of “docket shuffling” that interferes with judges’ decisions by prioritizing law enforcement priorities.
Under the Remain in Mexico program, asylum seekers who present themselves to immigration agents at the southwest border are returned to Mexico while they wait for their immigration hearings. Normally, those cases would be heard in immigration courts throughout the country — either because the people would be transported to detention centers in other states, or they would be released to family or friends throughout the U.S.
But those people are now staying in Mexico. Which means that the thousands of migrants who crossed through California’s southern border are being sent to court in San Diego.
That influx of Remain in Mexico cases has overwhelmed San Diego’s downtown immigration court.
This comes at a time in which all of the country’s immigration courts are struggling to reduce a backlog of nearly 900,000 immigration cases, according to data from the Transactional Record Access Clearinghouse of Syracuse University.
There are roughly 5,100 pending cases in San Diego’s immigration court. It’s unclear exactly how many of those cases will be impacted by the rescheduling.
Each case and immigrant who has to postpone their hearing will be impacted differently, Lin said.
Some may actually benefit from the extra prep time, while for others waiting too much could actually hurt their cause. A lot of cases depend on the strength of a person’s testimony, which is based on memory. Sometimes it’s hard to remember details years after the fact.
“It results in a weaker case because they get some of the minor details wrong because it happened so long ago,” Nietor said. “It’s pretty significant, especially if you see it as the equivalent of a two-month government shutdown, at least as it applies to immigration court here.”
Nietor had two cases originally scheduled for September pushed back to June 2020.
If lawyers like Nietor and Lin don’t close their existing cases, they may not be able to take on new clients. Migrants enrolled in the Remain in Mexico program have had a difficult time finding lawyers willing to represent them in court, attorneys said.
Nietor planned to take on some of those cases, but he won’t be able to if the court keeps pushing his existing cases back.
“I was just waiting for my caseload to go down a little bit,” he said.
https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com...exico-hearings
