Thread: Miami, Orlando immigration courts fast track juvenile deportation proceeding

Miami, Orlando immigration courts fast track juvenile deportation proceeding

• Anna M. Phillips, Times Staff Writer

Sunday, August 10, 2014 8:02pm

Associated Press

U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents work at a processing facility in Brownsville,Texas. Immigration courts in Miami and Orlando are speeding up hearings for the children and families who have been sent to Florida after entering the country illegally.


Acting on orders from the Obama administration, immigration courts in Orlando and Miami have created accelerated dockets for unaccompanied minors and families, prioritizing their cases as part of a national effort to stem the flood of Central Americans crossing into the United States illegally.

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Under the new procedures, immigration courts have set up "rocket dockets," speeding up the time it takes to review migrants' cases and determine whether they should be deported. Whereas it typically takes two or three years to resolve deportation proceedings, the new process could take months.

But the courts are not accomplishing this by adding more judges.

Rather, they have directed a handful of judges to focus primarily on juvenile and family cases, a shift that Department of Justice officials acknowledge will inevitably lead to longer delays for thousands of people.

"The sad part is that these judges have full dockets," said Tampa immigration lawyer John Ovink, whose cases are heard in the Orlando immigration court. "Most of these judges have in excess of 3,000 cases. Even if one judge is assigned extra time to do kids, it means that existing hearings will be pushed back."

After Texas and New York, Florida has received the third-largest number of what the government calls unaccompanied alien children, roughly 57,000 of whom have made the dangerous border crossing since October.

Sent to stay with sponsors — usually parents or relatives — while their cases wind through the immigration courts, most of them have landed where large immigrant communities already exist. More than 3,000 have been sent to Florida.

In Orlando, judges have more than 600 pending juvenile cases, according to Department of Justice spokeswoman Kate Sheeley. But it is Miami's immigration court that will experience the brunt of the influx. Judges there are looking at 1,845 pending cases.

These figures are most alarming to the small number of non-profit and religious organizations that handle the majority of these cases and, like the courts, are already overburdened. Many of these groups are doing triage, choosing the cases of children with the best chance of qualifying for special immigrant juvenile status — a green card Congress created for children under 18 who have been neglected, abused, or abandoned by family in their native country.

Tampa Bay's Gulf Coast Legal Services has accepted about 20 such cases. Camila Pachon Silva, the only immigration lawyer at the Legal Aid Society of Orlando, said she is handling several now and expects more. She worries that the accelerated dockets won't give minors and families enough time to find lawyers or the birth certificates and other documentation they'll need.

"A lot of these children didn't come with papers," she said, "and this docket is going to go way faster than any regular docket."

She's been told that her other clients may have to wait until 2015 to have their cases heard.

Flooded with new cases, organizations that provide legal representation for the poor are turning to private lawyers for help.

But the glut of juveniles has exposed a weakness in the legal community — many immigration lawyers don't have experience with these types of cases.

Gail Seeram, former president of the Central Florida branch of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, is holding a training session next month in Orlando, where Silva will teach lawyers how to win special immigrant juvenile status for their clients. It may be a challenge to convince lawyers to take these cases pro bono, Seeram said. One possible solution: removing the charity factor.

"The American Immigration Lawyers Association is seriously considering putting aside funds to help encourage attorneys to take pro bono cases or to support organizations that already are," she said.

In Tampa, Ovink said he is prepared to take as many as 15 cases of unaccompanied children and families. But as the courts speed the path to deportation, he is not particularly sanguine about the children's chances.

"My guess is that a lot of these kids will be sent back," he said.

