Department of Justice

Fake Attorney General Worries About 'Fake' Asylum Seekers

Jeff Sessions also accuses immigration lawyers of "gaming the system."

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For my money, asylum cases are the most gut-wrenching cases for a lawyer to work, pro bono. I know lawyers who do death penalty appeals usually wear the belt for “morally exemplary work at personal cost.” If you lose a death penalty appeal, your client is literally killed by the state. But, no offense, 99 percent of those clients are awful people. Not saying they deserve to die but… there is usually some “contributory negligence” there.

In asylum cases, if you lose a likely innocent person is going to be sent to their death. OR WORSE. Sometimes they, and their children, will be sent to their rape and torture before they die. Your clients aren’t always well suited to contribute to their own cause. And much of the evidence you need is held in countries you are not from who don’t exactly respond well to discovery requests.

The stakes couldn’t be higher. I didn’t/couldn’t do those cases. I just didn’t have the stomach to be that important to a person’s life. My wife worked some of those cases, because she is straight up a better person than me.

It is in that context that I find Jeff Sessions’s statements on asylum seekers to be among the most disgusting of his reign. From Politico:

“This system is currently subject to rampant abuse and fraud. And as this system becomes overloaded with fake claims, it cannot deal effectively with just claims,” Sessions said during a visit to a Justice Department division in northern Virginia that oversees the immigration courts.

Sessions said “smart lawyers” manipulate the system by counseling immigrants to shape their stories in order to win initial determinations that they have a “credible fear” of being persecuted at home.

“The system is being gamed. There’s no doubt about it. The credible fear process was intended to be a lifeline for persons facing serious persecution. But it has become an easy ticket to illegal entry into the United States,” the attorney general said in remarks to a few dozen employees an Executive Office of Immigration Review training center. “Saying a few simple words is now transforming a straightforward arrest and an immediate return into a probable release and hearing—if the alien bothers to show up for the hearing.”

Here, we have the nation’s top lawyer, accusing other lawyers of being… “smart.” In TrumpWorld, being actually effective at your job is reason for insult and ridicule.

It’s tragic, but not morally contemptible, for the Attorney General to accuse other lawyers of being too good at advocating for their clients. What’s contemptible is how Sessions accuses people who claim they fear for their life of lying. He’s calling one of the most difficult processes we have for entry into this country an “easy ticket,” which just speaks to immense and willful ignorance about the whole process.

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It is true that asylum cases have skyrocketed in recent years. Sessions says that claims by immigrants that they have a “credible fear” of returning home have gone from 3,000 cases in 2009 to more than 69,000 in 2016. Sessions is a jerk who can’t remember which Russians he met with, but he’s not on the “making up numbers” part of the administration.

But there are reasons for the rise that go beyond “lying foreigners” and “clever shysters.” If you listen to literally ANY Donald Trump rally, you’ll hear horrible tales of drug gangs and cartels. Trump makes it sound like drug gangs have turned Long Island into Honduras.

That is “fake news” from Trump, Long Island is still a largely safe suburban dystopia, beset more by infrastructure failures than MS-13.

But you know where the drug cartels and gangs have turned a place into Honduras? HONDURAS. AND GUATEMALA. The “surge” in asylum seekers is largely from people FLEEING the very menace Trump is always using as an excuse to build his see-through wall. The people who are actually in danger from gangs like MS-13 are coming here asking for SANCTUARY, and Jeff Sessions is calling them liars while his own president LIES about the threat posed by MS-13 to people living in the United States.

To fix our “broken” asylum, the Washington Post reports that Sessions wants to impose quotas on immigration judges. Instead of trying to make a considered, life-or-death decision on whether fears gangland retribution are credible, Sessions wants judges to just churn and reject seekers.

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The judges’ union says its current contract language prevents the government from rating them based on the number of cases they complete or the time it takes to decide them.

But now, they say, the department is trying to rescind that language, and advocates say it could violate a federal regulation that requires judges to “exercise their independent judgment and discretion” when deciding cases.

This is an administration which has three times tried to ban Syrian refugees fleeing war from coming to the country. It’s not exactly surprising that it wants to quickly send thousands of brown humans to their likely deaths.

But if you don’t understand how desperate and deserving asylum seekers are, I encourage you to take a case. This is not an issue you have to think about in the abstract. Go help a person seeking asylum in this country.

Then tell me if you think they are lying.

Sessions calls for changes to ‘broken’ U.S. asylum system [Politico]
Immigration judges say proposed quotas from Justice Dept. threaten independence [Washington Post]

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