Federal Judge Upholds Immigrants' Right to Remain Silent on Status

BREAKING NEWS:
U.S. District Judge Eric Melgren granted the government's motion to dismiss charges against Ortiz-Del Rio with prejudice, meaning the same charges cannot be filed again. Ortiz-Del Rio had been charged with falsely claiming U.S. citizenship. Ortiz-Del Rio happened to be in an apartment where another man was being arrested. The police took one look at Ortiz-Del Rio and, with no warrant or cause, arrested him, assuming he was "illegal." Another judge ruled in April that armed federal agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement lacked reasonable suspicion when they detained Ortiz-Del Rio in what amounted to custodial questioning after happening to find him in the apartment.

Immigration agents often arrest people other than those they target when they come across them, especially during raids on private residences. Once called by immigration officials "collateral," ICE officials often defended the controversial practice by saying that they were obligated to take action when they come across people -- other than their original "target" -- who could be in the country illegally.

That has prompted immigration advocacy groups across the country to advise immigrants to remain silent and not open their doors when immigration officials come knocking. The groups say that when ICE rounds up others in the course of pursuing their "targets," it is violating Fourth and Fifth amendment rights. Many groups have set up hotlines that they tell immigrants to call if ICE agents knock on their door.

Melgren noted that Ortiz-Del Rio was ordered out of a bedroom, asked to sit on the floor and repeatedly questioned about where he was born. Any responses Ortiz-Del Rio gave at the time -- in the absence of the Miranda warning about self-incrimination -- must be suppressed, Melgren ruled. He also said any subsequent statements the suspect made when taken to the ICE station for processing must also be suppressed as "fruit of the poisonous tree."

Europe is watching the US Tactics Towards Immigrants

I heard a quote attributed to Nietzsche recently that reminded me of the Immigration debate. The quote: "The Poor were made so the Rich could could feel better about themselves." I've been reading about the Immigration issues in Europe. In Europe, France in particular, they are targetting the Roma people. The Roma's immigrated to Europe in the 11th century. A few decades ago, many people referred to the Romas as "gypsies." They are more of an ethnicity vs a race. They are caucasians, generally brown-skinned but many are light skinned. Most references say that more and more Roma people are not self-identifying themselves as Roma for fear of racial profiling/retribution. Andrea Nill from the Wonk Room wrote the following article detailing the issues now being faced by the Romas. What is happening to the Romas is very similar to what is happening to Latinos in America. As Andrea says below, the world is watching what we do here in hopes of mirroring the same policies in their own countries towards their own target groups.
From -- The Wonk Room:
This summer, while the immigration debate broiled in the U.S., the government of France launched a countrywide crackdown on the Roma, an ethnic group with origins in South Asia or Eastern Europe, that drew criticism from both the United Nations and the Roman Catholic Church. And, in a “rare” move, the European Parliament called on France this week to suspend its expulsion of the Roma, accusing French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s government of “targeting Roma as a group” and “ignoring essential European human rights guarantees.”

The total number of Romanian and Bulgarian Roma deported from France so far this year has reached 8,313. The French government has defended its actions by pointing out that the deportations are necessary to combat crime and that they have paid about €300 per expulsion.

However, courts in Lille have stated that many Roma deportation cases “did not meet the legal standard of a real and immediate threat.” A court in Nantes ordered the state to pay damages to the 29 Roma concerned. Critics have described the ramped up expulsions “as part of a drive by Sarkozy to revive his popularity before 2012 elections and divert attention from painful pension reforms and spending cuts.”

The Roma represent the largest ethnic minority group in the European Union and, throughout history, they have been the target of persecution. The immigration debate in Europe is by no means limited to neither the Roma nor to France. Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has praised France’s expulsion of Roma as a model to follow and accused the left of wanting an “invasion of foreigners.” Muslim, African, and Latin American immigrants have also been common targets of European xenophobia.

All of this is despite the fact that the European continent’s population is aging so fast that it desperately “needs young newcomers to fill the gaps.” Nonetheless, a survey released this week by the Financial Times found that many Europeans have a negative view of immigration.

Ultimately, during this modern era of globalization, almost every nation — including the U.S. — is grappling with the immigration issue in one way or another. But Europe’s harsh response to the influx of newcomers doesn’t diminish what is happening in Arizona, nor does it make it okay. If anything, immigrant-receiving nations throughout the world are keeping a careful eye on the U.S. to see how the longtime “nation of immigrants” deals with the issue. And rather than adopting the marginalizing policies that have aggravated Europe’s immigration woes, the U.S. would be better off leading the way in building a humane immigration system that’s in tune with today’s modern global economy.