Contact Anna M. Phillips at aphillips@tampabay.com or (813) 226-3354. Follow her@annamphillips.

http://www.tampabay.com/news/courts/...eeding/2192350

Influx of Child Immigrants Strains Courts in Louisiana

• Alex Altman / New Orleans@aaltman82

6:00 AM ET

Attendees listen to speakers at the weekly meeting of "Congreso," or the Congress of Day Laborers. This is one branch of the New Orleans Workers' Center for Racial Justice, New Orleans, Aug. 6, 2014.William Widmer for TIME

The wave of unaccompanied children streaming across the U.S. border has compounded a court crisis, as advocates warn backlogs and a shortage of lawyers will lead to injustice

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For the 1,071 unaccompanied minors who have crossed the southwest border this year and ended up in Louisiana, the path to a future in the U.S. runs through a courtroom on the 24th floor of an office tower in the heart of New Orleans.

During the first six months of 2014, the court has taken on 450 juvenile immigration cases, according to government records obtained by Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC). That number puts the court on pace to shatter last year’s total of 540 cases. Three years ago, it had 71.

New Orleans’ struggle is part of a pattern. Nationwide, immigration courts have become choke points in the border crisis. Overburdened and underfunded, they are sagging under the weight of the new arrivals, with enormous case backlogs and a lack of attorneys able to perform work that must often be pro bono, or without charge.

At the end of June, the number of cases pending in U.S. immigration courts had climbed to a record high of 375,503, according to data amassed by TRAC. The largest backlogs are in states with the biggest immigrant populations, such as California and Texas, which have also received the greatest number of unaccompanied minors.

But as stressed as those states are, legal activists say the situation is worse in places where the number of immigrants may not be quite as high, but where there’s a shortage of lawyers able to represent a spiking population.

New Orleans is a prime example. The large number of Honduran immigrants resident here has made the Crescent City a magnet for kids fleeing the skyrocketing violence in the troubled Central American country. Over the past year, few cities have absorbed more unaccompanied kids than New Orleans. Yet the entire state of Louisiana has only about a half-dozen nonprofit immigration lawyers devoted to serving them, says Jennifer Rizzo, national pro bono promotion counsel for Human Rights First.

As a result, children are regularly summoned to complex legal proceedings that will shape their future without any legal representation. At the end of June, New Orleans Immigration Court had a total of 1,216 pending juvenile immigration cases. In 991 of them—81%—the child has no lawyer. Overall, 87% of immigrants detained in the state lack an attorney, according to a study by Human Rights First.

“Things have reached a crisis point,” Rizzo says.

Legal representation may be the single largest factor in determining whether an undocumented immigrant wins the right to remain in the U.S. According to TRAC’s analysis of 100,000 case records obtained through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), immigrant children represented by an attorney are deported by presiding judges about half the time. In cases when juveniles went without an attorney, the success rate for sidestepping deportation was just one in 10.

“There’s a likelihood that these kids don’t know how to obtain legal representation, because nobody speaks English,” says Hiroko Kusuda, whose law clinic at Loyola University in New Orleans is one of just three listed service providers in the state. “If they don’t have legal representation, the chances of them getting relief from deportation is close to zilch.”

Kathryn Mattingly, a spokeswoman for the Justice Department’s Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR), said in an email that EOIR provides interpreter services for immigrant children for whom English is a challenge. But she acknowledged that some go without a lawyer. “Children are not guaranteed representation in immigration court proceedings, but all respondents have a right to representation at no expense to the government,” Mattingly said, adding that various government initiatives are designed to promote pro bono work.

The small community of immigration lawyers in the New Orleans area wants to help. Along with national advocates, they are scrambling to enlist new recruits. Kathleen Gasparian, an immigration lawyer in Metairie, La., started a program called PB&J: Pro Bono and Juveniles, which recruits pro bono attorneys and matches them with immigrant kids who have recently crossed the southern border and cannot afford legal services. Rizzo recently organized a conference to tackle Louisiana’s crisis in immigration representation, and convenes a monthly working group of local stakeholders. “The immigration court system is broken,” Gasparian says.

The issues were multiplying even before children started arriving.

Louisiana has just two immigration courts, and the second, in the small city of Oakdale, more than three hours northwest of New Orleans, handles only detention cases. The backlog of pending cases statewide has soared to 6,703, up from just 732 a decade ago. “Now, you don’t even get your first hearing for a year,” says Ken Mayeaux, a professor at Louisiana State University Law Center in Baton Rouge who runs an immigration clinic for students. The average wait time for pending cases in the EOIR has climbed to 587 days.

Compounding that lengthening backlog, the New Orleans court is without a single devoted judge. Instead, a rotating trio of judges handle the docket, usually commuting from the Oakdale facility.

Sometimes cases are decided over video conference.

The lack of a permanent judge is a symptom of a national problem, created by a hiring freeze imposed in 2011 by Attorney General Eric Holder as DOJ sought to cut costs in the teeth of the recession. The hiring freeze was lifted in February, but Mattingly declined to say when a new full-time judge will start at New Orleans immigration court.

On a steamy Thursday morning this month, TIME visited the court, on Canal Street downtown, in an attempt to observe proceedings.

There were about six cases on the docket for the day, according to a printed list in the entryway, but two security guards barred this correspondent from entering, citing instructions from the presiding judge.

“In certain cases, including hearings involving credible fear reviews, the hearing is closed to the public unless the alien states for the record that he or she waves that requirement,” Mattingly later wrote in an email. On that day, she added, “there were no open cases.”

http://time.com/3093029/child-migrants-immigration-reform-new-orleans/

These foreign brats should never of been escorted around the country and given the ability to see a judge.

All the 'so called' family units should had been denied entry at the border or immediately apprehended, put on a bus and transported back to
Mexico.

They are sending their children here so the children can then bring the parents, grandparents, etc., etc.

First off, we need to determine if they are actually 'minors'.

Some of them have proven not to be.

HAND ALL MINOR'S OVER TO THEIR EMBASSY FOR DEPORTATION!!

And Consulates, too. The only Embassies are in DC. But most countries have many many consulates around our country in major cities. Mexico for example has consulates in all 50 states.

Originally Posted by Beezer

HAND ALL MINOR'S OVER TO THEIR EMBASSY FOR DEPORTATION!!

We should hire Mexican coyote's to reroute them back to Mexico or better yet, smuggle them to the continent's southernmost point 'Cape Horn' or the Aguila Islet of the Diego Ramirez Islands.

This I would have no problem contributing too, in fact I would donate 50% of my income to help pay for this!

I say load up BARGES full of them and drop them at the Southern most tip of Mexico...then next stop Central America.

"A lot of these children didn't come with papers," she said, "and this docket is going to go way faster than any regular docket."

She's been told that her other clients may have to wait until 2015 to have their cases heard.

Flooded with new cases, organizations that provide legal representation for the poor are turning to private lawyers for help.

Gail Seeram, former president of the Central Florida branch of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, is holding a training session next month in Orlando, where Silva will teach lawyers how to win special immigrant juvenile status for their clients. It may be a challenge to convince lawyers to take these cases pro bono, Seeram said. One possible solution: removing the charity factor.

"The American Immigration Lawyers Association is seriously considering putting aside funds to help encourage attorneys to take pro bono cases or to support organizations that already are," she said.

In Tampa, Ovink said he is prepared to take as many as 15 cases of unaccompanied children and families. But as the courts speed the path to deportation, he is not particularly sanguine about the children's chances.

"My guess is that a lot of these kids will be sent back," he said.

The article is from 8/14 - you can read @ all the legal help being solicited and the total false statement that the kids will be sent back - read it is less than 2% - all and all this legal involvement has encouraged the continued breaching of our border for a life of taxpayer funded social services, continued overbreeding and the entire nuclear family to follow too.

Repeal the Wilburforce Act that forces us to take them in Trump - what are you waiting for?

What criminal encouraged and helped these 'so called' unattended minors?

I remember one sob story said, 'some as young as 2 years old'.
Ask yourself how an 'unaccompanied 2 year old made a trek from Central America?

What kind of corporation calls themselves a news outlet and puts this kind of stuff out there.

Worse yet, how many people questioned this garbage.