What do we do to improve our Current Broken Immigration Processes?

Most people know and understand our current immigration policies are Broken.

Congressman Gutierrez has submitted an Immigration Reform Bill. Whether you agree with him or not, you must agree our policies are broken.

From my perspective, there are 3 strategies:
1. We can DO NOTHING and stay in Status Quo (broken immigration policies; promote racial profiling)
2. We can enforce current laws and demand Mass Deportation
3. We can fix the broken processes, fix the problems in Immigration Courts and support Comprehensive Immigration Reform

As I've been studying this issue, various groups have different perspectives. For example, Farm Bureaus promote Temporary Worker Programs:
"Federal lawmakers and the new administration also should complete an unfinished immigration bill left over from 2008. They expressed support for immigration reform that provides a more efficient temporary worker program for agriculture. They voted to support improved training for employers to help them understand and better use the current H-2A seasonal agricultural worker program, and better information delivery for new users of the program."

It is clear we cannot sit still and do nothing. What should we do to improve our current broken processes?

Rep Gutierrez at Large Chicago Immigration Rally: "2010 - The Year for Immigration Reform!" Jesse Jackson invokes memory of MLK at Rally!

Chicago Sun-Times Reports:

With zeal befitting a church where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. once preached, Rep. Luis Gutierrez told 1,200 people jammed into First Baptist Congregational Church on the West Side on Saturday that America can no longer put meaningful immigration reform on hold. Gutierrez -- pushing his own immigration reform bill -- said Latinos didn't turn out in droves to support then-Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama only to see his administration "be the administration that's deported more people than the last administration."

And while Obama has come under fire for trying to tackle too many issues at one time, Gutierrez told the supportive crowd: "This is the year we're going to get it done!"

Saturday's rally, entitled Full Citizenship and Full Employment for Full Equality, featured Chicago area lawmakers as well as union and religious leaders -- all calling for major changes in immigration law. By some estimates, there are 12 million people living illegally in the United States. Gutierrez says his immigration bill "keeps people working, but understands the needs of our economy. It gives a pathway to citizenship, but understands that immigrants must learn English, pay taxes and contribute to their communities."

The Rev. Jesse Jackson invoked the memory of King -- whose birthday is being commemorated Monday -- in calling for a change in immigration policy. "His fight was about immigration reform," Jackson said. "It was about one set of rules" for all people. And Jackson, like several others who spoke, highlighted the plight of the people of Haiti in the aftermath of the earthquake there.
Too often, Jackson said, would-be Haitian immigrants are unfairly turned away from U.S. shores. "We should play by one set of rules, whether you're from Cuba, Haiti or Mexico," Jackson said.

Gutierrez also took a swipe at his own faith, saying the Roman Catholic Church should stand up for immigration reform the way it fights against abortion. "My church is a church that should watch every action of unfairness and injustice that has occurred in the Congress of the United States, and not just one or two that they decide to choose," he said.

2010 Immigration Marches Begin!

The 2010 Immigration Marches have begun. The first group beginning their march are supporters from Miami, Florida. They began their March on Friday, Jan. 1, 2010. Their plan is to trek the fifteen hundred miles to Washington D.C., picking up advocates and supporters along the way and arriving in D.C. on May 1, 2010.
NY Times reports:
Lacing up new pairs of walking shoes with a flourish, four immigrant students set out on foot from downtown Miami on Friday, starting a four-month walk to Washington to protest what they called the Obama administration’s lack of action on legislation granting legal status to illegal immigrants. Three of the four protesters, who are current or former students at Miami Dade College, do not have legal-resident status and risk detention by immigration authorities during the 1,500-mile walk. The students’ trek shows the resolve and also some limitations of groups supporting an immigration overhaul that would include measures to legalize illegal immigrants. These groups said this week they are starting a national campaign in January to pressure President Obama to push for the overhaul before midterm elections in November. The students in Miami said in a statement that they decided to begin their walk because they had a “deep desire and need for complete citizenship” after they reached dead-ends in school or work because of their lack of legal immigration status.

Starting with a small but noisy send-off at noon by about 100 people on the steps of a landmark building in Miami known as the Freedom Tower, the students said they would walk about 16 miles a day, stopping to sleep at churches and immigration centers. They hope to reach Washington in May. They said they had concluded that the exposure to immigration agents on the walk was not much greater than what they faced in their daily lives. “We are aware of the risk,” Mr. Matos said by telephone. “We are risking our future because our present is unbearable.”

Elsewhere, immigrant groups have been trying other tactics to push for reform, after an overhaul bill they supported was defeated in the Senate in 2007 by a huge surge of voter opposition. In November the groups organized a mass conference call on which, they said, more than 60,000 participants on mobile phones spoke with Representative Luis V. Gutierrez, Democrat of Illinois, to discuss an overhaul proposal. Mr. Gutierrez introduced the bill in the House last month. In California, where hundreds of thousands of immigrants joined demonstrations in 2006, advocacy groups have shifted their focus, said Angelica Salas, executive director of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles. Now the groups are working to send immigrants who are voters to pay frequent visits to federal lawmakers who have not supported an overhaul. The Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, a group in Chicago, is preparing rallies for mid-January with labor unions and African-American churches, hoping to persuade American workers that immigrants would be less likely to undercut wages if they had legal status and could participate openly in unions.

Republican lawmakers said they remained confident that they could defeat any overhaul proposal. They said it would be political folly for the Obama administration to propose a huge legalization program for illegal immigrants when so many Americans are out of work. “Allowing millions of illegal immigrants to stay and take jobs away from citizens and legal immigrants is like giving a burglar a key to the house,” said Representative Lamar Smith of Texas, the senior Republican on the House Judiciary Committee.

NEW STAR ON THE PRO FRONT: News with Nezua

To all my Viewers:

We have a NEW SuperStar on the PRO Immigration Reform Front. I predict he will become FAMOUS and a front-runner in the Immigration Debate. He is my friend. He is young! He is knowledgeable! He is informed! He is Passionate! And....He is handsome!


His name is Nezua and he writes the blog: "The Unapologetic Mexican!" Maybe you've seen his blog before. Maybe you've heard his name. For all of my viewers: I want to formally introduce you to Nezua, the Unapologetic Mexican!

Look for him to become FAMOUS in the Immigration Debate in the years ahead! I fully endorse him. I bow to him. He is a Superstar!!


HERE IS NEZUA: VIDEO (click here and then scroll own and click on the Video)

Dee

(To all of my beautiful nieces: I will introduce you later!)

Broken Immigration System: Courts Backlogged, Immigration Judges Severely Understaffed

New Immigration Study: Broken Immigration System illustrates the need for Comprehensive Immigration Reform this year!

Immigration Judges Found Under Strain
Surging caseloads and a chronic lack of resources to handle them are taking a toll on judges in the nation’s immigration courts, leaving them frustrated and demoralized, a new study has found. The study, published in a Georgetown University law journal, applied a psychological scale for testing professional stress and exhaustion to 96 immigration court judges who agreed to participate, just under half of all judges hearing immigration cases. The survey found that the strain on them was similar to that on prison wardens and hospital physicians, groups shown in comparable studies to experience exceptionally high stress.

Surprising the researchers, 59 immigration judges wrote comments on the survey questionnaire elaborating on why they felt discouraged. In the comments, which were reported anonymously, the judges spoke of an overwhelming volume of cases with insufficient time for careful review, a shortage of law clerks and language interpreters, and failing computers and equipment for recording hearings.

“We judges have to grovel like mangy street dogs” to win exemptions from unrealistic goals to complete cases, one judge commented. Another wrote of the “drip-drip-drip of Chinese water torture” from court administrators demanding more and faster decisions. A third judge cited “the persistent lack of sufficient time to be really prepared for the cases,” while still another said simply, “There is not enough time to think.”

Unlike federal courts generally, immigration courts are not part of the judicial branch but are run by an agency of the Justice Department, the Executive Office for Immigration Review. In 2006, Alberto R. Gonzales, then attorney general, reported serious problems with overload and flawed rulings in the immigration courts. He outlined 22 measures the department should take to improve the courts, including hiring more immigration judges. The department recently hired four new judges and announced plans to hire a total of 28 this year. But a report this month by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a research group at Syracuse University that analyzes government data, found that the department had failed to meet its most important goals for training judges and giving them more assistance.

Many of the cases immigration judges hear are from people seeking asylum in the United States, claiming they would face life-threatening persecution if they returned home. But the troubling, complex facts of the asylum cases do not affect the judges as much as the pressure to dispatch them quickly, said Dr. Stuart L. Lustig, a professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco, who led the study, published in The Georgetown Immigration Law Journal. One judge said, “This job is supposed to be about doing justice, but the conditions under which we work make it more and more challenging to ensure that justice is done.”

Bernard Wolfsdorf, president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, the immigration bar, said: “If you go into these courts and see the workload, you ask, Is this a real American court? It appears that this broken system is wearing down many of the good judges.”

U.S. Immigration Policies: Broken Policies / Broken Promises!

The U.S. Immigration Policies are hopelessly BROKEN! 40% of the 12M here are due to Visa overstays and many of these cases are PENDING in the backlogged and very broken Immigration court process.

Most Americans are ignorant of the fact that these processes are so broken and backlogged.

Here is a peek at what is happening in one city, in one state where the overburdened legal process is shattering at the seams:

The Houston Chronicle reports:

Cases flood immigration courts in Houston
Despite rise in cases, number of judges has changed little

In a cramped hallway in Houston’s immigration court building, a toddler dressed in his pajamas slept soundly, sprawled out on a Spiderman blanket on his father’s lap. The wooden benches in a nearby courtroom were full, leaving a half-dozen immigrants and their attorneys to stand in the aisle.As the hours ticked by, an elderly woman facing deportation to Mexico rested her head in her hands. It was more than three hours before the court called her case — one of more than 30 on a judge’s calendar on a recent morning.
The scene is typical for Houston’s immigration courts, which saw a roughly 40 percent increase in case load from 2002 to 2007. The situation here is part of a nationwide problem, critics say. Nationally, the number of immigration prosecutions has increased significantly in recent years. Immigration judges received more than 334,000 matters — including bonds, motions and removal proceedings — in 2007, up from roughly 290,000 in 2002. Meanwhile, the number of immigration judges has remained flat, with 224 today compared with 225 in 2002. Since 2002, the federal government has added one immigration judge in Texas, for a total of 23.

The federal government has acknowledged for years the need to employ more immigration judges, but the agency that handles the hiring, the Executive Office for Immigration Review, has struggled with bureaucracy and budget constraints. David Burnham, who has studied the immigration court system extensively as co-director of theTransactional Records Access Clearinghouse with Syracuse University, described EOIR as “an agency adrift” during the past few years. But the blame shouldn’t stop there, or with the prior administration, he said, adding that Congress hasn’t “stepped up to bat.”

In 2006, then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales pledged to revamp the system, with the hiring of judges listed as a top priority. But last year, key members of Gonzales’ staff came under scrutiny amid reports they considered judicial candidates’ politics — rather than qualifications — in deciding appointments. The effort to find and appoint conservative and party-loyalist judges at times threatened to clog courts and delayed deportations, according to a Justice Department investigation.

In August 2007, the EOIR instituted a new screening and hiring policy for immigration judges designed to address concerns raised by the reports. EOIR spokeswoman Elaine Komis said the agency “continues to fill immigration judge vacancies as quickly as possible.”EOIR has 24 judge vacancies and is in various stages of the selection process for most of those positions, she said. Komis said EOIR is hoping Congress will designate $5 million for the hiring of immigration judges as part of the 2009 budget, which is still awaiting approval.

BROKEN IMMIGRATION PROCESSES:

The average judge in an immigration court hears about 1,200 removal proceedings every year, compared with an average annual case load of 480 for district judges, according to the Brookings Institution, a research organization in Washington, D.C. And whereas district court judges generally have two to three law clerks to assist them, immigration judges have one clerk for every six judges, Marks said.

Brittney Nystrom, senior legal adviser for the National Immigration Forum, which advocates for comprehensive immigration reform, said the case-to-judge ratio is particularly troubling. “It raises a lot of concerns for all of the players in the system,” Nystrom said. “The immigration judges themselves are concerned that they don’t have the resources or the time to adequately adjudicate their cases. The immigrants and the immigrant representatives are concerned they don’t have time to present their cases.”
Some local immigration attorneys said the manpower shortage is of particular concern in Houston’s two immigration courts, which in fiscal year 2007 received about 12,500 immigration matters. That’s up from 8,900 five years earlier. In the court, judges routinely have 30 to 40 matters scheduled in a single morning. Many cases are postponed — some for three to six months at a time — to give attorneys more time to prepare for court or to give petitioners additional time to hear back from immigration officials on pending applications.
Impact on due process
Raed Gonzalez, a Houston immigration attorney, said the high volume of cases has an adverse impact on clients’ due process. In some instances, the court refuses to wait for U.S. immigration officials to approve or deny a petition for legal permanent residency, which can take months to process. “There are many people who are entitled to relief and the judges will not wait for them,” he said, adding that the judges are under pressure to clear cases quickly. The court delays can affect clients’ personal lives, he said.
One client from Pakistan has been waiting five years for his case to be resolved in immigration court, Gonzalez said, adding that it has put stress on the man’s marriage.